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Young Adult
L I T E R AT U R E
FROM ROMANCE TO REALISM
ALA Neal-Schuman purchases fund advocacy, awareness, and accreditation
programs for library professionals worldwide.
THI RD E DITION
Young Adult
L I T E R ATUR E
FROM ROMANCE TO REALISM
MICHAEL CART
C H I C AG O | 2 0 1 6
ADVISORY BOARD
Robin Kurz, Assistant Professor, School of Library and Information Management,
Emporia State University
Stephanie D. Reynolds, Director, McConnell Center/Conference for the Study of Youth
Literature, and Lecturer, School of Information Science, University of Kentucky
Mary A. Wepking, Senior Lecturer and School Library Coordinator, School of Informa-
tion Studies, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Extensive effort has gone into ensuring the reliability of the information in this book;
however, the publisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material
contained herein.
ISBNs
978-0-8389-1462-5 (paper)
978-0-8389-1475-5 (PDF)
978-0-8389-1476-2 (ePub)
978-0-8389-1477-9 (Kindle)
Book design by Kimberly Thornton in the Proxima Nova and Adelle typefaces.
Cover images: (top) © oneinchpunch/Shutterstock, Inc.; (bottom) © Marijus Auruskevicius/
Shutterstock, Inc.
20 19 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1
For Jack Ledwith
Still and always the best of friends
Contents
Preface | ix
References | 249
Appendix | 271
About the Author | 277
Index | 279
vii
Preface
ix
x | Preface
for Native Americans (34 to 36) and Latinos (57 to 66) remained virtually flat.
We obviously have a long way to go, but the modest increases hold out some
hope for a more diverse field. K. T. Horning, Director of the CCBC, points
to a new organization, We Need Diverse Books, as “really keeping diversity
front and center.” If you’re not familiar with WNDB, check out its website at
www.weneeddiversebooks.org.
Speaking of diversity: I’m happy to report that there has been a dramatic
increase in the number of LGBTQI (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender,
Queer/Questioning, Intersex) books; a new record of sixty-four titles with
such content were published in 2015. This is twenty-four more than were
published during the entire decade of the 1980s and only eleven less than
were published in the 1990s. The field is broadening, too. The year 2015 saw
the publication of two books with intersex characters; there were also three
books about bisexuals, three about transgenders, and one each about gender
fluid and genderqueer kids.
Finally, YA is returning to its roots. After a decade of obsessively focusing
on speculative fiction, we are finally returning to a renascence of realistic
fiction—thanks in large part to two authors, the teen whisperer John Green
and Rainbow Rowell.
In addition to these general trends, here are some of the specific features
you’ll also find in this new edition:
And much more. My hope is that the reading of this new edition may give
you as much pleasure as the writing of it has given to me.
—Michael Cart
PART ONE:
3
4 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen
workforce, often as early as age ten. Who, then, had the discursive leisure
to grow up, to establish a culture of youth, to experience a young adulthood
when there was so much adult work to be done? Indeed, as late as 1900 only
6.4 percent of American seventeen-year-olds postponed adult responsibil-
ities long enough to earn high-school diplomas (Kett 1977); in fact, no more
than 11.4 percent of the entire fourteen- to seventeen-year-old population
was even enrolled in school, and those that were received—on average—
only five years of education (Mondale and Patton 2001). Simply put, until
1900 we were a society with only two categories of citizens: children and
adults.
This situation was about to change, however—and in only four years, at
that. The agent of impending change was G. Stanley Hall, the first American
to hold a doctorate in psychology and the first president of the American
Psychological Association. It was in 1904 that he “invented” a whole new cat-
egory of human being with the publication of his seminal work Adolescence:
Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex,
Crime, Religion and Education. As the length of its title suggests, this was a
massive, multidisciplinary, two-volume tome that Joseph F. Kett (1977, 26) has
described as “a feverish, recondite, and at times incomprehensible book, the
flawed achievement of eccentric genius.”
It was flawed, because much of what Hall posited about this new stage of
life that he called “adolescence” has been discredited, especially his notion
of recapitulation (i.e., child development mirrors that of the “race”). Never-
theless, his theories were enormously influential in their time, particularly
among educators and a growing population of youth workers. The latter
embraced Hall’s view of adolescence as a time of storm and stress (a phrase
that invoked the German Sturm und Drang school and visions of Goethe’s
sorrowful young Werther), along with inner turmoil, awkwardness, and
vulnerability, all phenomena that invited, even required, adult intervention
and supervision in such controlled environments as schools and a growing
number of youth organizations like the Boy Scouts and the YMCA. Neither
Hall nor his disciples used the term young adult, of course, but their defini-
tions of adolescence generally embraced our modern sense of young adults
as somewhere between twelve and nineteen years of age. Indeed, Hall was
prepared to extend his definition’s reach as far as the early twenties, but edu-
cators generally stopped at nineteen and youth workers at sixteen. In addi-
tion to these two groups, Hall inspired two other sets of influential devotees:
members of the vocational guidance movement (Hall believed in teaching
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 5
adolescents practical life and job skills) and the authors of “parents’ man-
uals,” which sought to guide the management of teenagers in middle-class
and upper-middle-class homes (Kett 1977, 221). Michael V. O’Shea, one of the
most prolific writers of these manuals, was also among the first to capitalize
on the potential economic importance of adolescents, so much so that Kett
(1977, 224) has dubbed him “the first entrepreneur of adolescence.” As we will
see, there have been many others.
