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David Guterson

David Guterson was born in 1956 in Seattle, where his father practiced criminal defense law. After receiving his master's degree from the University of Washington, where he studied writing with Charles Johnson, Guterson moved to Bainbridge Island in Puget Sound, where he taught high school English. He has said that his first novel, Snow Falling on Cedars, took ten years to finish: two years to think through, and eight to research and write. It was published in 1994. He also has stated...

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David Guterson Essays

12th Grade

Snow Falling on Cedars

“There are things in this universe that we cannot control, and then there are the things we can…let fate, coincidence, and accident conspire; human beings must act on reason” (Guterson 418). Reason, especially in the eyes and hands of human...

11th Grade

Snow Falling on Cedars

In David Guterson’s award-winning 1994 novel Snow Falling on Cedars, the story centers around the murder trial of Kabuo Miyamoto, using the testimony as a vehicle to tell a multigenerational story about the island’s fraught history from the...

12th Grade

Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson’s 1994 novel Snow Falling on Cedars spans three days detailing the murder trial of Japanese-American fisherman and family man Kabuo Miyamoto, all the while shifting in and out of real time to discuss the events leading up to it....