Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  The critic Margo Jefferson finds effect in this cause. Writing in 1982, when the romance revival was still in its early innings, she concluded that the emotionally recidivist titles were “grown-up nostalgia repackaged for the young, very like those remakes of 1950s and 1960s songs by people in their 30s and 40s pretending to be ten or twenty years younger” (Jefferson 1982, 613).

  As early as 1974, the journalist Edwin Miller was warning readers of Seventeen magazine about just such a grown-up nostalgia that seemed to be skewing Hollywood’s portrayal of teens in the seventies. “Young people have become more troublesome in recent years,” he wrote. “Even nice kids. If [however] you have a teen-ager pinned down in the past like a butterfly under glass, you’ve got the upper hand” (Rollin 1999, 262). This sounds a bit paranoid, but it’s true that Hollywood was busily harvesting the past for display both on America’s large and small screens. American Graffiti, George Lucas’s sentimental salute to the early sixties, was a box-office sensation in 1973, and Happy Days, a nostalgic nod to the simpler—and arguably happier—times of the 1950s, was the number-one-rated television show of the 1976–1977 season.

  When it was their turn, publishers cranked the clock back even farther, to the 1940s, with their fictional treatment of the innocent romantic lives of young people who Barson and Heller (1998), in their amusing book Teenage Confidential, call “Kleen Teens.”

  If the adolescent lives portrayed in the eighties’ romances were an eerie replication of those already unreal lives found in the pages of the forties and fifties versions, their packaging at least was different this time around. Although there had been a certain sameness to the content of the earlier titles, they were, at least, published as individual hardcovers by writers whose names—Janet Lambert, Betty Cavanna, Anne Emery—quickly became household words. The new romances, however, had little individual identity; they were slick, mass-market paperback series appearing at the rate of one new title per month under such saccharine rubrics as Wildfire, Caprice, Sweet Dreams, First Love, Wishing Star, and so on and on. If they were branded, it was with the name of their series, not that of their authors.

  The decision to revive romance was not made in a vacuum, however; marketing decisions seldom are. The editor Pamela Pollack (1981, 25) explained, “Mass market paperback publishers gave teens what they ‘want’ as determined by market research, rather than what they ‘need’ based on their problems as reflected by social statistics.”

  In fact, what they wanted in the eighties was what their parents had already been demanding—and getting—for a decade or more: genre romances and formulaic bodice-ripper-of-the-month gothic paperbacks. The latter—the adult gothics—had hit the paperback racks at least two decades earlier, led by the 1960 publication of Victoria Holt’s Mistress of Mellyn (Doubleday).

  However, it was not until the seventies, according to Kristin Ramsdell, that the (adult) romance boom really began. Although historical romances were especially popular at first, “light, innocent, Category (usually contemporary) Romances were popular, as well” (Ramsdell 1987, 8). It was this latter type that began trickling down into YA publishing at about the time that President Reagan’s trickle-down theories of economics hit the marketplace.

  Both offered what many readers have always, not unreasonably, wanted: escape from life’s cares and woes. The author Jane Yolen told Seventeen magazine that “the trend is a teenager’s way of saying ‘enough.’ Teenagers have seen their adolescence taken away by graphic television shows and movies and books. The return to romance is a way to return to the mystery and beauty of love, even if only on a superficial level” (Kellogg 1983, 158).

  Well, maybe. But it’s worth noting that Yolen is, most famously, an author of fantasy, and the lives portrayed in romances had more of the never-never to them than reality. Here’s how Pollack (1981, 28) described them: “The heroines—shy, inexperienced, small-town girls—live in happy homes and tend to have names that end in ‘ie.’ Their primary interest in life is boys; having a steady ensures a place in the high school hierarchy. They are not interested in college or career and are not involved in the women’s movement. Their mothers are their role models. Their fathers are shadowy but benign breadwinners. There are no grandparents—in fact, there are few elderly, black, or handicapped people to be found.”

