Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  Series books for both sexes hit their stride with the formation of the Stratemeyer Syndicate in 1900. Edward Stratemeyer, who had worked as a ghostwriter for Alger, had the bright idea of hiring other ghosts to develop his own cascade of story ideas into novels. The result became what Carol Billman (1986) has called the Million Dollar Fiction Factory. Working pseudony-mously, these otherwise-anonymous writers churned out hundreds of titles in endless series, most of them now forgotten, though a few—the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins, and Ruth Fielding—are still remembered with a twinge of pleasurable nostalgia.2 Arguably the most successful of the Stratemeyer series and the ones that come closest to our modern conception of young adult fiction didn’t appear until well after World War I. The Hardy Boys solved their first case (The Tower Treasure) in 1927, and Nancy Drew hers (The Secret of the Old Clock) in 1930.

  Coincidentally, 1930 is the year the ALA formed its Young People’s Reading Roundtable, whose annual list of best books for “young readers” (think “young adults” here) contained a mixture of children’s and adult books. The first list, for example, ran the gamut from Will James’s Lone Cowboy to Edna Ferber’s adult novel Cimarron. This situation obtained until 1948, when librarians—realizing the new but still amorphous group of older “younger readers” no longer had any interest in children’s books—changed the name and content of their list to Adult Books for Young People (Cart 1996).

  Meanwhile, prescient publishers, taking notice of the emerging youth culture of the 1930s, began cautiously publishing—or at least remarketing— what they regarded as a new type of book. One of the first of these was Rose Wilder Lane’s Let the Hurricane Roar. Published in 1933, this story of two teenage pioneers by the daughter of the Little House books’ author offered intrinsic appeal to contemporary teens. Recognizing this, its publisher, Longmans Green, quickly began promoting it as the first in its promised new series Junior Books, a frankly patronizing phrase that lingered in publishing like a bad odor in the refrigerator for nearly a decade. Nevertheless, it may have set the stage for another book that Little, Brown would publish in 1936.

  This one caught the eye of the pioneering young adult librarian Margaret Alexander Edwards of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore. Writing some years later in the Saturday Review, she reported Little, Brown’s editorial bemusement when the publisher received a manuscript from the writer Helen Boylston. “While it was not a piece of literature, it was an entertaining story which did not fit into any category. It was too mature for children and too uncomplicated for adults. In the end Little, Brown took a chance and published the story under the title ‘Sue Barton Student Nurse’ and the dawn of the modern teen-age story came up like thunder” (Edwards 1954, 88, emphasis added).

  The thunder was, presumably, the sound of fervent adolescent applause, as Sue Barton (for reasons that seem elusive to modern readers struggling through its turgid pages) quickly became one of the most popular books in the history of young adult literature. In 1947—eleven years after its publication— a survey of librarians in Illinois, Ohio, and New York chose the book as “the most consistently popular book” among teenage readers, and it remained in print for years thereafter along with its six sequels, which saw young Sue finish her training, serve in a variety of professional capacities (visiting nurse, superintendent of nurses, neighborhood nurse, staff nurse), and finally marry the young doctor she had met in book number one (Cart 1996, 41).

  The popularity of the series may have derived in large part from its verisimilitude. Boylston was a professional nurse herself, and there’s truth in the details of her settings, but there are also stereotypes in her characters and clichés in the dramatic situations in which they find themselves embroiled. Told in an omniscient third-person voice, the books betray their author’s often too-smug, patronizing attitude toward her material and her characters—not only Sue but also, and especially, the “quaint” immigrants who are the chief patients at the big-city hospital where Sue receives her training.

  Nevertheless, because of its careful accuracy regarding the quotidian details of the nurse’s professional life, Sue Barton was the prototype of the career story, an enormously popular subgenre among the earliest young adult books.

  Rivaling Sue for the affection of later nurse-story lovers was Helen Wells’s own fledgling professional Cherry Ames, who debuted in 1943 (Cherry Ames, Student Nurse) and whose subsequent adventures filled twenty volumes. Wells also gave eager girl readers stories about the plucky flight attendant Vicki Barr. Still another writer who re-created occupational worlds that she was personally familiar with was the remarkable Helen Hull Jacobs, whose many books about the world of championship tennis and military intelligence reflected her own life as the number-one world tennis player and a commander in the Office of Naval Intelligence during World War II.

  As for boys, they had been reading vocational stories since Horatio Alger offered his paeans to the rewards of hard work (and marrying the boss’s daughter). More contemporary writers like Montgomery Atwater, Stephen W. Meader, and Henry Gregor Felsen offered fictions about such real-life jobs as avalanche patrolling, earthmoving, and automobile mechanics. In the years to come, other less talented writers would report on virtually every other conceivable career—in often drearily didactic detail.

