by Michael Cart
Middle School Literature
Something else equally significant was happening to young adult books: the typical age of their protagonists was decreasing from sixteen or seventeen to as young as twelve or fourteen. This radical change was due to several interrelated factors. First was the rise of the middle school movement. From 1966 to 1981, the number of these new schools—which typically served grades 6–8—increased from 499 to 6,003. Unlike the old junior highs, which might have been described as high schools with training wheels, these new schools were specifically designed to meet the unique developmental needs of eleven-to fourteen-year-olds, young people who were no longer children but not quite young adults, either. As Lucy Rollin (1999, 252) notes, “The term ‘middle school’ emphasized a separate identity, a school and a group of students who were not ‘junior’ to anything but in transition.” As had happened in the thirties with the emergence of the first generation of teenagers, this new group offered a de facto challenge to publishers to create a new kind of literature expressly for them, one that publishers continued to call young adult but that targeted this new, younger age range. Simultaneously, the amount of traditional YA literature continued to dwindle, as fewer and fewer books appeared for high school-aged readers. As a result, though it might have appeared to the casual observer that the age of YA protagonists was simply decreasing, what was actually happening was that a new kind of literature—middle school literature—was being born (and the traditional form was, well, dying). This shift dovetailed nicely with the sales strategies of the chain bookstores, many of which were morphing into superbookstores. The Barnes & Noble chain led this evolution, opening 105 superstores between 1989 and 1992. Though much larger than the earlier chain stores, none of the new behemoths contained separate young adult sections; instead, everything labeled “YA” was simply—and summarily—shoved into the children’s department. This practice further encouraged the “youthening” of protagonists, because at the same time, the stores avoided stocking any titles containing controversial subjects or themes. As George Nicholson noted in 1990, the chains would not buy a novel “with anything difficult in it” (Cart 1996, 150). No wonder that another legendary editor, Richard Jackson, flatly declared in 1994, “Young adult [now] stops at fourteen” (Cart 1996, 150).
Unfortunately, the new middle school YA literature did have at least one thing in common with the traditional form: it didn’t sell well in hardcover. In fact, in 1993 hardcover sales to both the institutional and the retail markets were down for the first time, though paperback sales continued to soar. As a result, publishers—though they still produced small hardcover editions of a thousand copies or less for the institutional market (Eaglen 1990)—were typically acquiring for hardcover release only titles that promised steep sales when they would be published a year later in their paperback editions, editions that were sold directly to teens through the chain bookstores.
Recognizing the dwindling market for hardcovers, why didn’t publishers begin issuing quality fiction in original trade paperback formats for those largely ignored older teens? After all, adult publishers were finding success with this more cost-effective strategy. One reason was that the children’s book review media tended not to cover paperbacks (hence the continued small-run hardcover releases), and many libraries remained reluctant to stock such an ephemeral format. Another reason was the claim that chains would not stock such paperbacks; and still another was authors’ alleged preference for the implicit cachet of hardback publication, along with the more practical reason that publishers paid larger advances for hardcovers than for paperbacks. To its credit, the publisher Harcourt, Brace did experiment with issuing selected titles in simultaneous hard and soft editions in a uniform trim size but, unfortunately, had little or no success.
Ave, YA?
Thanks to all these many factors, the number of YA titles continued to decline, though it is difficult to ascertain by how much with any degree of precision. Publishers and the reference media have historically (and a bit unceremoniously) lumped statistics for children’s and YA books together into one generic children’s books category. Nevertheless, Audrey Eaglen (1990, 54) in her School Library Journal column noted that “even the biggest publishers seldom do more than a dozen or so YAs a year.”