As a result of this new focus on the perceived needs of adolescents, the
percentage of young people in school gradually began to grow. By 1910, 15.4
percent were enrolled (Rollin 1999) and the old model of the six-year high
school was beginning to change, too, as over the next decade, more and more
junior high schools were created. “By 1920,” Lucy Rollin (1999, 8) noted, “the
pattern of the four-year high school was well established,” and by 1930 almost
half the adolescent population was enrolled there. This was the good news
for advocates of education, but the bad news was that slightly more than half
of America’s adolescents were still not in school but in the workforce, where
they continued to be regarded as adults. But this, too, was about to change.
Indeed, it had already begun as the workplace was employing increasingly
sophisticated technology that required additional education, as—more
forcefully—had a spate of compulsory education laws.
It took the economic devastation of the 1930s, however, to effect truly seis-
mic change. As Grace Palladino (1996, 5) has written, “The Great Depression
finally pushed teenage youth out of the workplace and into the classroom.”
Lucy Rollin (1999, 85) concurred: “The Thirties were a fulcrum for this shift.”
The numbers alone, are telling: by 1939, 75 percent of fourteen- to seventeen-
year-olds were high-school students, and by 1940 nearly 51 percent of
seventeen-year-olds were earning diplomas (50.8 percent according to Kett
[1977]).
uals: dances and dating. Quick to recognize this was the already entrenched
Scholastic magazine, which had been founded in 1922 by M. R. “Robbie” Rob-
inson, another of the early entrepreneurs of adolescence. In 1936, Scholastic
introduced a new column to its pages. Titled “Boy Dates Girl,” it was writ-
ten by Gay Head (the pseudonym for Margaret L. Hauser), whose columns
would provide the fodder for a number of later books, including First Love;
Hi There, High School! and Etiquette for Young Moderns. As the last title sug-
gests, the column focused more on manners than on advice to the lovelorn.
Among the topics Hauser addressed, according to Grace Palladino (1996),
were how to make proper introductions, which fork to use at a dinner party,
and whether or not to wait for a boy to open a car door. Although boys took
pride of place in the column’s title, its intended readers were clearly girls,
who were admonished not to correct their dates, because boys did not appre-
ciate “brainy” girls. In the early days of youth culture, it was obvious that it
was already a male-centered one. This was a reflection of the then-prevail-
ing cultural attitudes, of course, as was Hall’s almost single-minded focus on
male adolescents in his own work. He had written so little about girls, in fact,
that H. W. Gibson, an early disciple and social worker with the YMCA, dubbed
adolescent psychology of the time “boyology” (Kett 1977, 224).
Although boys may have been the objects of lavish attention, the ste-
reotypical image of the male adolescent that emerged in popular culture
was an unflattering one: the socially awkward, blushing, stammering, acci-
dent-prone figure of fun typified by William Sylvanus Thaxter, the protago-
nist of Booth Tarkington’s best-selling 1916 novel Seventeen, (the inspiration
for Carl Ed’s long-running comic strip Harold Teen, which first appeared in
1919. Twenty years later this image was still the rage, this time informing the
spirit of radio’s Henry Aldrich and the movies’ Andy Hardy. (The Aldrich Fam-
ily debuted on NBC in July 1939, while the first Andy Hardy movie, A Family
Affair—starring Mickey Rooney—was released in 1937.) With the first appear-
ance in 1941 of another soon-to-be youth icon, the comics’ Archie Andrews (in
Pep Comics No. 22, on December 22, 1941), it became clear that Hall’s “adoles-
cent” was fast morphing into a new kind of youth, the teenager. In fact, the
first use in print of the term teenager occurred in the September 1941 issue
of Popular Science Monthly (Hine 1999; see also Palladino 1996), and the term
became commonplace in the decade that followed, though it wasn’t until
1956 and Gale Storm’s hit record Teenage Prayer that the term passed into
currency in the world of popular music (the same year saw the debut of the
singing group Frankie Lyman and the Teenagers).
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 7
this day, though in 1991 YASD did finally decree, in concert with the National
Center for Education Statistics, that young adults “are those individuals
from twelve to eighteen years old” (Carter 1994).
named Dick Webster, who habitually calls her Peanut and Small Fry. One
supposes these are intended as endearments, but they sound merely conde-
scending. Consider the following: “‘Hey!’ Dick scolded, suddenly masculine.
‘We’ve got to get going.’ Dick looked at her Dad in a way that said ‘Women!’
and grabbed her hand authoritatively. ‘Come on.’” (Cavanna 1946, 220).
Girl readers were apparently quite ready to go along, too, because Cavanna,
ultimately the author of more than seventy books, became one of the most
popular authors for adolescents of forties and fifties. Going on Sixteen was
the third most popular book in a 1959 survey of school and public libraries,
close behind—yes—Seventeenth Summer.
Another romance author who rivaled Cavanna for popularity was Rosa-
mund du Jardin (who was the only author to have two titles on that 1959 sur-
vey: Double Date and Wait for Marcy). Du Jardin’s own first book, Practically
Seventeen (do you detect a trend in these titles?) was published in 1949, and is
yet another pale imitation of Daly.
Like Seventeenth Summer, Practically Seventeen is told in the first person,
in the dumbfoundingly arch voice of Du Jardin’s protagonist Tobey Heydon
(which sounds too much like hoyden to be a coincidence). Like Daly’s Angie,
Du Jardin’s Tobey has three sisters—two older and one younger. Like Angie’s
father, Tobey’s is a traveling salesman. He is fond of saying that because he
is “completely surrounded by females in his own home” he “would go crazy
without a sense of humor and that he has had to develop his in self-defense.”
“But none of us mind,” Tobey hastens to reassure the reader. “He is really
sweet, as fathers go” (Du Jardin 1949, 4).
