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Context
Khaled Hosseini was born in Kabul, Afghanistan, on March 4, 1965, and was the oldest of five children. Just as he describes in The
Kite Runner, Kabul was a cosmopolitan city at the time. Western culture, including movies and literature, mixed with Afghan
traditions, such as kite fighting in the winter. Lavish parties were normal at the Hosseini family’s home in the upper-middle class
neigborhood of Wazir Akbar Khan. Hosseini’s father served as a diplomat with the Afghan Foreign Ministry, and his mother taught
Farsi and history at a local high school for girls. Then, in 1970, the Foreign Ministry sent his father to Iran. While the family only
spent a few years there, Hosseini taught a Hazara man, who worked as a cook for the family, how to read and write. By this time,
Khaled Hosseini was already reading Persian poetry as well as American novels, and he began writing his own short stories.
Repeated moves marked the next decade of the Hosseini family’s life. They returned to Kabul in 1973, the year Mohammad Daoud
Khan, overthrew his cousin, Zahir Shah, the Afghan King, in a coup d’etat. The Afghan Foreign Ministry relocated the Hosseini
family to Paris in 1976. Though they hoped to return to Afghanistan in 1980, that was not possible because of a military invasion by
the Soviet Union. Instead, the Hosseinis moved to San Jose, California after they were granted political asylum in the United
States. Khaled Hosseini went on to graduate from high school in 1984 and attended Santa Clara University, where he received his
bachelor’s degree in Biology in 1988. In 1993, he earned his Medical degree from University of California, San Diego, School of
Medicine, and in 1996 he completed his residency at Cedars-Sinai medical Center in Los Angeles, making him a full-fledged
doctor.
While Khaled Hosseini has said before that his first novel is largely fictional, he acknowledges that the Afghanistan he knew as a
child inspired it. Like his main character, Amir, Khaled Hosseini enjoyed Western films and kite fighting. He also lived in a pre-
revoltionary Afghanistan that had not yet been ravaged by the Soviet invasion and subsequent Taliban rule. In a 2003 interview
with Newsline, Khaled Hosseini said the passages in the book most resembling his life are those of Amir and Baba as immigrants in
the United States. When the Hosseinis arrived in California, they had difficulty adjusting to the new culture, and for a short time his
family lived on welfare. He also remembers the local flea market where he and his father worked briefly among other Afghans, just
as Amir and Baba did in the book.
Although the period of adjustment passed and Khaled Hosseini became a successful practicing doctor in 1996, he felt deeply
influenced by what he recalled of his homeland, and he began writing "The Kite Runner" in March 2001. Two years later, in the
midst of the U.S. war in Afghanistan, Riverhead Books published the book. “The Kite Runner” became an international bestseller,
with more than eight million copies in print. It also received numerous book awards, including the the Boeke Prize, the Barnes and
Noble Discover Great New Writers Award, and the Literature to Life Award. In 2007, it was made into a feature film. The movie
encountered some problems. The children who played Hassan, Amir and Sohrab, and a fourth boy with a smaller role, had to be
moved out of the country. Hassan’s rape scene in the film, along with Sohrab’s abuse at the hands of the Taliban, put the young
actors and their families in possible danger, as some Afghans found the episode insulting. In May 2007, Khaled Hosseini published
his second book, "A Thousand Splending Suns," which also became a bestseller.
Khaled Hosseini’s literature also changed his personal life. After nearly twenty-seven years, he returned to Afghanistan to see what
had become of his country and his people. Like Amir, he was able to find his father’s old home, but he also recognized that war and
brutality destroyed the place where he grew up. His efforts to bring attention to the plight of refugees earned him the Humanitarian
Award from the United Nations Refugee Agency in 2006, and he became a U.S. goodwill envoy to the organization. It was during a
2007 trip as an envoy that he was inspired to start his own non-profit group. He created the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, which
funds projects to empower vulnerable groups in Afghanistan, such as women and children. Today, Khaled Hosseini writes full-time.
He continues to live in Northern California with his wife, Roya, and their two children.
Plot Overview
Amir recalls an event that happened twenty-six years before, when he was still a boy in Afghanistan, and says that that made him
who he is. Before the event, he lives in a nice home in Kabul, Afghanistan, with Baba, his father. They have two servants, Ali and
his son, Hassan, who are Hazaras, an ethnic minority. Baba’s close friend, Rahim Khan, is also around often. When Afghanistan’s
king is overthrown, things begin to change. One day, Amir and Hassan are playing when they run into three boys, Assef, Wali, and
Kamal. Assef threatens to beat up Amir for hanging around with a Hazara, but Hassan uses his slingshot to stop Assef.
The story skips to winter, when the kite-fighting tournament occurs. Boys cover their kite strings in glass and battle to see who can
sever the string of the opposing kite. When a kite loses, boys chase and retrieve it, called kite running. When Amir wins the
