OLIVER Twist, Huck Finn, Holden Caulfield . . . Stanley Yelnats.

Stanley Yelnats? Sure. Stanley’s the hero of “Holes,” Louis Sacher’s award-winning novel beloved by readers 10 and up.

On Friday, the movie – about Stanley and his adventures at Camp Green Lake, where it’s so hot the lake has dried up – opens at a theater near you.

Sacher even wrote the script. Not that he was crazy about the idea.

“I was very distrustful of Hollywood people,” Sacher told The Post from his home in Austin, Texas.

“My first reaction was no. I wanted someone who knew what they were doing.”

Director Andrew Davis says he put Sacher through “screenwriting school,” sending him scripts to read and teaching film concepts like “You don’t need to say it if you’re going to see it.”

Not only did Sacher like writing the script, he even wound up in the film – along with his real-life wife and daughter. He plays the bald guy whose wife buys onion juice from Sam the onion man, hoping his bald head will sprout.

“Don’t blink,” Sacher jokes.

If you read “Holes,” you know all about Stanley, a good kid who suffers from the family curse – bad luck – that lands him in prison camp.

There, he and the other boys – Armpit, Magnet and Zero among them – spend all day digging holes in the desert-dry lake bed, watched over by a warden with a secret (Sigourney Weaver) and her redneckish assistant, Mr. Sir (Jon Voigt).

By the end, we learn about friendship and responsibility – laughing along the way.

Sacher says the story sprung totally from his imagination, though the warden resembles someone he knows: a fellow bridge player who’s always saying, “Excuse me?”

His own childhood, he says, was nothing like Stanley’s.

He was a suburban kid from Long Island whose dad worked on the 78th floor of the Empire State Building for a shoe company.

The 49-year-old writer still remembers the “scary” woods across from his East Meadow home, where “these older guys would hang out and I was afraid they’d beat me up or something.”

During college in California, he was a teacher’s aide at an elementary school and tried to sell his first book, “Sideways Stories from Wayside School,” while applying to law school. He sold it during the first semester.

Later, he and his wife moved to Texas – “where we could afford to have a home and raise our family” – when he started writing about the heat.

The story became “Holes.”

He wrote six drafts before finishing it and showing it to his first reader: his then fourth-grade daughter, Sherre.

“She really liked it,” he says. “And she wasn’t much of a reader . . .”

Will we ever see another story about Stanley?

Probably not.

“I kind of feel like his story is done,” Sacher says. “I’ve toyed with the idea of maybe writing a novel about some of the other characters, like Armpit.”

We smell another hit.