What did editors have to say about this? A panel of five leaders in the field shared their views with participants in a 1994 YALSA conference preceding the annual American Library Association Conference and Exhibition, held that year in Miami Beach. The five were Marc Aronson, of Henry Holt; David Gale, of Simon & Schuster; Richard Jackson, of Orchard Books; Robert Warren, of HarperCollins; and Linda Zuckerman, of Harcourt, Brace. Two of them—Jackson and Zuckerman—had their own imprints (Richard Jackson Books and Browndeer Press, respectively). With five strong-minded, independent individuals on the platform, consensus on some issues was predictably elusive; however, there did seem to be agreement that young adult publishing—though still alive—was ailing. Aronson delicately called it “a time of transition.” Zuckerman was probably the least sanguine of the five, saying frankly, “I think young adult literature is dying.” She explained that there was only a limited amount of time and risk that publishers were willing to take with developing new authors. As a result, she predicted, the YA field would continue to diminish, becoming increasingly focused on series and on the work of a handful of established name authors.
There was consensus that publishers were, indeed, increasingly targeting the twelve-to fourteen-year-old reader. In fact, of the five, Gale was the only one who was still actively searching for books for older readers, though he acknowledged that he had to exercise caution in accepting manuscripts with too much sex or violence, as an increasingly conservative school library market might reject them. He also agreed that books for older readers were “nonexistent” in bookstores, echoing Nilsen’s earlier comment that fiction didn’t sell particularly well in the prevailing market and that fewer novels were being published.
Several of the editors also acknowledged that a major factor in their decision to publish a book in hardcover was its demonstrated potential for paperback reprint sales. “Do paperback sales drive the market?” Warren asked rhetorically and answered categorically: “Yes.” Warren then turned the discussion from a focus on the field of YA to the individual writer, and he reminded the audience, “We’re not publishing a genre; we’re publishing an author. And a good book will always, always be published” (Cart 1996, 163).
This salutary affirmation aside, an overall air of the valedictory pervaded a conference that found little to celebrate in the present but much to laud in the past. Indeed, the principal business of the conference attendees was the selection of the one hundred best YA books published between 1967 and 1992.
This 1994 list—the Top One Hundred Countdown—included a number of titles that, in terms of their topical and thematic content, were historically important. Go Ask Alice and A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ but a Sandwich were, for example, classic treatments of drug abuse, whereas Richard Peck’s Are You in the House Alone? was the first YA novel to deal with rape. As did Paul Zindel’s earlier The Pigman, Lois Duncan’s Killing Mr. Griffin continued to explore the important issue of adolescent acceptance of responsibility, also a theme of her earlier classic I Know What You Did Last Summer (Little, Brown, 1973). Felice Holman, in her Slake’s Limbo (1974), introduced an element of allegory into the prevailing mode of YA realism; her story of young Artemis Slake’s 121-day odyssey in New York’s subways also gave readers a classic story of survival. Last, Barbara Wersba’s Run Softly, Go Fast (1970) explored another timeless theme: the uneasy relationship of fathers and sons, a topic that also informed such other novels of the seventies as Robert Newton Peck’s A Day No Pigs Would Die (Knopf, 1973) and Richard Peck’s Father Figure (Viking, 1978).
Despite its golden past, young adult literature was, by 1994, clearly at risk of extinction. Ironically, so were young adults themselves, whose lives were becoming increasingly en
dangered by societal and personal problems that ranged from poverty to homelessness, from fractured families to violence (in 1991 one fifteen-to nineteen-year-old was murdered every three and a half hours!), from increased drug use to sexual harassment, rape, and—perhaps as a result of all this—an exponential increase (200 percent in the preceding four decades) in teenage suicide (Waters 1994, 49).
Sadly, these issues coincided with a continuing decline in the purchasing power of school and public libraries and a critical shortage of trained young adult librarians who might have helped endangered young adults weather their stormy lives. According to a 1988 survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, only 11 percent of America’s libraries had young adult specialists on staff. A later survey, conducted in 1992 by the Young Adult Library Services Association, confirmed this, reporting a continued “dearth of qualified staff” and the prevailing feeling, among librarians, that YA funding was the first area to be cut at times of fiscal crisis and that “the loss of library funding” had become “a national epidemic” (Latrobe 1994, 238).
