A Study Guide for Lois Lowry's The Giver

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Lois Lowry's "The Giver," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Aug 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781535836807

Book preview

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The Giver

Lois Lowry

1993

Introduction

When The Giver was first published in 1993, Lois Lowry was already a previous Newbery Medal winner (for her 1989 World War II novel, Number the Stars). She was also widely admired and greatly appreciated by an avid following of young readers for her comic series of Anastasia books. The Giver was immediately recognized as a very special novel. It too won the Newbery Medal. And a large number of commentators concluded that it was the best book Lowry had written.

Lowry's other work is mostly grounded in the cut and thrust of family life. The narrative of The Giver, because of the futuristic and allegorical themes in the novel, is a considerably more spartan affair. Readers are made immediately aware that they are in the realm of fabulous rather than realistic fiction, and that Jonas is the principle player in a moral fable with political and social overtones.

Lowry spent a good part of her childhood living near the Amish people of Pennsylvania. Later she moved to Tokyo and lived in an American compound within the city. Both experiences seem to have made her suspicious of attempts by communities to protect a rigid self-identity. She is careful in The Giver to make the community she is describing extremely plausible. From many points of view, it represents a well-managed social order. But as the reader discovers, along with Jonas, more and more about the principles on which that social order is based—infanticide, enforced euthanasia—it becomes impossible to read the novel as anything other than a savage critique of such systems.

Author Biography

Lois Lowry was born March 20, 1937, in Honolulu, Hawaii. Her parents, Katharine (Landis) and Robert E. Hammersberg (an army dentist), were separated at the onset of World War II. Lowry spent the war years in Pennsylvania, where her mother's family lived. Early childhood influences included the presence of the Amish and an adoring grandfather. In 1948, when Lowry was eleven, the family was reunited in Japan, where her father was then stationed. In her 1994 Newbery Medal Acceptance Speech, she identified her experiences in Tokyo—living in the close confines of an American enclave named Washington Heights and making exciting forays on her bicycle into the Japanese streets—as amongst the significant memories which led to the writing of The Giver.

Lowry was educated at boarding school and Pembroke College. She attended Brown University but left after two years to marry an attorney, Donald Grey Lowry. She began writing seriously in the early 1970s, after all of her four children (born within a span of five years) were in high school. She was divorced in 1977, the year in which her first novel, A Summer to Die, was

Reviews for A Study Guide for Lois Lowry's The Giver

[Allan Brain · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I liked this book it helped me understand the giver much more clearly when I was given the book to read for a book discussion group the first few pages that I read confused me I didn't know what to think of it I almost didn't read it but I did read it and enjoyed it I've read it again twice getting more out of the story each time this book here helped me understand it even more now I want to read the book again great book I loved it.