Katniss Everdeen she experienced when her father was fighting in the Vietnam War. In the novels, Katniss is extensively knowledgeable in foraging, wildlife, hunting, and survival techniques. Collins knew some of this background from her father, who grew up in the Great Depression and was forced to hunt to augment a scanty food supply, although Collins saw her father bring home food from the wild during her own childhood as well. In addition, Collins researched the subject using a large stack of wilderness survival guidebooks. Katniss and the other tributes are, in their time before participating in their Hunger Games, compelled to
The Hunger Games place in an unspecified future time, in the dystopian, post-apocalyptic nation of Panem, located in North America. The country consists of a wealthy Capitol city, located in the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by twelve (originally thirteen) poorer districts ruled by the Capitol. The Capitol is lavishly rich and technologically advanced, but the districts are in varying states of poverty. The trilogy's narrator and protagonist Katniss Everdeen, lives in District 12, the poorest region of Panem, located in Appalachia, where people regularly die of starvation. As punishment for a past rebellion against the Capitol (called the "Dark Days"), in which District 13