Brief History of Adolescent Literature

Brief History of Adolescent Literature

Chapter 2

P. 43 - 77

Books at any point in history show what adults

want young people to know and reflect the attitudes of

the times

Influence of Sunday Schools

• 1824 – 1880s• Moralistic fiction

– Virtues of dying child– Disobedient child would get

comeuppance

• Primarily sugar-coated sermons

• Did advance literacy

The Converted Child. Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, circa 1830

Primarily religious

Young People’s Books Prior to 1800s

Children are mere adults and must accept the wrath of God

http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/exhibits/child/stories1.htm

1800s

• happy family life• harsh, but honest• still read today

• broken homes• romantic fantasies• “rags to respectability”• hero rarely achieved

riches• barely read

today

Louisa May Alcott Horatio Alger Jr.

Horatio Alger• http://www.horatioaler.com/junior.htm

Four Basic Types of Books in 1800s

p. 45-53

1. Series

Martha Findley

Oliver Optic

Susan Coolidge

Harry Castlemon

2. Domestic Novels

• Characteristics– preached morality

– woman’s submission to man

– suffering, self-sacrificing, denying

– heroines different in name, not character

– most are orphaned girl meets handsome man, saved

– women were target audience

• Elizabeth Wetherell– Wide Wide World

– “when [women] were not crying, they were cooking”

• Augusta Jane Evans Wilson– St. Elmo

3. Dime Novels

• audience mostly men

• cost $.10, dropped to $.05

• 100 pages; 7x5

• stock characters

• melodramatic plots

• rapid beginnings

• cliffhangers

• he-men

• westerns

Librarians objected to their

immorality

• aimed at youth

• distributed in mass at newsstands and dry goods stores

• lurid cover illustration

• many genres represented

• tales of urban outlaws, detective stories, working-girl narratives of virtue defended, and costume romances (west most popular setting)

• Established original attitude toward paperbacks and cheap books:– “trash”

– evil; corruptive

– should be banned

Major Dime Novels Publisher

• Beadle Brothers– Malaeska: the Indian

Wife of the White Hunter (Ann Stephens, 1860)

– Seth Jones: or The Captives of the Frontier (1860)

4. Bad Boy Adventure

• Tough, imperfect boys

• Story of a Bad Boy (T. Bailey, 1870)• Tom Sawyer (Mark Twain, 1876)• Boy Emigrants (N. Brooks, 1876)• Master Skylark (J. Bennett, 1898)• Treasure Island (R. L. Stevenson, 1883)

Public Library Development

1731 - Benjamin Franklin started Philadelphia Library Company by sharing his books

1826 - New York state used school buildings for public libraries

1847 - Boston levied a tax for free public library

the first publicly supported municipal library in America

1854 - Boston Public Library opened

first public library to allow people to borrow books and materials

1876 - ALA founded and Library Journal published

1884 - first library school

Problems early public libraries faced

1. Tax dollars for funding support

2. Purpose: scholarly or pleasure

3. Books to include: fiction or nonfiction

• 1896 - Melvil Dewey recommended NEA have library department for schools

• 1900 - first library school graduate appointed to Boston high school

• 1912 - stressed need for professionally trained librarians in high schools

• 1916 - C. C. Certain standards

• Depression slowed growth

School Library Development• 1823 -Brooklyn’s Apprentice Library

– boys over 12 were allowed in– girls were allowed one hour an afternoon once a

week

• 1853 - Milwaukee recommended – schools spend $10 a year for books– only children over 10 years old, parents, teachers

and school commissioners could check out books– keep items for one week; fines charged

Changes in English Classroom and National Council Teachers of

English

• 1860 - 1870 Harvard entrance exams forced English curriculum to be based on predetermined “classics”

• 1894 - Committee of Ten on Secondary School Studies recommended English be studied five hours a week for four years and college entrance exams be established

• very few students enrolled in school but teachers were pressured to prepare students for college by dictating recommended reading

• recreational reading considered waste of time

• 1911 - in protest to college entrance exams, NCTE compiled list of books for home reading and included some “new” books

• 1917 - Hosic suggested teacher should make reading “unfailing resource and joy in lives of all”

• 1936 - LaBant found students enjoyed reading if they chose what they read

Research Findings

• Interest of the reader is most powerful factor (Norvell, 1946)

• Voluntary reading rarely overlapped with required reading

• Sue Barton, Student Nurse (Boylston) most popular book in 1947

• students read to reassure themselves about normality and role playing (Carlsen, mid 1950s)

• bibliotherapy was outgrowth

Seven Types of Books in the Early 1900s

p. 421 - 429

1. Series

• Edward Stratemeyer Library Syndicate

• wrote dime novels under pseudonym, Oliver Optic

• founded syndicate (factory of juvenile series books) in 1906

• criticized for literary quality

• he created plot sketches for each chapter• advertised for authors; authors wrote

under pseudonyms; writers paid a one-time fee, not including royalties; agreed to never reveal they had written for a specific series or under a particular author’s pseudonym

• “safe and sane” (moral) for children to read

• good always triumphed over evil

• sports produced real men; never trust a foreigner

• The Bobbsey Twins published in 1904.