Like Seventeenth Summer (again), Du Jardin’s book is a story of young love
but much slighter in substance and lighter in tone. Tobey’s big dilemma—and
the theme that unifies the book’s highly episodic plot—is whether her rela-
tionship with boyfriend Brose (short for Ambrose) will survive until he can lay
hands on the class ring he has asked her to wear. Given the episodic structure
of her first novel, it’s no surprise to learn that Du Jardin had been a successful
writer of magazine fiction, her short stories having appeared in such popu-
lar women’s magazines as Cosmopolitan, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, and
McCall’s. Certainly her work is slicker, more innocent, and funnier than Daly’s.
For at-risk teens of the current day, there is something pleasantly nostalgic
and comforting in reading about peers (even long-ago ones) whose biggest
problems are pesky younger sisters, about who will take them to the big dance
(the “Heart Hop” in this case), and about how to resolve a rivalry for a boy’s
affection with a visitor from the South named, appositely, Kentucky Jackson.
16 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen
The book’s dust-jacket blurb speaks, well, volumes—not only about Prac-
tically Seventeen, but also about the type of book that would prevail in pub-
lishing for young adults throughout the forties and fifties. Here’s a sample
paragraph:
eerily like reading the novels we have been discussing, especially when one
comes to the editors’ valedictory summing up of their findings (“American
Youth—Full View”), where they affirm, “We have recorded, as told by youth
itself, the things they find important—the good schools, the basketball rival-
ries, the college scholarships and Friday night dates” (Daly 1951, 256).
Perhaps life really was simpler back in the 1940s!
To the editors’ credit, though, their book does differ from the YA literature
of the 1940s by including one African American teen (called “Negro” here),
though one wonders how representative she may be. Her name is Myrdice
Thornton, and she is the daughter of an affluent mother (her father, the first
African American member of the Chicago Park Police, was killed in the line
of duty). Living in the North, she attends an integrated school in the Hyde
Park neighborhood and seems to have experienced little racial prejudice or
related problems, telling her profiler, “I never did feel different . . . I see no
reason to act that way.” Perhaps more indicative of reality was the reaction
of the “Negro” boy who, when interviewed (though not profiled) expressed
amazement that anyone would be interested in his opinion.
One other teen in the book, Hank Polsinelli, the son of Italian immigrants,
is also “different.” Alas, his parents are presented as the same kind of stereo-
typed and “quaint” eccentrics that Boylston featured in Sue Barton. Hank’s
mother, for example, is said to be “a real Italian mother; she believes it is
her main business to cook, keep house and make a home for her husband
and children and not ask too many questions.” She does scold Hank when
he misses mass, “but Hank takes reprimands lightly and his mother under-
stands men. ‘He is a good boy at home,’ she says, ‘I don’t know what he does
outside’” (Daly 1951,76).
That Hank and the several other working-class teens who are profiled seem
much more mature than their privileged peers reminds us that adolescence,
in its first several decades at least, was primarily an experience of middle-
and upper-middle-class kids, who lived, for the most part, in all-white small
towns. According to Kett (1977, 245), such “towns and small cities proved to
be much more responsive to the institutions of adolescence than were rural
and metropolitan areas, while a mixture of apathy and antipathy continued
to mark the attitudes of lower class youth.” Small wonder that urban settings
and youth remained largely invisible in YA fiction until the social upheavals
of the turbulent 1960s.
There are other disconnects between the idealized (fantasy?) world of
early YA fiction and the real one. This is inadvertently reflected in the Profile
18 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen
book in a series of topical essays in which the editors and profilers step back
from their individual subjects and do some actual research and investigative
reporting, which leads to a somewhat less sunny picture of teenage life in the
late forties. It’s there we learn, for example, that “boys estimate that about
half the eighteen- and nineteen-year-old boys have had sex experience” (Daly
1951, 153); that “in almost all cases the boys feel it is up to the girls ‘to keep
things under control.’ She should know how and when to say ‘stop,’ for after
all it’s just natural for a fellow” (152), and that “pregnancy itself is still consid-
ered a social disgrace and a personal disaster” (153). Also, “society as a group
has little sympathy for the unwed mother” (154), especially if she is econom-
ically deprived. “These girls may be placed in a charitable institution, to be
trained in sewing or a trade while waiting out the birth of a child” (154). Sex,
of course, remained absent from YA fiction until the late 1960s and it was
equally absent from any serious discussion in the home. “Most teen-agers
do not get sex information from their parents” (65). Nor did they get it from
schools. “Oregon is the only one of the forty-eight states in which sex educa-
tion is generally taught” (73). Nor, of course, did they get it from books—at
least not the whole story. As one girl states, “I read all about ‘that’ in a book
when I was eleven. But nobody ever told me I was going to get so emotional
about it” (155). Too bad, for that’s what a good work of realistic fiction, with
fully realized characters whose lives invite empathy from the reader and
with it emotional understanding can do—had there been any such books
available. That there weren’t may be evidence that adult authors (and pub-
lishers) did not yet trust YA readers with the truth of reality.
