Author Gary James Paulsen often claimed that his life inspired the fiction he created. His childhood was tumultuous; he was a poor student and he struggled to fit in, eventually finding solace and identity in nature. The peace that he found in the wild stayed with him throughout his life and formed the basis for his middle-grade and young adult novels.

Guts is a memoir in first-person perspective offering thematic anecdotes from Paulsen’s life that are directly linked to his famous Hatchet series, a middle-grade collection of coming-of-age wilderness adventure novels.

Born into an era of war in 1939, Paulsen spent the first seven years of his life without his father, who was a deployed military officer. His mother worked in a munitions plant in Chicago, leaving Paulsen with his grandmother. When the war ended, Paulsen and his mother traveled by boat to the Philippines. Many of the events that transpired during the harrowing voyage East were recounted in Eastern Sun, Winter Moon: An Autobiographical Odyssey.

In 1949, the Paulsen family returned to Minnesota. Many of the experiences in Guts: The True Stories Behind Hatchet and the Brian Books hail from this period of nature exploration and a growing interest in hunting.