Biographical Note

Packard was born in 1931 in Huntington, New York, grew up there, graduated from Princeton, served in the U.S. Navy, graduated from Columbia Law School, and worked as a lawyer before becoming a full-time writer. He conceived of the idea and wrote the prototype and first book for Bantam’s classic Choose Your Own Adventure series, wrote a lot of other books in the series, and created other works of fiction and non-fiction, including Imagining the Universe (1994), which received a Scientific American book award. In December, 2024, he licensed six of his most well-known original Choose Your Own Adventure books for reissue by Chooseco, the present owner of the Choose Your Own Adventure trademark. His essay “Nine Things I Learned in Ninety Years,” his book Imagine: Fifty-Six Thought Experiments, and his memoir, It’s a Miracle It Wasn’t Worse: Growing Up in the 1930s and 1940s, are available free for reading or downloading, on this website.