Another example of an invisible topic is the consideration—or lack
thereof—of juvenile delinquency and the presence of gangs in teen life. Juve-
nile delinquency has been an issue in American life since the mid-nineteenth
century; the 1930 White House Conference on Children and Youth formally
defined it as “any such juvenile misconduct as might be dealt with under the
law” (Kett 1977, 309). However, it wasn’t until adolescents or teenagers had
become a distinct—and distinctive—culture that popular attention turned,
with a vengeance, toward the “problem.” A significant catalyst was the uni-
versal hand-wringing over the spate of unsupervised—and possibly out of
control—youths during World War II, a situation that was the product of
fathers at war and mothers at work. Thus, “during the first six months of 1943
alone, twelve hundred magazine articles appeared on this subject (juvenile
delinquency)” (Palladino 1996, 81). One of these, “Are These Our Children?”
which appeared in the September 21, 1943, issue of Look magazine, inspired
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 19
RKO to produce a movie based on it. Youth Runs Wild was released in 1944
and ads promoting it featured such titillating headlines as “What Happens
to These Unguarded Youngsters? The Truth about Modern Youth” (Barson
and Heller 1998). The war ended in 1945, but the fascination with “dangerous”
kids endured. In 1947, Irving Shulman published his adult novel The Amboy
Dukes, about life in a Brooklyn gang. A host of original paperback novels,
each more lurid than the last, followed in its wake. And then, suddenly, it
was the 1950s, and not only were delinquents and gang members big news
(and bigger box office), so were teenage rebels. The movie The Wild One, star-
ring a leather jacket-clad, motorcycle-riding Marlon Brando, was released in
1954. It contained an unforgettably culture-defining moment in this priceless
exchange between a horrified adult and Brando: HA: “What are you rebelling
against?” MB, mumbling, “What have you got?”
Adults were further outraged (and teens, enthralled) the following year
when not one but two cinematic classics of youthful disaffection were
released: Rebel without a Cause starring the soon-to-be-iconic James Dean
(who had died in an automobile crash only months before the movie was
released) and Blackboard Jungle, a gritty film about an inner-city teacher’s
confrontation with his gang leader students. The most remembered aspect
of the latter is the song that played over the movie’s opening credits: it was, of
course, Bill Haley and His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock.” Forgive a personal
note here: I was thirteen when this movie was released and I’ll never forget
sitting in the balcony of the old Logan Theater in my hometown (Logansport,
Indiana) and hearing this song, the likes of which I had never heard before
and the likes of which I couldn’t wait to hear again! It was a transfixing and
transforming experience that captured the imaginations and sensibilities of
every teen in America, too, and presto, rock and roll was born and nothing
was ever the same again.
Except young adult literature of the fifties, that is! Well, that’s not quite
true. One aspect of the new, harder-edged reality of teen life did find a place
in that fiction: the car gang, a franchise that Henry Gregor Felsen seemed to
own; he capitalized on it in such novels as Hot Rod (1953), Street Rod (1953),
Crash Club (1958), and others.
The wave of prosperity that accompanied the end of World War II had
turned America into a nation of car-crazy kids. Profile of Youth devoted an
entire chapter, “Teen-Age Drivers Talk Back,” to the topic, in fact. It began,
rather breathlessly, “Sixteen, when a driver’s license can be taken out in most
states, is a far more important milestone in the life of the typical American
20 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen
male than twenty-one, when he reaches his majority and can vote, because
‘cars are more fun than anything else in the world’” (Daly 1951, 46). Inevita-
bly this phenomenon led to more adult hand-wringing (“I never close an eye
any more until I know John or Mary is in at night!” [45]); a spate of popular
songs about fatal car crashes involving teens; the magazine Hot Rod, which
debuted in 1948; and a literary gold mine for Felsen.
The late forties and early fifties produced another wildly popular genre
for boys. These books weren’t about street rods but space rods! Science fic-
tion found a welcoming home in young adult fiction with the publication
of the already established adult author Robert A. Heinlein’s first book for
teens, Rocket Ship Galileo, in 1947. Space Cadet followed the next year and Red
Planet the next. In short order Heinlein was joined in the science fiction lists
by Andre Norton (pseudonym of Mary Alice Norton), whose first YA novel,
Star Man’s Son, 2250 A.D., appeared in 1953—many, many others followed.
As in the forties, the books of the fifties continued to focus on romance
for girls and other genre fiction for boys, who—in addition to car books and
science fiction—were reading novels of adventure, sports, and animals.
For both sexes, there was a soupçon of more serious literature that focused
principally on historical fiction and what the educator G. Robert Carlsen
called stories of foreign culture. The latter had been a mainstay of juvenile
fiction since the turn of the twentieth century, though most of the titles,
written by well-intentioned white Americans, were of the “little-children-of-
foreign-lands” type (most seemed to be twins). But there were exceptions.
Elizabeth Foreman Lewis had written knowledgeably and insightfully about
the lives of young people in China, having lived and taught there herself.
Similarly, Anne Nolan Clark wrote widely about Latin America, but the best
work in this category came from abroad in the years immediately following
World War II, “an era,” according to legendary editor and publisher Marga-
ret McElderry (1994, 369), “in which American children’s book editors actively
sought out the best in writing and illustration from abroad.” McElderry her-
self inaugurated this era when, in 1953, she published Margot Benary-Isbert’s
The Ark, the first German book to be published for American young readers
following World War II. However, the strident imperative that books about
other cultures could only be written by those from within that culture did
not emerge until the 1980s and the advent of multiculturalism and political
correctness.
1 : Fro m S ue B arton to the Si x tie s | 21
For now, another advent—the arrival of a whole new decade and the dra-
matic changes it would visit on youth culture and the literature produced for
it—is at hand. For a discussion of that we begin a new chapter!
Notes
1. Speaking of “twain,” a singular work of fiction for boys—to match Little
Women for girls—appeared in 1885: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn.
2. As “Victor Appleton,” Howard R. Garis wrote many of the Tom Swift books,
while under his own name he created the more enduring literary character
of Uncle Wiggily. Interestingly, his wife, Lillian, was the pseudonymous
Laura Lee Hope who penned the Bobbsey Twin books. Their two chil-
dren also wrote for Stratemeyer, thus turning the Garis household into a
mini-fiction factory of its own, though not, alas, a very happy one! See the
ironically titled House of Happy Endings by Leslie Garis (2007).
