Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  The book’s dust-jacket blurb speaks, well, volumes not only about Practically Seventeen but also about the type of book that would prevail in publishing for young adults throughout the forties and fifties. Here’s a sample paragraph: “In recent years, permanent recognition and popularity have been accorded the junior novel … the story that records truthfully the modern girl’s dream of life and romance and her ways of adjusting to her school and family experiences. Practically Seventeen is such a book—as full of life as the junior prom,” and about as relevant to today’s readers as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.

  And yet were it and other such books relevant to and reflective of their contemporary readers’ lives? Perhaps more than modern readers might realize. In 1951 J. B. Lippincott published the fascinating Profile of Youth. Edited by Maureen Daly (yes, that Maureen Daly), it collected profiles of twelve “representative” teenagers who had appeared in issues of Ladies’ Home Journal throughout 1949 and 1950.

  “We chose our young people from the North and South, the East and West,” Daly (1951, 9) writes. “From the hangouts and the libraries; from the popular and the aloof; the leaders and the followers. Some are planning professional careers; others are preparing themselves for marriage. Some just want a job—any job. We asked them about their lives—and let them tell their own stories. We asked them about their problems—and joined with them on the solutions.”

  Although there are differences among the kids—especially in their circumstances (though none is homeless or impoverished)—the one thing they have overwhelmingly in common is, to twenty-first-century readers, an astonishing innocence. Almost none of them smokes or drinks; drugs are never mentioned; none of the students is gay or lesbian or a gang member. None is emotionally troubled or the victim of abuse. Instead, their biggest concern (the book calls it “A National Problem”) is whether to go steady. They also “resent” parents who refuse to understand or recognize the importance of fads and customs in high school. (In her introduction, Daly [1951, 10] expresses hope that a parent reading this book “may listen with greater patience to a sixteen-year-old’s plea for orange corduroy slacks or a red beanie when he realizes how vital ‘fads’ are to adolescent security.”). Reading the profiles is 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 rivalries, 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 young adult literature of the 1940s by including one black 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 black 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, is also “different,” the son of Italian immigrants. Alas, his parents are presented as the same kind of stereotyped 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 understands 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 youths 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 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 considered 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 economically 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 education is generally taught” (73). Nor, of course, did they get it from books—at least not the whole story. As one girl stated, “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, a good work of 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 publishers) 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. Juvenile 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 universal 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 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 not the fascination with “dangerous” kids. 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, starring a leather jacket-clad, motorcycle-riding Marlon Brando, was released in 1954 and contained an unforgettably culture-defining moment in a 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 other 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 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). Inevitably, 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 fiction 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 (Scribner) in 1947. Space Cadet (Scribner, 1948) followed the next year and Red Planet (Scribner, 1949) 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. (Harcourt), appeared in 1953—many, many others followed.

  As in the forties, the books of the fifties continued to focus on romance stories 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 the category came from abroad in the years immediately following World War II, “an era,” according to the legendary editor and publisher Margaret McElderry (1994, 369), “in which American children’s book editors actively sought out the best in writing and illustration from abroad.” McElderry herself 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 be written only by those from that culture did not appear until the 1980s and the advent of multiculturalism and political correctness.

  For now, another advent—the arrival of a whole new decade and the dramatic 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; under his own name, he created the more enduring literary character of Uncle Wiggily. Interestingly, his wife, Lillian, penned the Bobbsey Twins books under the pseudonym Laura Lee Hope. Their two children also wrote for Stratemeyer, thus turning the Garis household into a mini-fiction factory, though not, alas, a very happy one! See the ironically titled House of Happy Endings by Leslie Garis (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007).

  the sixties and

  the seventies

  The Rise of Realism and the First Golden Age

  Teenagers today want to read about teenagers today.

  —S. E. Hinton, “Teen-Agers Are for Real,” 1967

  Hinton may have been writing in 1967, but she was echoing a concern that American educators had expressed 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), Norvell went on to suggest that “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 powerful as interest.”

  Although I can’t imagine any of them had read or even heard of Norvell, many teens of the early fifties featured in Maureen 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 was 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, and a horse-loving 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).

  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, “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 literature before 1960 would have qualified as literature. Indeed, many academics would have asserted that putting the words young adult and literature together was 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 adolesc
ents and their problems by psychologists, educators, and librarians, have turned to the personal concerns of the teen-ager.”

  Perhaps, but the writers of the novel for the adolescent whom Alm singled out for particular praise were all adult novelists like Maureen Daly, James Street, Dan Wickenden, William Maxwell, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. This was consistent, though, with the approach Dwight L. Burton had taken in an earlier essay, “The Novel for the Adolescent,” which is often cited as 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, young adults, too many of its constituent titles were what Alm (1955, 315) himself had glumly described as “slick, patterned, rather inconsequential stories written to capitalize on a rapidly expanding market” (emphasis added).