  A decade before Boylston’s initial publication, another influential and wildly popular author for adolescents debuted: it was 1926 when Howard Pease published his first book, The Tattooed Man (Doubleday). A better writer than Boylston, Pease would soon rival her in popularity. In fact, a 1939 survey of 1,500 California students found that Pease—not Boylston—was their favorite author (Hutchinson 1973).

  Like Boylston, Pease specialized in a literary subgenre: in his case, it was the boy’s adventure story set—usually—at sea. And again, like Boylston, Pease knew his material from firsthand experience. For him, this was service in the U.S. Merchant Marine during World War I.

  In 1938 still another important early writer, who also specialized in genre fiction based on personal experience, made his auspicious debut: John R. Tunis, the “inventor” of the modern sports story, published the first of his many novels, The Iron Duke (Harcourt). Tunis had played tennis and run track as a student at Harvard and, following service in World War I, had become a sportswriter for the New York Post. What set his work apart from that of earlier sportswriters was that he focused less on play-by-play accounts of the big game than on closely observed considerations of character, social issues, and challenges—not his characters’ hand-eye coordination but, instead, their personal integrity and maturation.

  The First Young Adult Novel?

  In retrospect, any of these writers (though especially Pease, Boylston, and Tunis) could be reasonably identified as the first writer for young adults, but most observers (myself included) would opt to join the redoubtable Edwards (1954, 88) in declaring (on second thought in her case) that “it was in 1942 that the new field of writing for teen-agers became established.”

  The signal occasion was the publication of Maureen Daly’s (1942) first— and for forty-four years her only—novel, Seventeenth Summer (Dodd, Mead). Amazingly, the author was only twenty-one when her history-making book appeared, though how old she was when she actually wrote the book is moot. Daly herself claimed she was a teenager, but the New York Times reported that only fifty pages of the book had been written before the author turned twenty (Van Gelder 1942). Daly was quick to point out, though, that her novel was not published as a young adult book. “I would like, at this late date,” she wrote in 1994, “to explain that ‘Seventeenth Summer,’ in my intention and at the time of publication, was considered a full adult novel and published and reviewed as such” (Berger 1994, 216).

  John R. Tunis was similarly—and unpleasantly—surprised to learn from his publisher Alfred Harcourt that The Iron Duke was a book for young readers. He was still fuming thirty years later when he wrote, “That odious term juvenile is the product of a merchandisin
g age” (Tunis 1977, 25).

  The merchandising of and to “the juvenile” had begun in the late 1930s, coincident with the emergence of the new youth culture. The movement picked up steam in the 1940s as marketers realized that these kids—whom they called, variously, teens, teensters, and finally (in 1941) teenagers—were “an attractive new market in the making” (Palladino 1996, 52). That market wouldn’t fully ripen until post–World War II prosperity put money into the kids’ own pockets, money that had previously gone to support the entire family. The wild success of Seventeenth Summer was, however, an early indicator to publishers of an emerging market for a literature that spoke with immediacy and relevance to teenagers. In the case of Daly’s novel, these factors were due to not only her own youth and the autobiographical nature of her material (“What I’ve tried to do, you see,” she told an interviewer, “is just write about the things that happened to me and that I knew about—that meant a lot to me” [Van Gelder 1942, 20]) but also the fact that she chose to tell her story of sweet summer love in the first-person voice of her protagonist, seventeen-year-old Angie Morrow. For its time, the book was also fairly bold and, thus, further reader enticing in its inclusion of scenes showing teenagers unapologetically smoking and drinking. And yet to modern readers Angie seems hopelessly naive and much younger than her years. Her language now sounds quaintly old fashioned, and the pacing of her story is glacially slow, bogged down in far too many rhapsodic passages describing the fauna of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin (the book’s setting). If Angie’s diction is dated, so—more painfully—are her attitudes. Humiliated, for example, by the bad table manners of her new boyfriend, the otherwise-desirable (and always very clean) Jack Duluth, Angie frets, “His family probably didn’t even own a butter knife! No girl has to stand for that!” (Daly 1942, 147) Clearly, Jack and his deprived family had never read Gay Head’s column (or her books!).

  Despite all this, Seventeenth Summer has remained tremendously popular; it’s sold well more than a million and a half copies since its publication, and it’s still in print in a smartly redesigned paperback edition.

  Even more important than Seventeenth Summer to the cultivation of a readership for a newly relevant literature was the inaugural publication of the new girls’ magazine Seventeen in September 1944. Teens were thrilled to be taken seriously at last. The first printing of four hundred thousand copies sold out in two days and the second—of five hundred thousand—in the same short time. One reader wrote the editors to thank them for “looking upon us teenagers as future women and Americans, instead of swooning, giggling bobby-soxers.” Another chorused, “For years I have been yearning for a magazine entirely dedicated to me” (Palladino 1996, 91–92).