2
HINTON MAY HAVE BEEN WRITING IN 1967, BUT SHE WAS ECHOING A CON-
cern that had been expressed by American educators for at least two
decades. In 1946, for example, George W. Norvell wrote, “Our data shows
clearly that much literary material being used in our schools is too subtle,
too erudite.” According to Nilsen and Donelson (2009, 59), he went on to
suggest, “Teachers should give priority to the reading interests of young
adults,” concluding that “to increase reading skill, promote the reading
habit, and produce a generation of book-lovers, there is no factor so power-
ful as interest.”
Although I can’t imagine any of them had read or even heard of Norvell,
many of the early fifties teens featured in Daly’s (1951) Profile of Youth echoed
his views, while acknowledging their personal dislike for reading. One senior
boy, for example, reported switching to journalism from English Literature
because “they were giving us English writers of the seventeenth century and
way back when” (41). A girl, it is reported, “doesn’t like to read books and much
prefers articles with many pictures” (62). It took another girl six weeks to get
through the first hundred pages of Pride and Prejudice (163), and a horse-lov-
ing Wyoming boy asserted, “I read A Tale of Two Cities last month for English
class—didn’t like it.”
“Another young cowboy,” the profiler writes, “looked up. ‘Last month,’ he
recalled morosely, ‘last month we done Macbeth’” (215).
23
24 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen
And so it goes. Would these teens have been more enthusiastic about
reading if they had been permitted to self-select their books? Perhaps. The
Dickens disliker did acknowledge reading about horses occasionally (though
in farm and ranch magazines, not in books). And another boy demanded to
know, “Why can’t we read Cheaper by the Dozen in class instead of some old
has-been?” (96).
The problem, of course, was that even if teachers had been inclined to use
young adult books in the classroom instead of books by old has-beens, it’s
obvious from our survey of the field that few works of young adult litera-
ture before 1960 would have qualified as literature. Indeed, many academ-
ics would have asserted that putting the words “young adult” and “litera-
ture” together produced nothing but an oxymoron. And yet enough serious
work was being done that the first tentative attempts at critical analysis
had already begun to appear by the mid-1950s. Richard S. Alm (1955, 315), for
example, noted in 1955 that “the last twenty years has seen the coming of
age of the novel of the adolescent,” perhaps, he ventured, because writers,
“noting the heightened attention given to adolescents and their problems
by psychologists, educators, and librarians, have turned to the personal con-
cerns of the teen-ager.”
Perhaps, but the writers of the novel for the adolescent whom Alm sin-
gled out for particular praise were all adult novelists like Maureen Daly,
James Street, Dan Wickenden, William Maxwell, and Marjorie Kinnan Raw-
lings. This was consistent, though, with the approach Dwight L. Burton had
taken in an earlier essay, “The Novel for the Adolescent,” that is often cited
as being the first criticism of young adult literature. In it Burton (1951, 362)
devoted the lion’s share of his attention to an analysis of work by four adult
authors whose novels either showed “a keen perception of the adolescent
experience,” or “have a peculiar appeal to certain elements of the adolescent
reading public.” (For the record, the four authors were Dan Wickenden, Ruth
Moore, C. S. Forester, and Thomas Wolfe.)
The point we infer from both of these early pieces of criticism is that
although there may—by the 1950s—have been a separate, identifiable body
of books to be read by that separate, identifiable body of readers, that is,
young adults, too many of its constituent titles were what Alm (1955, 315)
himself had glumly described as “slick, patterned, rather inconsequential sto-
ries written to capitalize on a rapidly expanding market” (emphasis added).
In 1956 a third early critic, Frank G. Jennings, was even blunter, grumbling,
“The stuff of adolescent literature, for the most part, is mealy-mouthed,
2: T he Si x tie s and Se v entie s | 25
gutless, and pointless” (226). This may smack of overstatement for dramatic
effect, but it is true, I think, that “much of the literature written for young
adults from 1940 through 1966 goes largely and legitimately ignored today”
(Nilsen and Donelson 1993, 574).
Books or Ladders?
Adolescence has always been viewed as a period of transition, of moving
upward from one stage of development to another, and so it is not surpris-
ing that its literature, in the early years at least, should have been viewed
as a ladder—or, more precisely, a rung on a ladder—between children’s and
adult literature. This idea of reading ladders may have been the inspiration
of Dora V. Smith, who, in the 1930s at the University of Minnesota, taught
the first college-level course in adolescent literature. At least one of her most
celebrated students, G. Robert Carlsen (1984, 29), thinks so, recalling that “in
her classes we constructed ladders placing titles on the rungs according to
our judgment of quality . . . through reading guidance a teacher was to move
readers from one level to a higher one.”
Consistent with this concept is the corollary notion of stages of reading
development (which echoes psychological stages of adolescent develop-
ment!), that is, it is possible to identify certain specific types—or categories—
of fiction that will appeal to young readers at specific ages or grade levels in
school. In his influential 1980 work Books and the Teen-Age Reader, Carlsen
identified three such stages: (1) Early Adolescence: ages eleven to fourteen,
grades five to eight; (2) Middle Adolescence: fifteen to sixteen, grades nine
and ten; and (3) Late Adolescence: seventeen to eighteen, grades eleven and
twelve (Carlsen 1980). He then developed corollary categories of books that
he believed offered unique appeal to students in each stage of development.
For example, early adolescents would like animal, adventure, and mystery
stories; middle adolescents would welcome war stories and historical novels;
and late adolescents would dote on searches for personal values and books
of social significance.