How, I asked in the first edition of this book (which I wrote in the immediate wake of the 1994 Miami Beach conference), can we solve problems of such magnitude? How can we even comprehend them? Well, if knowledge is power, there was no shortage of powerful nonfiction being published to describe the shape and scope of the problems. More important, a trend in early nineties nonfiction was the inclusion, through interviews, of the authentic voices of the young people themselves, especially those whose lives were at risk or who lived at the narrower margins of society. Such books included Susan Kuklin’s Speaking Out: Teenagers Take on Race, Sex and Identity (Putnam, 1993), Judith Berck’s No Place to Be: Voices of Homeless Children (Houghton Mifflin, 1992), and Susan Goodwillie’s Voices from the Future: Our Children Tell Us about Violence in America (Crown, 1993). Such books gave not only voices but also faces to those too-often-invisible young people. But, good as those books were, we needed more.
“We need more than information,” I argued in “Of Risk and Revelation,” my keynote speech at the 1994 conference. “We need wisdom. And for that we must turn to fiction—to young adult fiction, which is written for and about YAs and the unique problems that plague and perplex them. Why fiction? Because of its unique capacity to educate not only the mind but the heart and spirit as well. The late Italo Calvino put it this way in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium: “My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things only literature can give us by means specific to it” (Calvino 1988, 1).
“Really good fiction,” the novelist and critic John Gardner once wrote, “has a staying power that comes from its ability to jar, to turn on, to move the whole intellectual and emotional history of the reader” (Yardley 1994, 3). If young adult literature is to have a future, it must be more than formula-driven fiction that begins and ends with a problem. It must be as real as headlines but more than the simple retailing of fact. It must also be enriched by the best means literature can offer: an expansive, fully realized setting; a memorably artful narrative voice; complex and fully realized characters; and unsparing honesty and candor in use of language and treatment of material. Young adult literature, in short, must take creative (and marketing) risks to present hard-edged issues of relevance so that it may offer its readers not only reality but also revelation and, ultimately, that desired wisdom.
This is the spirit in which I wrote the first edition of this book, and it remains one of the guiding principles by which I evaluate the success or failure of the literature that followed in the second half of the 1990s. For more about that, we turn to the next chapter and a consideration of the balance of that formative decade.
the rest of
the nineties
Revival and Renaissance
In retrospect, the 1994 Miami Beach conference turned out to be a dramatic turning point for young adult literature, marking not the death of the genre as had been predicted but, instead, its rebirth and the beginning of a remarkable period of renaissance that has continued to the present day (2010).
The first stirrings of this revival had actually taken place in U.S. schools in the late eighties and early nineties in the form of the nascent whole-language movement, a method of teaching reading that employed trade books instead of classic basal readers (Dick and Jane, anyone?). Although at first the movement primarily affected the children’s book market, it would have a longer-range and salutary impact on young adult literature by bringing contemporary books into the classroom. As Lori Benton, then with the Book Shop in Boise, Idaho, told Publishers Weekly, there’s “a huge demand for us to give in-service workshops. Teachers want help finding what literature is available and appropriate” (Ohanian 1991, 127).
Another phenomenon of equal if not greater importance arrived in 1992 when, following a fifteen-year period of decline, America’s teen (twelve to nineteen) population spiked significantly, growing 16.6 percent from 1990 to 2000, when it totaled 32 million. That rate of increase was widely expected to outstrip that of the general population before peaking in 2010.
In the meantime, January 1994 saw the publication in School Library Journal of Chris Lynch’s important article “Today’s YA Writers: Pulling No Punches.” Himself an emerging writer of hard-hitting literary fiction for young adults, Lynch underscored the importance to the field of allowing authors the luxury of “taking the gloves off” when writing for young adults. “My plea is authenticity,” he wrote, adding “the teen experience is unlike any other and it deserves its own literature” (Lynch 1994, 37–38).
