Up the Down Staircase

Bel Kaufman

Sep 2012 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

For every teacher fighting to make a difference—the timeless bestseller about the hope, heartache, and hilarity of working in the public school system.

When Sylvia Barrett arrives at New York City’s Calvin Coolidge High, she’s fresh from earning literature degrees at Hunter College and eager to shape young minds. Instead, she encounters broken windows, a lack of supplies, a stifling bureaucracy, and students with no interest in Chaucer. Narrated in “an almost presciently postmodern style” through interoffice memos, notes and doodles, lesson plans, suggestion-box insults, letters, and other dispatches from the front lines, Up the Down Staircase stands as the seminal novel of a beleaguered American public school system perpetually redeemed by teachers who love to teach and students who long to be recognized (The New Yorker).
 
Hailed as “the funniest book written in America since Catch-22,” Up the Down Staircase spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list, has been adapted for the stage, and was made into an award-winning feature film starring Sandy Dennis (New York Herald Tribune). It remains an essential and highly enjoyable read that will leave you laughing and shaking your head at the same time.
 
This ebook features an illustrated biography of Bel Kaufman including photos from the author’s personal collection.

Ratings and reviews

I had the pleasure to work with Bel and her husband without knowing who she was. The more we chatted the more I found who she was. Am glad I worked with her. She was 100 hundred years old who was looking forward to be 101 and she is the brightest woman I have ever met. She gave me her book as gift which I truly appreciated.

The story is set in the early 1960's, but many themes are relevant today. If you enjoyed Blackboard Jungle, you should appreciate this as well.

The story of a new teacher's first few chaotic days at a high school.

About the author

Bel Kaufman (1911–2014) was a bestselling writer, dedicated teacher, and lecturer best known for her novel Up the Down Staircase (1965), a classic portrayal of life in the New York public school system. Kaufman was born in Berlin, the daughter of Russian parents and granddaughter of celebrated Yiddish writer Sholom Aleichem. Her family moved to Odessa when she was three, and Russian is her native language. The family also lived in Moscow before immigrating to New York City when Kaufman was twelve. There, she graduated magna cum laude from Hunter College and with high honors from Columbia University. Kaufman then worked as a high school teacher in the city for three decades. The success of Up the Down Staircase launched her second career as a sought-after speaker for events around the country. Kaufman is also the author of Love, Etc. (1979), a powerful, haunting, and poignant novel rendering life as fiction.