Carlsen linked these aspects of reading development to University of Chi-
cago psychologist Robert J. Havighurst’s influential theory of developmental
tasks, which seemed to suggest that if teenagers were to successfully climb
the ladder of personal development from childhood to adulthood, they must
successfully complete seven distinct life tasks:
26 | Part O ne : T hat Was T hen
“To accomplish [the tasks],” Havighurst claimed, “will lead to happiness and
to success with later tasks, while failure leads to unhappiness in the individ-
ual, disapproval by society, and difficulty with later tasks” (Havighurst 1988,
61). Havighurst’s ideas influenced work other than Carlsen’s. Evidence of this
may be inferred from the Alm article cited above, where the critic described
what he perceived as the prevailing focus of young adult writers’ attention:
“In the main,” he asserted, “these authors deal with an adolescent’s relation-
ships with others his own age, with his parents and other adults, and with
such worries as deciding upon and preparing for a job, ‘going steady,’ marry-
ing and facing the responsibilities of adulthood” (Alm 1955, 315). Though unac-
knowledged, this simply echoes Havighurst’s list of developmental tasks.
Carlsen (1984, 29) was more candid, recalling of his own teaching methods,
“I applied Robert Havighurst’s concept of developmental tasks to adolescent
books. It seemed to me that the most popular and successful titles, like Daly’s
Seventeenth Summer, were books in which characters were dealing with one
or more of the developmental tasks. So we looked not only at the story con-
tent, but also at the conflicts and turmoils besetting the characters.”
Personally I think this persistent attempt to transform literature into util-
itarian ladders too often turned the early critics’ attention from the work
itself to the personal problems of the reader; that act, in turn, invited the
transformation of a promising literature into the series of formula-driven,
problem novels that would emerge in the sixties and seventies. I also think
that frog-marching literature into ready-made category pens labeled for read-
ing age suitability homogenizes readers, while also smacking of the didactic
and dogmatic and threatening to turn literature from art to tool. Small won-
der that young readers, beginning to feel manipulated, joined their voices in
the chorus that greeted the looming new decade: “Never trust anybody over
thirty.”
2: T he Si x tie s and Se v entie s | 27
ties outlined above, contenting themselves, instead, with wearing their “tuff”
hair long, dressing in blue jeans and T-shirts, and lifting a fist in the inevita-
ble rumble.
Hinton’s was not the first novel to deal with gangs. Frank Bonham’s story
of Los Angeles, Durango Street, had been published in 1965, but there was
something about The Outsiders that captured the imagination of its readers
and spawned a new kind of literature, “books,” as Richard Peck (1994, 154) put
it, “about young people parents thought their children didn’t know.” Hinton
knew them, though; she went to school with them every day in Tulsa. She
knew from personal observation what their lives were like but, as a reader,
she didn’t find that kind of first-person reality being depicted in the pages of
young adult literature.
“The world is changing,” she wrote in an impassioned New York Times
Book Review article, “yet the authors of books for teen-agers are still 15 years
behind the times. In the fiction they write, romance is still the most popu-
lar theme, with a horse-and-the-girl-who-loved-it coming in a close second”
(Hinton 1967b, 26). Hinton continues, “Nowhere is the drive-in social jungle
mentioned . . . In short, where is the reality [?]” Hinton was not alone in won-
dering that.
In 1966, George Woods, then children’s book editor of The New York Times
Book Review, wrote, “One looks for modernity, boldness, for realism. The teen-
age novel, especially, should grapple with the delights and the dilemmas of
today’s teen-agers. Delicacy and restraint are necessarily called for, yet all too
often this difficult problem is resolved through avoidance. A critic in touch
with the world and aware of the needs of the young expects to see more
handling of neglected subjects: narcotics, addiction, illegitimacy, alcoholism,
pregnancy, discrimination, retardation. There are few, if any, definitive works
in these areas” (169).
Not quite four months before Hinton’s piece appeared, Nat Hentoff deliv-
ered a similarly scathing indictment of young adult literature in The New York
Times. Writing of his own first YA novel, he asserted, “‘Jazz Country’ failed, as
have most books directed at teen-agers . . . My point is that the reality of being
young—the tensions, the sensual yearnings and sometime satisfactions, the
resentment against the educational lock step that makes children fit the
schools, the confusing recognition of their parents’ hypocrisies and failures—
all this is absent from most books for young readers” (Hentoff 1967, 3).
A year later Newbery Medal–winning author Maia Wojciechowska (1968,
13) joined the chorus, criticizing authors of books for the young, who keep
going back to their own turn-of-the-century childhoods, or write tepid
2: T he Si x tie s and Se v entie s | 29
themselves. With four decades of hindsight, it now seems that it is The Con-
tender, rather than The Outsiders or The Pigman, that is a model for the kind
of novel that Woods, Hentoff, and Hinton herself had called for in the arti-
cles cited earlier in this chapter. This revisionist critical opinion was reflected
when a long-overdue Margaret A. Edwards Award was bestowed on Lipsyte
in 2001.
Regardless of who was first responsible, it is inarguable that, in the late
sixties, YA literature was in a hectic period of transition from being a litera-
ture that had traditionally offered a head-in-the-sand approach to one that
offered a more clear-eyed and unflinching look at the often unpleasant reali-
ties of American adolescent life.
It would be an uphill battle, though, for not only are young adults inher-
ently romantic, they are also inherently reality-denying. Richard Peck (1994,
159), as usual, put it well:
Lipsyte—and Hinton and Zindel and Donovan, and even Bonham and Hen-
toff—were among the first to test these boundaries and, in the process, to set
aside certain shibboleths that had contributed to the rosy unreality of previ-
ous YA novels. The taboos that had hobbled the literature in terms of subject
and style had flourished in the complicity of silence that authors had main-
tained in the forties and fifties. But in the late sixties and early seventies, a
new and bolder generation of authors began to break the silence with the
power and candor of their voices. “Authors [now] wrote the way people really
talked—often ungrammatically, sometimes profanely” (Nilsen and Donelson
1988, 275).