  Here was a niche to be exploited, and the editors of Seventeen were quick to recognize it, making theirs one of the first magazines to actually survey its readers—not to determine their editorial interests but, instead, their taste and interests in consumables. Oddly, such research was “unheard of at the time in fashion magazines.” But Seventeen quickly changed that by hiring the research company Benson & Benson to conduct the important market survey “Life with Teena” (the name of the hypothetical everygirl it conjured up to breathlessly report the survey’s results). “Teena has money of her own to spend,” the editors enthused, “and what her allowance and pin money earnings won’t buy, her parents can be counted on to supply. For our girl Teena won’t take ‘no’ for an answer when she sees what she wants in ‘Seventeen.’” The not-so-subtle message to American business was “place your ads here.” And the business wasn’t confined to the manufacturers of sweater sets. “We’re talking about eight million teenage girls who can afford to spend $170,000,000 a year on movies,” the magazine trumpeted to motion picture producers (Palladino 1996, 103–6).

  The year this happened was 1945. In Chicago, the nineteen-year-old shoe clerk Eugene Gilbert was wondering why so few teenagers were buying shoes in his store. His conclusion: “Stores and manufacturers were losing a lot of money because they were largely blind to my contemporaries’ tastes and habits. I started then to become a market researcher in a virtually unexplored field.” Four years later, as head of the Youth Marketing Company in New York, Gilbert was sagely observing, “Our salient discovery within the last decade was that teenagers have become a separate and distinct group in our society” (Palladino 1996, 109–10).

  It was a revelation and a revolution, such a liberating experience for teens that the New York Times published the Teen-Age Bill of Rights (Rollin 1999, 107–8):

  1. The right to let childhood be forgotten

  2. The right to a “say” about his own life

  3. The right to make mistakes, and find out about himself

  4. The right to have rules explained, not imposed

  5. The right to have fun and companions

  6. The right to question ideas

  7. The right to be at the Romantic Age

  8. The right to a fair chance and opportunity

  9. The right to struggle toward his own philosophy of life

  10. The right to professional help whenever necessary

  Oddly—if one is to judge by the gender of the pronoun employed throughout—these rights belonged exclusively to male teenagers! Odd, because—otherwise—the decade pretty much belonged to the girls, who certainly owned much of the media attention of the time. Not only did girls have Seventeen, but they could also read another popular magazine devoted to them. Calling All Girls actually antedated Seventeen; it launched in late 1941. Meanwhile, manufacturers and the motion picture industry kowtowed to girls, as did radio, which offered them such popular fare as A Date with Judy, Meet Corliss Archer, and Your Hit Parade, while newspaper comic strips served up daily doses of Teena, Penny, and Bobby Sox.

  As for the fledgling young adult literature, imitation was definitely the sincerest form of flattery. For in the wake of Seventeenth Summer’s success, romance fiction quickly captured the hearts of American publishers. One of the earliest of the faux Angie Morrows that followed was sixteen-year-old Julie Ferguson, the heroine of Betty Cavanna’s 1946 Going on Sixteen (Westminster). As its title suggests, the book is an almost homage to Daly. In fact, Cavanna’s protagonist, Julie, actually mentions having “just last month read a newspaper account of a book written by a girl of seventeen” (Cavanna 1946, 89). This is offered in the context of Julie’s longing for a career in publishing—not as an author but as an illustrator. In this regard, Cavanna borrows not only from Daly but also from career books like Boylston’s. There are other similarities as well. Both books are about the interrelationship of dating and popularity; the book’s dust jacket even claims that it offers “numerous useful tips on how to overcome shyness and how to become ‘part of things.’”

  Perhaps Cavanna’s heroine read the book herself, because she finally does become part of things by finding true love (and dates) with her neighbor Dick Webster, who habitually calls her Peanut and Small Fry. One supposes these are intended as endearments, but they sound merely condescending. 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. Cavanna, ultimately the author of more than seventy books, became one of the most popular authors for adolescents of the forties and fifties. Going on Sixteen was the third most popular book in a 1959 survey of school and public libraries, close behind Seventeenth Summer.

  Another romance author who rivaled Cavanna for popularity was Rosamund du Jardin (who was the only author to have two titles on that 1959 survey: Double Date and Wait for Marcy). Du Jardin’s first book, Practically Seventeen (Lippincott) (do you detect a trend in these titles?) was published in 1949 and is yet another pale imitation of Daly.

  Like Seventeenth Summer, for example, 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 much lighter in tone. Tobey’s big dilemma—and the theme that unifies the book’s highly episodic plot—is whether her relationship with her 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 popular 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, who will take them to the big dance (the Heart Hop, in this case), and how to resolve a rivalry for a boy’s affection with a visitor from the South named, appositely, Kentucky Jackson.