Clive King, author the children's classic Stig of the Dump, died on July 10 at age 94, the Bookseller reported.
King studied at Cambridge and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London before serving in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. "His service as a sailor and his work as a language teacher for the British Council took him all over the world and many of his books for children were inspired by the places he had visited, but it was the one set closest to his childhood home in Kent that launched his writing career," the Bookseller wrote.
That title was Stig of the Dump, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone and first published in 1963, about a boy named Barney "who explores the dump at the bottom of a nearby chalk-pit, and finds there a cave-boy who has made himself a house out of all kinds of junk." The book has sold more than two million copies and was adapted for TV in 1981 and in 2002.
Francesca Dow, managing director of Penguin Random House Children's, said, "This year our Stone Age Stig is 55 years old. However, the book's depiction of the vivid interior life and imagination of a child, the delight of roaming free, making shelters and dens away from the grown-ups, as well as ideas such as the universal language of friendship--and even the importance of recycling--feel as fresh and relevant today as they did when Puffin first published it in 1963. I remember reading Stig of the Dump when I was little and longing for a special secret Stig and dump of my own."
King's other books include Hamid of Aleppo, The Twenty-Two Letters, The Town that Went South, The Night the Water Came, Me and My Million, Ninny's Boat, The Sound of Propellers, The Seashore People and Snakes and Snakes. He also wrote plays for children.