Zindel had written the way two people really talked; in 1973 Alice Chil-
dress would go him ten better and write in twelve different voices while also
addressing the hard-edged issue of heroin abuse in her novel A Hero Ain’t
Nothin’ But a Sandwich. Hinton would also write about drug abuse (That
Was Then This Is Now [1971]). As for other taboo-breaking topics, Zindel would
Other documents randomly have
different content
Frédéric II amassa un trésor de 60 millions de thalers en vendant
des mercenaires à l'Angleterre pendant la guerre d'Amérique.
Cette prospérité permit au landgrave de satisfaire ses goûts
fastueux. Il fit venir de France un architecte, Simon-Louis Ry qui
embellit Cassel, abattant les remparts, dessinant des jardins à la
Lenôtre. Tischbein, peintre allemand, mais de talent si français qu'on
l'a comparé à Nattier, fut chargé de la décoration des appartements
princiers.
Le landgrave entretint aussi une troupe dramatique et lyrique qui
jouait les chefs-d'œuvre classiques de la scène française, les opéras
et les opéras-comiques français, car Frédéric, contre le sentiment de
l'Allemagne du XVIIIe siècle, préférait la musique française à
l'italienne, de même qu'il mettait avant toutes les autres la littérature
française de son temps. La dévotion du Landgrave ne l'empêchait
pas au demeurant de partager les idées des Encyclopédistes et
d'honorer Voltaire avec lequel il correspondait.
A cette époque, le philosophe de Ferney était fort embarrassé
d'un de ses admirateurs qui se trouvait dans une mauvaise situation.
Jean-Pierre-Louis Luchet, Marquis de La Roche du Maine, puis
marquis de Luchet, était né à Saintes en 1774. Il avait pris du
service dans un régiment de cavalerie et avait démissionné pour
épouser une Genevoise. A Paris, il mena grand train et se tailla de
beaux succès littéraires. Mais la marquise eut le tort d'admettre dans
son salon les mystificateurs fameux pour avoir turlupiné ce bizarre et
ridicule Poinsinet qui finit par se noyer dans le Guadalquivir, à
Cordoue: «Notre langue lui doit, disent les Mémoires secrets, de
s'être enrichie du terme de mystification, terme généralement
adopté, quoi qu'en dise M. de Voltaire, qui voudrait le proscrire on
ne sait pourquoi».
Mais ces mystificateurs, parmi lesquels on comptait le comte
d'Albanel, l'avocat Coqueley de Chaussepière, les acteurs Préville et
Bellecour, de la Comédie-Française et un commis dans les fourrages
qui était connu sous le nom de Lord Gor, firent d'autres victimes que
Poinsinet et ils mystifièrent grossièrement différentes personnes. Sur
la plainte d'une dame de qualité, la police intervint. Il y eut des
menaces de prison. Cette affaire finit par s'arranger, mais tout le
monde tourna le dos aux Luchet et toutes les portes se fermèrent
devant eux.
A cela vint s'ajouter la faillite du marquis qui s'occupait de mines.
Il dut fuir et après un séjour chez Voltaire, il s'en alla à Lausanne où
il fonda en 1775 les Nouvelles de la République des Lettres. Il
engloutit ainsi ce qui lui restait de fortune. C'est alors que Voltaire le
recommanda au landgrave de Hesse-Cassel qui l'accueillit.
Luchet était un homme agréable et disert. Les Allemands, même
ses ennemis, accordaient qu'il fût un «connaisseur en beautés
théâtrales comme presque tous les Français de qualité». Sa
réputation de littérateur était faite.
Il plut beaucoup à Frédéric II qui dès le 1er juin 1776 écrivait à
Voltaire: «Plus je connais M. de Luchet, plus je l'estime. Quel charme
dans la conversation; quelles idées nettes! Il s'exprime avec la plus
grande facilité et précision. Je l'ai fait directeur de mes spectacles et
l'on dirait qu'il est fait exprès pour cette place». C'est pour Luchet
l'époque des triomphes: il est successivement nommé conseiller
privé, directeur du Théâtre-français, surintendant de l'orchestre de la
cour, bibliothécaire du Muséum de Cassel, secrétaire perpétuel de la
Société des Antiquités fondée à Cassel en 1777, historiographe du
Landgrave, vice-président du cercle du commerce à Cassel. Il était
déjà ou allait devenir membre de la Société d'Agriculture de Berne,
des Académies de Marseille, de Turin, de Dijon, de Saint-
Pétersbourg, d'Erfuhrt, de celle des Arcades, de la Société des
Antiquaires de Londres, de la Société royale de Lunebourg, de
l'Institut de Bologne, etc. Tout-puissant à la cour du Landgrave, il y
introduit des compatriotes.
Comme intendant de la musique et des spectacles de la cour, le
marquis recrutait et dirigeait la troupe française, qui jouait à Cassel,
et suivait la cour dans ses déplacements d'été, à Wabern, à Geismar,
à Weissenstein. Dans ces résidences on jouait devant la cour seule.
M. de Luchet s'occupait de la mise en scène et c'est lui qui
désignait les pièces à représenter. Sachant que le Landgrave serait
flatté que l'on jouât pour la première fois à Cassel des œuvres
d'auteurs français, Luchet recherchait les pièces nouvelles.
