About John Green
John Green grew up in Orlando, Florida, the main setting for his third novel, Paper Towns. At 15, he began attending Indian Springs School in Alabama, the inspiration for Culver Creek in Looking for Alaska. Green describes the fictional boarding school as “almost inch for inch the same place that Indian Springs School was in 1995.” (vlogbrothers, 2010)
(photo from Green’s bio)
After graduating from Kenyon, Green spent about six months working as a student chaplain in a Chicago children’s hospital. His experiences there would prompt his writing of The Fault in Our Stars, although it would be a story he would return to time and again before finally working to completion after the death of a young friend, Esther Earl, who was, like Hazel, a thyroid cancer patient.
After deciding the ministry was not for him, Green got a job as an editorial assistant at Booklist. During his time there, he wrote and published his first novel, Looking for Alaska. When Alaska won the Michael L. Printz award in 2006, Green left his job at Booklist and continued work on his sophomore novel, An Abundance of Katherines.
In 2007, Green reconnected with his brother, Hank Green, and the two embarked on a one-year project to communicate only through short YouTube videos on their new channel, vlogbrothers. They became a hit as early YouTubers and would go on to collaborate on multiple online projects, including the Nerdfighteria community, the Crash Course OER YouTube channel, and starting the Foundation to Decrease World Suck, which holds an annual 48-hr video fundraiser, Project For Awesome. Both continue to write books and work on their myriad creative and humanitarian centered projects. To learn more about the brothers’ ongoing ventures, visit Who We Are - Hank and John.
Why John Green
“John Green is intellectual freedom.” —Kate Lechtenberg, in a blog post for the Office for Intellectual Freedom of the American Library Association (2017)
John Green is very much my contemporary, and yet, I largely missed his meteoric rise within the literary and nascent online worlds. For the first decade plus after the publication of Alaska, I was living under a bit of a proverbial rock first as a new business owner, then as a new parent and subsequently navigating the dawning awareness of my child’s—and my own—neurodiversity and the intense mental health struggles we were both experiencing. I vaguely recall Fault coming out in theaters and thinking, “child cancer? Heck no.” For a long time during this period, reading and movies were almost exclusively a means of escape, even though as a child, I was a voracious reader and remember titles such as Bridge to Terabithia and Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes as being both troubling and satisfyingly thought-provoking. I do credit early experiences as a reader for helping to overcome, or at least bear, some challenging times and building empathy. But while Green was writing realistic YA fiction and doing things online, I was reading Twilight and Harry Potter and trying very hard not to think too much about reality.
But sometime around 2018, my oldest son—whom I’d been homeschooling due to some difficult to accommodate differences—and I stumbled upon Crash Course through a foray into exploring the OER Big History Project. We instantly loved the CC videos embedded in BHP and over the next few years, when we needed a resource for school—he attended, and continues to today, a public personalized learning charter school in our county, and I was always looking for creative ways to meet requirements, since his learning profile was so unique—I often returned to Crash Course.
Then in 2023, for our family’s annual celebration of “Jolabokaflod,” I purchased a used and signed copy of The Anthropocene Reviewed. By this point, I’d returned to reading more widely, and after years of homeschooling and the pandemic resulting in my unplanned retirement from teacher private music lessons and running a studio, I’d happily leaned into my self-appointed role as family librarian. I loved researching books and trying to meet my family’s quirky reading needs. When I saw that one of our favorite YouTube educators had released a book of essays, I jumped at adding it to our library. Over 2024, I worked my way through the book, both in print and on audio—the audio, by the way, contains additional essays and some sound clips, my favorite by far being Green shakily singing “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here” to the tune of Auld Lang Syne—and I fell in love with his writing.
Over the summer of 2024, with the rising intensity of the upcoming presidential election, my attention became increasingly tuned to socio-political headlines. Living on the northern side of Southern California, the escalation of book bans hadn’t been forefront for me and was largely overshadowed by the fallout from January 6 and other difficult headlines, like Uvalde. But when I saw the headline about Utah’s new book banning legislation, my attention snapped hard toward the state of librarianship, a field I’d already been increasingly wondering about looking into. So, when I enrolled in this course, choosing to study Green’s body of work as a lens for the topic of intellectual freedom for youth was automatic. I relate deeply to how he thinks, and believe many people could benefit from his work. Many already have. He is undoubtedly an Influencer among Influencers, and the world is a better place with his voice in it. As Kate Lechtenberg said in her OIF blog post from 2017, “John Green is intellectual freedom.”
John Green on Censorship
“I don’t believe that books, even bad books, corrupt us. Instead, I believe books challenge and interrogate. They give us windows into the lives of others and give us mirrors so we can better see ourselves. And ultimately, if you have a worldview that can be undone by a novel, let me submit that the problem is not with the novel.” —John Green, On the Banning of Looking for Alaska (2016)
Green is an outspoken advocate for the arts, education, and freedom of thought and expression. In the vlogbrothers YouTube video below, he argues that great books only have a “humanizing” agenda, that the job of stories is to simply tell truths about life and the world. Many of those truths are hard—some may argue most truths are hard—and Green articulates over and over again in his writing, his speaking, and his humanitarian projects that facing truth, having tough conversations, and building empathy are the only ways to navigate this crazy existence. By virtue of his vast body of expression across multiple platforms, Green is a role model for exercising one’s right to the freedoms to speak, think, learn, read, believe, and express. He’s a role model for how to navigate life as an organism both keenly intelligent and wont to self-destruct at the hands of that intelligence, because of the existential threats that intelligence can imagine. Being human is no simple thing. And Green confronts this reality repeatedly and eloquently. And he stands up and speaks out and puts action behind his deeply held belief that every one of us has the right to do the same without fear of retribution.
In addition to his regular writing and speaking work, Green has joined efforts to combat book bans with other authors and organizations, including 2023 and 2024 lawsuits against Iowa and Florida anti-intellectual freedom legislation. In an interview with The Daily Iowan, Green discusses his feelings about the rashes of book challenges and bans, “To be honest, it’s hard. It’s hard to be called a pornographer. It’s hard to be called a groomer. Those things are hurtful. It’s a bummer. But I’m proud of my work, and I stand by it, and I’m very grateful to the teachers and librarians who continue to share it.” Green vehemently supports librarians and educators and their roles in both protecting the intellectual freedoms of youth and working to help them become informed and empathetic citizens:
“The heroes are the librarians and teachers who have to deal with this stuff alongside doing their actual jobs of teaching and librarianship.” —John Green (2023)