  The predictably hand-wringing adult reaction to this was not long in coming. As early as 1981, when the romance boom was only two years old, a coalition of organizations led by the Council on Interracial Books for Children issued a report charging, among other things, that these books “teach girls that their primary value is their attractiveness to boys; devalue relationships and encourage competition between girls; discount the possibility of nonromantic friendships between boys and girls; depict middle-class, white, small-town families as the norm; and portray adults in stereotypical sex roles” (Ramsdell 1983, 177).

  Apparently, however, stereotypes sell, for the new romance series were wildly successful from their very inception. Scholastic’s Wildfire, which debuted in 1979, sold 1.8 million copies of sixteen titles in one year. Dell’s Young Love followed in February 1981; Bantam’s Sweet Dreams, in September 1981; Simon & Schuster’s First Love, in February 1982; and in 1985 the first YA novel ever to reach the New York Times paperback best-seller list, the Sweet Valley High super edition Perfect Summer. Created by Francine Pascal, the Sweet Valley empire soon spawned countless spin-offs; by the end of the eighties, there were 34 million Sweet Valley High books in print (Huntwork 1990).

  Speaking, still, of sales, another significant difference between the new romance and that of the forties was that, for the first time, teens themselves were the targeted consumers. Affluent though the eighties may have been in consumer terms, they were a period of economic hardship for schools and libraries. With this traditional market for YA literature in eclipse, publishers began looking for a new one. As Ramsdell (1987, 19) points out, Scholastic’s launch of its Wildfire series “changed the way materials were marketed to young adults… . Previously publishers had concentrated on reaching young adults indirectly through the schools and libraries; now they tried selling to them directly with spectacular results.”

  By the early 1980s American teens were spending a staggering $45 billion per year on nonessential consumables, and new marketing companies like Teen Research Unlimited, of Northbrook, Illinois, had been founded to poll them and otherwise study their tastes and habits. It was another example of history’s repeating itself. It was in the 1940s, remember, that teens were first identified as potential consumers and, to study them, the pioneer marketing maven Eugene Gilbert founded his Youth Marketing Company.

  By 1986, 93 percent of high school students in one national survey had worked for pay. “You want to talk revolution?” Forbes magazine cynically asked. “Not to this generation of adolescents. They have seen the future—and they want to buy it, not change it” (Rollin 1999, 282).

  And where were they buying it? In the new American consumer paradise, the shopping mall. The first enclosed shopping mall in America had opened in 1957 in Edina, Minnesota, and in the succeeding two decades the mall had become such a fixture of American life and home away from home for America’s teenagers that Richard Peck had become its unofficial laureate with his 1979 novel Secrets of the Shopping Mall (Delacorte).

  The omnipresence of the malls quickly led to the evolution of the chain bookstore. Announcing Pacer Books, a new line of YA paperbacks from Putnam, then editor in chief Beverly Horowitz explained that Pacer titles would be found in display racks in these new fixtures of the omnipresent malls, “hangout places where kids go on a boring Saturday. You will find Pacer positioned right between the fast-food haven and the record store. There is a teen-aged consumer force out there, and the only way to reach them is to go where their action is” (Baldwin 1984, 15).

  George Nicholson, then editor in chief of Dell/Delacorte Books and a pioneer in paperback publishing for young readers with Dell’s Yearling Books, ag
reed, explaining that chain bookstores in malls “demystified the traditional bookstore concept for kids. Now they can buy anything they want. They have the power to come in, pay their money, and out they go, without being harassed. No one questions them” (Baldwin 1984, 18).

  The stupendous success of paperback romance series soon inspired other genre incursions into the marketplace, most notably horror. Christopher Pike is generally credited with creating the bloodcurdling stampede with the 1985 publication of his novel Slumber Party. However, R. L. Stine quickly followed with his first foray into horror (writing as Jovial Bob Stine, he had previously been known as an author of joke books); his Blind Date was published in 1987. Both authors became phenomenally popular, though Stine took the lead with the 1990 introduction of his Fear Street series and the 1992 debut of the Goosebumps books. By 1994 there were twenty-one Goosebumps titles, and each had sold in excess of 1 million copies in paperback (Cart 1996).