Vers la fin de 1779 il reçut l'offre d'un opéra-comique. Celui qui
l'offrait, et qui était l'auteur des paroles et de la musique, s'appelait
le Chevalier Andrea de Nerciat. Le marquis de Luchet, qui l'avait
connu à Paris, brillant officier de la maison du Roi, se dit que ce
serait une bonne recrue pour la cour de Frédéric, que ce lieutenant-
colonel français, auteur et musicien, et lui répond que l'opéra-
comique est reçu et que si l'auteur se trouve sans situation, il n'a
qu'à venir à Cassel où on lui en trouvera une.
Le chevalier de Nerciat fut très flatté. Il pensa qu'on utiliserait ses
talents comme sous-directeur des spectacles ou dans quelqu'autre
fonction du même genre et se mit en route. Il arriva à Cassel dans
les premiers jours de février 1780 et fut très bien reçu. Il se logea
dans la haute ville neuve [20] . On le nomma aussitôt conseiller et
sous-bibliothécaire de S. A. S. le landgrave Frédéric II. Nerciat
n'entendait rien à cette fonction, mais il accepta le poste, en
attendant mieux. Par reconnaissance, peu de jours après son
arrivée, il donna lecture à la Société d'Antiquités d'un discours dans
lequel il manifestait son étonnement devant les projets magnifiques
d'un prince, un des plus grands pour la protection qu'il accordait aux
sciences et aux arts, un des meilleurs pour le souci qu'il prenait du
bien-être de ses sujets: c'était un Titus, un Auguste, etc. Le discours
eut le succès qu'on en attendait et Nerciat devint un courtisan
apprécié dans la cour frivole du landgrave.
[20] Je pense qu'Andrea de Nerciat venait de se
marier. Sa femme mourut probablement en couches en
1782. Quoi qu'il en soit, le chevalier se remaria en 1783.
Si je me donne un mari,
Je ne le veux ni joli
Ni galant, ni fait pour plaire,
Un benêt, c'est mon affaire,
Il en est tant Dieu merci.
Pour époux, vive une bête,
Madame fait à sa tête,
Elle gouverne monsieur
Et d'un maître sans malice
Fait, au gré de son caprice,
Son très humble serviteur.
A vrai dire, Strieder ne nous dit pas le rôle qu'il a joué, mais
qu'on devine.
Inexperts, les nouveaux employés de la Bibliothèque multiplièrent
les erreurs. Un jour, le marquis de Luchet vint au Muséum et voulant
donner un exemple sur la façon de classer les livres, inscrivit
gravement dans le catalogue: Commentaires de Saint-Paul sur
quatre épîtres de saint Paul, Galates, Ephésiens, Philippiens,
Colossiens, Genève 1548. En réalité, il s'agissait des commentaires
de Calvin sur les Epîtres de Saint-Paul.
Le Chevalier de Nerciat vint aussi. Il apportait ses ouvrages
imprimés pour en faire don à la Bibliothèque. Ils y figurent toujours.
Ce sont: Contes nouveaux, Dorimon ou le marquis de Clairville,
Constance ou l'heureuse témérité et Félicia ou mes fredaines, édition
de 1778, sans indication de lieu, en quatre volumes.
Le chevalier de Nerciat ayant vu le buste du Landgrave qui se
dressait dans la Bibliothèque, composa aussitôt ces vers:
Le chevalier de Nerciat.
[24] En français.
«La manière dont Vous Vous êtes expliqué dans une de vos
feuilles au sujet de la Bibliothèque de Cassel a mis le rédacteur
du journal littéraire de Gœttingue dans le cas de commettre une
injustice que Vous voudrez bien sans doute réparer. Il qualifie
collectivement d'ignorants étrangers les Bibliothécaires de
Cassel, comme si deux ou plusieurs étrangers ignorants étaient
les auteurs solidaires des bévues que Vous aviez indiquées, et
que relève la correspondance de Gœttingue avec des réflexions
peu flatteuses pour les étrangers assimilés.
«Deux Français à la vérité sont rattachés à la Bibliothèque de
Cassel, mais l'un est un chef, une espèce de Primat des
Sciences, lettres et Arts. Ce chef a seul imaginé la distribution
actuelle; divisé les matières; placé les livres, et composé les
légendes latines qui indiquent leur arrangement. Tout cela était
conçu avant que l'autre Français eût mis le pied dans le
nouveau Musée, où il n'a accepté une place très surbordonnée
qu'afin de ne pas manquer une occasion précieuse de s'attacher
à un Prince éclairé, bienfaisant, qui à cette époque n'avait pas
besoin du nouvel étranger pour les choses auxquelles celui-ci
pouvait être propre.
«Je suis ce Français et je vous proteste, Monsieur,
qu'employé à la Bibliothèque de façon à ne pas partager la
gloire de mon Supérieur s'il en avait acquis, je ne veux pas plus
partager ses disgrâces. Bien ou mal, j'ai fait avec une muette
subordination, mais avec toute la diligence possible, ce qu'on
m'a commandé.
«Si Vous aviez su ces particularités, Monsieur, Vous m'auriez
sans doute mis à part dans Vos remarques et le journaliste de
Gœttingue qui Vous a copié m'aurait aussi tiré du pair. Vous êtes
trop équitable, Monsieur, pour ne pas faire usage pour ma
justification de la lettre que j'ai l'honneur de Vous écrire, et à
laquelle je Vous prie de donner place dans Vos feuilles. J'ai
l'honneur d'être, etc…
Le Chev. de Nerciat
à Cassel
le 6 mars 1781.»
le chevalier de Nerciat.»
Georg
Philipp
August
Get. Oberneust.
fr. Gem.
9 — 15
—
10
1782
*
* *
G. A.
Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., Paris, 1797.—4 vol. in-18 avec les
fig. d'après Eisen.
Félicia, ou mes Fredaines, etc., Paris, 1798.—4 vol. in-18 avec les
fig. d'après Eisen.
Foutromanie, Chant I
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