• In 1930, when Stratemeyer died, daughters Harriet Adams and Edna Stratemeyer took over

• continued same series and characters

• include Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Baseball Joe and Ruth Fielding

“syndicate” still exists

Demise of Series

• The great depression took its toll – Statemeyer series decreased from 27 to 7

• War created paper shortage

• Readers became more sophisticated

2. Young child, usually girl, saves those around her

• popular before WWI

• Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Wiggins, 1904)

• Anne of Green Gables (Montgomery, 1908)

• Pollyanna (Porter, 1913)

3. Girls’ and Boys’ books

• up to mid 30s, girls’ books considered inferior to boys’ books

• believed girls would read boys’ books, but boys would not read girls’ books

• boys were allowed outside the house

4. Westerns

5. Sports Stories

• Burt L. Standish introduced the character of Frank Meriwell

• Half-Back (Barbour, 1899)– invented formula of boy attending school

learning who and what he might become through sports

6. School Stories

• Peggy (Laura Elizabeth Richard, 1899)

• Jane’s Island (Marjorie Hill Alee, 1931)

• Bright Island (M. L. Robinson, 1937)

7. Junior/Juvenile

• Let the Hurricanes Roar (Rose Wilder Lane, 1933– recently re-issued as Young

Pioneers

–“[this book] makes me ashamed of cussing about hard times and taxes”

1940s to 1965

p. 63 - 75

Changes Occurring in America

• war• gaps of all kinds: racial, technological, cultural,

and economic• civil rights• school integration• riots• increasing violence• assassination

Types of Books

1. Paper backs

• Avon - 1941• Bantam, Dell - 1943

• by mid 1960s - popular because of convenient size, cost, availability First introduced by

Pocket in 1938

• difficult to catalog

• easy to steal

• covers considered lurid

• contents thought to be “nothing short of pornography”

Schools resisted paperbacks because:

2. high school years

• dating, parties, class rings, senior year, popular crowd

• simple plots

• exclusively white, middle class

• taboo topics were avoided

Authors who began to make changes in taboo topics

• Florence Crannell Means (minorities)• Seventh Summer by Maureen Daley (shy, innocent

girls)• Mary Stolz (focus on character, rather than incident)• James Summers (young marriage from male view

point)• Paul Annixter (mixed animals, ecology, symbolism

3. career books

• Helen Boylston, (Nurse Barton books)• Peggy Covers the News (E. Bugbee, 1936)• Helen Wells, flight stewardesses• formulistic by late 1940s• character had minor setbacks but wins place

in profession• glossed over daily grinds by glamorizing

career

4. sports and car books

• John F. Carson - basketball• Fear Strikes Out (1955) Jim Piersall• It’s good to be Alive (1959) Roy Campanella • Henry Gregor Felson (joys and dangers of cars)• John Tunis (sports)

5. Adventure/suspense

• James Bond series (Ian Fleming)

• Guadalacanal Diary (1943) R. Tregaskis

• Here is Your War (1944) Ernie Pyle

• The Raft (1942) Robert Trumbull

• Adam of the Road (1942) E. J. Gray

• The Innocent Wayfaring (1943) Marchette Chute

6. romance

• Love is Forever (1954) M.E. Bell

• Marriage (1954) Vivian Breck

• Forever Amber (1944) K. Winsor

7. society’s problems

• Of Mice and Men (1937); Grapes of Wrath (1939) Steinbeck

• Cry the Beloved Country (1948) Paton

• Invisible Man (1952) Ralph Ellison

• Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965) Haley & Malcolm X

• Soul on Ice (1968) Eldridge Cleaver

8. personal problems and initiation

• Married on Wednesday (1954) A. Emery• Divided Heart (1947) M. Lewiton• Too Bad about the Haines Girl (1967) Zoa

Sherburne• A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) B. Smith• Catcher in the Rye (1951) J.D. Salinger• Lord of the Flies (1955) Golding• A Separate Peace (1961) Knowles

Mood in the 1950s

•Magazines, paperbacks, and comic books were targeted for censorship

–comic books were cheap - $.25 a book–main objective was to “protect adolescent, weak and susceptible”

•Gathings and McCarthy hearings

Examples of Hysteria • Texas passed a bill requiring all authors to

sign a statement that they never had been a member of the Communist Party before the text would be adopted or used in the state

• San Antonio wanted to “red stamp” any book by an author who had Communist affiliation or was pro Communist

• bill submitted, but never passed, that Library of Congress mark all “subversive” matter

“Don’t join the book burners. Don’t think you are going to conceal faults by concealing evidence that they ever existed. Don’t be afraid to go into your library and read every book as long as any document does not offend our own ideas of decency…even if they think ideas that are contrary to ours, they have a right to have them, a right to record them and a right to have them in places accessible to others. It is unquestioned, or it is not America.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 14, 1953

“Our fiction today shows what we have been through: our novels reflect the suffering of the depression; they show the neurotic tendencies traced by Freud; they show the brutality of concentration camps and the violence of two world wars. These are the facts of the life we have survived and we cannot conceal them from our children.”

E. A. Weeks (Publishers Weekly, 1953)

Criticism of YA literature in 1940s -1966

• developed slowly

• like much adult literature, it was second-rate

• much of the literature from this period is ignored

Then came the 1960s…

• “the floodgates were opened”

• many of the taboos disappeared

• books told about real problems and emotions

Discussion Questions

1. Good books focus on people with problems. Bad books focus on problems that seem incidentally to involve people. Cite an example of a book, story, or movie that seemed to focus on the problem and not the people. Explain your choice.

2. Consider the taboos that faced writers of young adult fiction in the 1940s and 1950s. Why do you feel these taboos were certain to disappear with time? Was their disappearance necessarily good for young adult literature?

3. In Gary Soto’s interview on page 67, he states that most of the young adult novels he reads, “lack a sense of place. The stories could happen anywhere.” Agree or disagree with his statements. Justify your opinion.