' In the Soup series of novels, Peck embellishes upon his childhood adventures with Soup, his mischievous best friend whose practical jokes often result in mayhem at such small-town functions as parades and school plays. there is no rhetoric about love-in fact nobody in A Day No Pigs Would Die ever mentions the word love, or any other emotion for that matter-love nevertheless suffuses every page. The reaction of reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt to A Day No Pigs Would Die echoed the estimation of many critics: ' is a stunning little dramatization of the brutality of life on a Vermont farm, of the necessary cruelty of nature, and of one family's attempt to transcend the hardness of life by accepting it.

He is also able to face the loss of his father, who, though silent on the subject, has been slowly dying. Through this experience, he comes to understand the meaning of love and the necessity of death. The pig proves barren, however, and Rob must help his father slaughter it, knowing that their meager income prohibits the luxury of a useless animal. Rob, in return for helping a neighbor's cow give birth, receives a sow that soon becomes his beloved pet. Told in a spare yet vivid style, A Day No Pigs Would Die revolves around thirteen-year-old Rob Peck and his relationship with his austere father, a farmer and hog butcher. He now divides his time between Vermont and Florida, where he is the director of Rollins College Writers Conference. He later became an advertising executive, writing jingles for television commercials, but abandoned this career following the successful publication of A Day No Pigs Would Die in 1973. He joined the United States Army infantry during World War II, serving for two years in Italy, Germany, and France. As a young man he found employment as a lumberjack, hog butcher, and paper-mill worker.

Trig by Robert Newton Peck