by Michael Cart
young adult
literature
young adult
literature
from romance to realism
michael cart
AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
CHICAGO 2010
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programs for library professionals worldwide.
Michael Cart is a nationally known expert in young adult literature, which he taught at UCLA before his recent relocation to the Midwest. A columnist and reviewer for ALA’s Booklist magazine, he is also the author or editor of twenty books and countless articles that have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, Parents Magazine, American Libraries, School Library Journal, and elsewhere. Cart served as president of both the Young Adult Library Services Association and the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English. He received the 2000 Grolier Award and was the first recipient (2008) of the YALSA/Greenwood Publishing Group Service to Young Adults Award. In addition, he appointed and chaired the task force that created the Michael L. Printz Award and subsequently chaired the 2006 Printz Committee.
© 2011 by the American Library Association. Any claim of copyright is subject to applicable limitations and exceptions, such as rights of fair use and library copying pursuant to Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act. No copyright is claimed in content that is in the public domain, such as works of the U.S. government.
ISBN: 978-0-8389-1045-0
Printed in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cart, Michael.
Young adult literature : from romance to realism / Michael Cart.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8389-1045-0 (alk. paper)
1. Young adult fiction, American--History and criticism. 2. Young adult literature--History and criticism. 3. Teenagers--Books and reading--United States. 4. Teenagers in literature. I. Title.
PS374.Y57C37 2010
813.009’92837--dc22
2010013674
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This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
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For Jack Ledwith
Still and always the best of friends
contents
Part One That Was Then
one
From Sue Barton to the Sixties: What’s in a Name?
and Other Uncertainties
two
The Sixties and the Seventies: The Rise of Realism
and the First Golden Age
three
The Eighties—Something Old, Something New: The Rise of the
Paperback Series, Multicultural Literature, and Political Correctness
four
The Early Nineties: A Near-Death Experience
five
The Rest of the Nineties: Revival and Renaissance
Part Two This Is Now
six
A New Literature for a New Millennium? The Renaissance Continues
seven
Romancing the Retail: Of Series, Superstores, Harry Potter, and Such
eight
So, How Adult Is Young Adult? The Crossover Conundrum
nine
Back in the Real World: Immigration, Mixed Race,
and Other New Realities of Teen Life
ten
Sex and Other Shibboleths: YA Comes of Age—
and Not a Moment Too Soon
eleven
Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Literature:
The Controversies Continue
twelve
The Viz Biz: Transforming the Funnies
thirteen
The Eyes Have It—Other Visual Forms:
Photo Essays and the New Nonfiction
fourteen
Of Books and Bytes: Multiple Literacies,
the Death of Print, and Other Imponderables
REFERENCES
INDEX
Part One
That Was Then
from sue barton to the sixties
What’s in a Name? and Other Uncertainties
There is ready and well-nigh universal agreement among experts that something called young adult literature is—like the Broadway musical, jazz, and the foot-long hot dog—an American gift to the world. But the happy concurrence ends when you then ask those experts to explain precisely what this thing called young adult literature is, because doing so is about as easy as nailing Jell-O to a wall. Why? Because the term, like the gelatin, is inherently slippery and amorphous. Oh, the literature part is straightforward enough. Who can argue with the British literary critic John Rowe Townsend (1980, 26), who defines it as “all works of imagination which are transmitted primarily by means of the written word or spoken narrative—that is, in the main, novels, stories, and poetry” (to which, in due course, I will add narrative nonfiction). No, the amorphous part is the target audience for the literature: the young adults themselves. For it’s anybody’s guess who—or what—they are! Indeed, until World War II, the term young adult—like its apparent synonym teenager—was scarcely used at all. For while it was acknowledged that there were human beings who occupied an ill-defined developmental space somewhere between childhood and adulthood, the idea that this space constituted a separate and distinct part of the evolution from childhood to adulthood was still foreign in a society accustomed to seeing children become adults virtually overnight as a result of their entering the full-time workforce, often as early as age ten. Who 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 responsibilities long enough to earn high school diplomas (Kett 1977). No more than 11.4 percent of the entire fourteen-to seventeen-year-old population was even enrolled in school, and those who 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 category 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, which Joseph F. Kett (1977, 26) 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 stage of life that he called adolescence has been discredited, especially his notion of recapitulation (i.e., child development mirrors that of the evolution of the human race). Nevertheless, 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 definitions 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 educators generally stopped at nineteen, and employers, at sixteen. In addition to these two groups, Hall inspired two other sets of influential devotees: members of the vocational guidance movement (Hall believed in teaching adolescents practical life and job skills) and the authors of “parents’ manuals, 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) 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 of young people were enrolled (Rollin 1999), and the old model of the six-year high school was beginning to change, too, as, over the following decade, more and more junior high schools were created for students ages twelve to fourteen. “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. 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 to change 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 thirties, however, to effect truly seismic 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]).