  As were the romance series, horror fiction was formula driven, produced according to multipage specification sheets that virtually guaranteed predictable plots and cardboard characters. Settings were as blandly white, middle class, and suburban as those of romance novels and equally devoid of sex (though gouts of blood were always welcome).

  New Voices and Multicultural Stirrings

  Despite the glut of paperback series, the eighties also saw the debut of a number of literarily and culturally important new voices, including the likes of Francesca Lia Block, Bruce Brooks, Brock Cole, Chris Crutcher, Ron Koertge, Gary Paulsen, Cynthia Voigt, and Virginia Euwer Wolff (Block, Crutcher, Paulsen, and Voigt would go on to receive the Margaret A. Edwards Award for their contributions to the field).

  Meanwhile, already established voices continued to be heard; such stalwarts as Sue Ellen Bridgers (Permanent Connections, 1987); S. E. Hinton (Tex, 1980, and Taming the Star Runner, 1988); Robert Cormier (The Bumblebee Flies Anyway, 1983; Beyond the Chocolate War, 1985; and Fade, 1988); M. E. Kerr (Little Little, 1981; Me, Me, Me, Me, Me: Not a Novel, 1983; and Night Kites, 1986); Robert Lipsyte (Summer Rules, 1981, and The Summer Boy, 1982); and Richard Peck (Remembering the Good Times, 1985, and Princess Ashley, 1987) published major work.

  As the legendary editor Charlotte Zolotow—who worked with Block, Kerr, Lipsyte, Zindel, and others—noted, “The more original you are in publishing, the harder it is to be commercially successful but good writing survives trends,” adding that young adult novels in the eighties were “becoming more honest and realistic, authors writing out of heart, feeling, and genuine motivation” (Baldwin 1984, 17).

  Another legendary editor, Jean Karl, who had founded the children’s book department at Atheneum, agreed: “Young adults are moving into new areas of their lives,” she said, “where they need to find books which will provide them with literary experiences that will broaden their view of the world” (Baldwin 1984, 20, emphasis added).

  Clearly, this view needed broadening, because the world of the 1980s that young (and old) adults inhabited was changing dramatically. One of the most significant changes had begun quietly enough back in 1965, when the U.S. Congress passed certain amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act that not only placed a ceiling on immigration from European countries for the first time but also set it lower than the newly established limits for those from other parts of the world. The result was a major change in patterns of immigration. The numbers of immigrants from Europe began dropping precipitously, while those from Asia and the West Indies increased dramatically. In 1940, 70 percent of immigrants had still come from Europe. By 1992 only 15 percent came from there, whereas 37 percent were coming from Asia and 44 percent from Latin America and the Caribbean (“Numbers Game” 1993). Moreover, not only did the pattern change, so did the scope. The 1980s began seeing the greatest wave of immigration to the United States since the nineteenth century (8.9 million people entered the United States legally between 1980 and 1990 and roughly 3 million more illegally) (Mydans 1993). Significantly, most of the new immigrants hailed from such countries as Mexico, the Philippines, Haiti, South Korea, China, the Dominican Republic, India, Vietnam, and Jamaica—all of which had previously been represented only modestly.

  Just as it had taken a decade for adult romances to trickle down into the YA field, so it would take nearly a decade and a half—from 1965 to 1980—for publishers to begin to take cognizance of these new facts of demographic life and to start offering a new body of literature, called multicultural, that would give faces to these new Americans.

  And not a moment too soon.

  According to “Kids Need Libraries” (Mathews et al. 1990, 202), a position paper promulgated by the youth-serving divisions of the American Library Association and adopted by the Second White House Conference on Libraries and Information, “Kids need preparation to live in a multicultural world and to respect the rights and dignity of all people.”

  A search for those rights had brought yet another huge immigrant swell to U.S. shores: political refugees who came to America from countries like Iran, El Salvador, and Cuba seeking not only economic opportunity but also sanctuary.

  The arrival of both groups of new peoples created enormous problems of acculturation not only for them but also for established residents, as each category tried to cope with innumerable daily crossings of the borders of strange languages and baffling customs and mores. In this potentially explosive, newly multicultural environment, books had never been more important, for—as Hazel Rochman (1993, 9) wisely put it—“The best books break down borders.”

