Zindel did not read much as a child and said he he wrote for people who did not like to read. Zindel's mother, a nurse who also worked as a shipyard laborer, hat-check attendant and dog-breeder, took in dying patients as boarders. His father was a police officer who abandoned the family. Zindel was born on May 15, 1936, in the Tottenville section of Staten Island. A knock at the door would send mother, sister and me running to a window to peek out.'' He said his mother conditioned him to believe that the world was out to get him, and he retreated into a secret world of puppet shows in cardboard boxes. ''Mother never trusted anybody, and ours wasn't the kind of house someone could get into by knocking on the front door. Zindel contrasted the marigolds one daughter grows for a science project - marigolds that had been exposed to radiation, and grow abnormally - to the family, which mirrored his own. The play focused on an abusive, beleaguered mother and her two daughters, one with unexpected scientific talent, the other with instincts that mirror the mother's. ''The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds'' was ''one of the most discouraging titles yet devised,'' Clive Barnes said in his review in The New York Times.

As with other plays that were staged before he quit teaching in 1969, he had written it in his spare time and seemed to relish his outsider status - he never went to the theater, he said, until he was already a published playwright. Zindel had been a high school chemistry teacher for six years, demonstrating basic chemical reactions and explaining concepts like atomic numbers and covalent bonds, when ''The Effect of Gamma Rays'' opened in Houston. The cause was cancer, said his daughter, Lizabeth Zindel. Paul Zindel, who drew on memories of his troubled childhood on Staten Island for a prize-winning play with a tongue-twisting title, ''The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds,'' died yesterday at the Jacob Perlow Hospice at Beth Israel Medical Center in Manhattan.

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