I have never fancied myself a writer for a juvenile audience, so I was surprised to receive offer from Power Press Books to compose a biography of Stephen F. Austin for a 7th-grade leading level, one of a planned series of Texas-based biographies. My first response was that they should approach Gregg Cantrell of the University of North Texas (he is now at Texas Christian University) who had recently written a prize-winning biography of Austin. I was even more surprised at their answer: they did not want the reigning authority on a subject to write the books in their series. They wanted somebody good, but with a different point of view—even as they did not want me to write the Sam Houston book, and they assigned that job to Mac Woodward, curator of the Sam Houston Memorial Museum in Huntsville (who did a terrific job, by the way.)

Coming up with 12,000 words about Austin was easy. However, considering that I have given workshops to school districts on how to make history more relevant and interesting to students, the challenge was that I now had to put my writing skills where my mouth had been. How could I find common ground between today's 12-year-olds and the Father of Texas?

One way was to describe the relationship between Austin as a child and his almost cruelly overbearing father, who when Stephen was only three, sent him a thirty-page letter on how to become a Great Man. Any child with a little league father or stage mother could understand that. Second, Texas is now a fully bicultural state, and I pointed out Austin's success at functioning suddenly as a minority in a new society, whose rules he had to learn from the ground up. Austin's own life-long honesty and devotion to a cause provided lessons that needed no amplification. But at the end of his life, when it was pretty clear from his letters that he had been in love with his secretary, Samuel May Williams, I had my doubts whether the editor would allow any mention of it—but to my surprise they changed not a word in my text that Austin never married, and formed relationships with friends that were closer and more emotional than was common.

Stephen F. Austin was my second piece done as work-for-hire and my first collaboration with a house photo-researcher working independent from me, but I think the relationship was successful and the work is one that I am proud of.