  The editor and publisher Margaret K. McElderry (1994, 379)—who had been the first to publish a children’s book from Germany following World War II—had this to say: “What is of immense importance now, as I see it, is to find writers among the new wave of immigrants, authors who can portray creatively what it is like to adjust to life in the U.S., what their own experiences have been, written in either fictionalized form or as expository nonfiction.”

  Such writers had already appeared in the world of adult publishing: authors like Gish Jen, Bharati Mukherjee, Gus Lee, Maxine Hong Kingston, Amy Tan, Sandra Cisneros, Nicholasa Mohr, Gary Soto, David Wong Louie, Bette Bao Lord, Gita Mehta, Frank Chin, and still others. Who would match their eloquence in the world of young adult literature?

  Before we can answer that question, we need to pause for a belated word or two of definition. Multiculturalism is an expansive word, containing in its definition and in its resonant connotations as many concepts—and sometimes hotly expressed opinions—as a suitcase full of unmatched socks.

  I have been using the word multiculturalism to refer simply to aspects of the cultural and social lives and experiences of the newly immigrant populations who began arriving here in the seventies and the eighties. For others, however, the issues surrounding the word were more complex—and controversial.

  Sarah Bullard explained: “Educators disagree, first, over which groups should be included in multicultural plans—racial and ethnic groups, certainly, but what about regional, social class, gender, disability, religious, language and sexual orientation groupings?” (Smith 1993, 341).

  Similarly, Masha Kabakow Rudman (2006, 111) has written, “Multiculturalism can be defined simply as the inclusion of, appreciation of, and respect for all cultures; but a more complex formulation includes a challenge to the power structure that subordinates people on the basis of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability, age, and religion.” This more expansive definition conjures up the image of a very—almost unmanageably—large tent, and so, when addressing this issue in the context of the decade of the eighties, I agree with Karen Patricia Smith, who argued—in a 1993 article about the concept of multiculturalism and literature—that “it is … necessary, for the sake of coherence, to narrow the scope of one’s discussion.” For her purposes—and for mine, at least in this chapter—“the term will be used to refer to people of color; that is, individuals who identify with African-American, Hispanic, America
n Indian, Eskimo or Aleut, and Asian or Pacific Islander heritage” (Smith 1993, 341–42).

  Color is an important consideration, because—until the end of the sixties—it was nearly absent from the world of books for young readers. It was in 1965 that the educator-writer Nancy Larrick published a hugely influential—and, again, controversial—article in the Saturday Review. Titled “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” the article excoriated American publishers for failing to give faces to the growing populations of children of color. Surveying the 5,206 books for young readers published between 1962 and 1964, she found that only 6.7 percent contained any reference in text or illustration to blacks. And 60 percent of that 6.7 percent were set either outside the United States or in the period before World War II. And even when blacks did appear, they were too often presented as caricatures and stereotypes in books that, as Henrietta Smith (1995, 5) has observed, “were replete with the exaggerated use of dialect and illustrations that showed the Negro child with heavy lips, bulging eyes, night-black skin and wooly hair.”

  But it was still the sixties, and the times were actually a-changin’. In the wake of Larrick’s seminal article, of the burgeoning civil rights movement, and of such long-overdue legislation as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the world of American blacks as depicted in literature began changing dramatically. Within five years, a black literary renaissance was under way, marked by the emergence of such celebrated illustrators as Jerry Pinkney, Ashley Bryan, John Steptoe, and Tom Feelings, and such distinguished writers as Rosa Guy, Alice Childress, Walter Dean Myers, Julius Lester, Mildred Taylor, and Virginia Hamilton, who—in 1975—became the first black writer to win the prestigious Newbery Medal for M. C. Higgins the Great. Two years later, Taylor became the second for Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. To further encourage this creative flowering, the American Library Association, working through its Social Responsibilities Roundtable, established the annual Coretta Scott King Awards in 1969 to recognize outstanding works written and illustrated by black authors and artists.