An early intimation that this process was already under way was a new column on young adult literature that had debuted in the venerable Horn Book magazine in its September–October 1993 issue: “The Sand in the Oyster,” by the writer, critic, and editor Patty Campbell. In her first column, Campbell (1993, 568) promised “to do some heavy breathing, since [the] subject will be controversial books and issues in young-adult literature, focusing not only on sex and censorship but also on debatable matters of literary style and other social and intellectual concerns.” Lynch’s article and Campbell’s column would be the first of a series of similar writings to help spur the revival of young adult literature. In June 1994, for example, I began my own monthly column, “Carte Blanche,” in Booklist magazine. And 1995 saw both Marc Aronson’s memorably titled “The YA Novel Is Dead, and Other Fairly Stupid Tales,” in School Library Journal, and my own “Of Risk and Revelation: The Current State of Young Adult Literature,” in Journal of Youth Services in Libraries.
In retrospect, it’s clear that 1996 marked another significant turning point in young adult literature’s coming of age as literature. In a radical departure from its previous focus on scholarship and research in children’s literature, the Children’s Literature Association devoted the entire contents of the spring issue of its quarterly journal to “Critical Theory and Young Adult Literature.” That fall the theme of the annual workshop of the National Council of Teachers of English’s Assembly on Literature for Adolescents (ALAN) was “Exploding the Canon,” which offered true believers another opportunity to trumpet the news that young adult literature was now literature that deserved a long-overdue place in a literary canon. Surely, conferees argued, YA books deserved a place in America’s classrooms, where they could be taught and appreciated in the company of long-established—but increasingly dusty— classics.
This argument found more discursive expression that same year in two book-length publications: Sarah H. Hertz and Don Gallo’s From Hinton to Hamlet: Building Bridges between Young Adult Literature and the Classics (1996) and the first edition of this book (HarperCollins, 1996). Scarcely a year later, another important book appeared, John Noell Moore’s Interpreting Young Adult Literature: Literary Theory in the Secondary Classroom (Boynton/Cook, 1997).
How Adult Is Young Adult?
In summer 1996 YALSA presented still another significant program, “How Ad
ult Is Young Adult?” Held at the American Library Association’s Annual Conference and Exhibition, in New York, the program attracted a standing-room-only audience and excited considerable discussion and debate. Campbell (1997, 366), in fact, devoted one of her “Oyster” columns to its content, noting, “We have lost the upper half of YA—those fourteen-to nineteen-year-olds who were the original readership for the genre.”
How to recover and even expand that audience was, in fact, the central purpose of the program’s co-conveners (the literary agent George Nicholson and myself). To that end, a number of influential speakers addressed the importance of redefining and expanding the audience for young adult literature. As moderator, my role was to provide context, and accordingly, I noted, “The borders of the land of young adult have always been ill-defined and subject to negotiation and many titles that have found their way onto YALSA’s annual Best Books for Young Adults list have slipped across from the land of children’s literature as well as from the world of books published for adults.”1
The editor Marc Aronson picked up on this theme in noting that the most successful titles in his own EDGE imprint at Henry Holt were those that crossed markets. “They reach YA and Asian American adult [readers]; YA and Latino adult, YA and Jewish adult, YA and African American adult.” In fact, he suggested, “We have frozen our terms around a late sixties reality that no longer exists and we may be doing ourselves harm by calling books that deal with older teenage life or deal with coming of age in a sophisticated way, ‘YA.’” His point, of course, was that YA had become synonymous with middle school literature, and therefore the term was an implicit turnoff for older readers, as was Barnes & Noble’s policy of shelving YA titles in its children’s departments. In that respect, there was good news from another of the speakers, Carla Parker, senior buyer for the Barnes & Noble chain, who reported—to loud applause—that Barnes & Noble would reconfigure old stores and create separate, stand-alone YA areas in all of its new stores, so that by 1997 all of the YA sections would be “outside of, not in, their children’s departments.”