Andrew Clements books

Anthologies

Benjamin Pratt Reading Order

Frindle Reading Order

Jake Drake Reading Order

Non-Fiction

Pets To The Rescue Reading Order

Reading Program Reading Order

Real Monsters Reading Order

Slippers Reading Order

Standalone Novels

Things Reading Order

Andrew Clements grew up in New Jersey and developed a love of reading early, thanks to his parents, who passed that enthusiasm on to all their children. After studying at Northwestern University and earning a master’s in teaching at National Louis University, he spent seven years in the classroom, teaching fourth grade, eighth-grade English, and high school English north of Chicago. That time in front of students shaped nearly everything he later wrote. Schools, teachers, and the small daily dramas of classroom life became the raw material for most of his fiction.

He started writing picture books in the 1980s while working as a publisher, but his career shifted when Frindle came out in 1996. The story of a fifth-grader who coins a new word for pen and watches it spread despite his teacher’s resistance struck a chord with young readers, selling more than eight million copies over the following decades. Clements went on to write dozens more books, including early readers, chapter book series, young adult novels, and picture books, reaching children at nearly every reading level.

Clements died at home in Baldwin, Maine, on November 28, 2019, at age 70. He left behind a manuscript that was later published as The Frindle Files (2024), a sequel set a generation after the original, in which a new student discovers that his English teacher has a surprising connection to the boy who invented the word frindle.