The Emergence of Youth Culture
This influx of students into high school was an important step in advancing universal education, but what was even more important—in terms of the later emergence of young adult literature—is that putting young people into one another’s company every day led to the emergence of a youth culture centered on high school social life, especially in the newly popular sororities and fraternities, which provided the context for a newish wrinkle in courtship rituals: dances and dating. Quick to recognize this was the already entrenched Scholastic magazine, which M. R. “Robbie” Robinson, another of the early entrepreneurs of adolescence, had founded in 1922. In 1936 Scholastic introduced a new column to its pages. Titled “Boy Dates Girl,” the column was written by Gay Head (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 suggests, 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 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 appreciate “brainy” girls. In the early days of youth culture, it was obvious that the culture was already a male-centered one. This was a reflection of then prevailing cultural attitudes, of course, as was Hall’s nearly 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 times “boyology” (Kett 1977, 224).
Although boys may have been the center of lavish attention, the stereotypical image of the male adolescent that emerged in popular culture was an unflattering one: the socially awkward, blushing, stammering, accident-prone figure of fun typified by William Sylvanus Thaxter, the protagonist of Booth Tarkington’s best-selling 1916 novel Seventeen (Harper), 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 Family debuted on NBC in July 1939, and the first Andy Hardy movie, A Family Affair—starring Mickey Rooney—was released in 1937.) With the first appearance in 1941 of another soon-to-be youth icon, the comics’ Archie Andrews (in Pep Comics No. 22, of December 22, 1941), it became clear that Hall’s adolescent 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 Lymon and the Teenagers).
The co-opting of the adolescent—now teenager—by popular culture did not mean that psychologists and other serious thinkers had abandoned the subject. Far from it. Two of the most significant works in the academic literature would appear less than a decade later: Robert James Havighurst’s Developmental Tasks and Education and Erik Erikson’s Childhood and Society both appeared in 1950 and broke new ground in the field of psychology, especially with respect to stages of human development. Each writer defined specific stages of this development; Havighurst identified six and Erikson, eight. For both, two of the stages were “adolescence” and “young adulthood,” which they identified as thirteen to eighteen and nineteen to thirty (Havighurst) and twelve to eighteen and nineteen to forty (Erikson). In short order, other significant work followed, most notably Jean Piaget’s The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence (1958) on cognitive development and Lawrence Kohlberg’s on moral development (intermittently throughout the 1970s).
All of this work—like that of Hall’s—would have significant influence on therapists, youth workers, and especially educators, who found an equation between the tasks that Havighurst associated with each developmental stage and books for teens that dramatized the undertaking and accomplishing of those tasks. It’s worth noting that the introduction of the term young adulthood into these various professional vocabularies may have been instrumental in the American Library Association’s decision to form, in 1957, the Young Adult Services Division (YASD). This was a long-overdue professional acknowledgment not only of a now au courant term but also of the singular life needs of what we might as well now call young adults. Why young adult and not adolescent, though? Well, there is no definitive answer. However, the term young adult was not altogether foreign to the library world. The youth services librarian Margaret Scoggin had first used it in the professional literature as early as 1944 (Jenkins 1999), and Kenneth R. Shaffer, then director of the School of Library Science at Simmons College, recalled in 1963, “Our excitement of nearly a quarter of a century ago when we made the professional discovery of the adolescent—the ‘young adult’—as a special kind of library client” (Shaffer 1963, 9). Als
o, one might presume that adolescent smacks a bit too much of the clinical, and some might even regard it as faintly patronizing, though young adult might not be much better. As we will see, such uncertainty as to precisely what to call youths has continued to invite much heated discussion and debate even to this date, 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).
A Literature for Young Adults
What impact did all of these developing attitudes and theories have on the writing and publishing of books targeted at such young people (however they might have been labeled and categorized at any given moment)? The short answer, one supposes, is “not much.”
Because adolescents, teenagers, or young adults were—at least until the late 1930s—still widely regarded as children (even if the boys had mustaches and the girls, breasts!), there was no separate category of literature specifically targeted at them. However, as—over the course of the first four decades of the twentieth century (1900–1940)—opinions began coalescing around the viability of recognizing a new category of human being with its own distinct life needs, books aimed at these “new” humans began to emerge. This happened very gradually, though, and may have had its roots in the long-ago publishing world of the immediate post–Civil War years, when, as Nilsen and Donelson (2009, 42) have asserted, “Louisa May Alcott and Horatio Alger, Jr. were the first writers for young adults to gain national attention.” The two authors’ respective novels Little Women and Ragged Dick both appeared in 1868 and gave impetus to an era—already under way—of series fiction: dime adventure novels for boys and wholesome domestic stories like the Elsie Dinsmore books for girls. Then, as now, it was firmly believed there were girl books and boy books and never the twain would meet.1 The always-opinionated G. Stanley Hall had much to say about this, too. In a 1908 Library Journal article, he allowed: “Boys loved adventure. Girls sentiment. Books dealing with domestic life and with young children in them, girls have almost entirely to themselves. Boys, on the other hand, excel in love of humor, rollicking fun, abandon, rough horse-play, and tales of wild escapade” (Nilsen and Donelson 2009, 52).