Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  Earlier evidence of the importance of the library market had come in 2005, when for the first time, a librarian was added to the panel of judges that select the winners of the annual Eisner Awards, the Oscars of the comic book industry. Kat Kan (a teen services librarian) was the first librarian judge, and she has been followed in years since by such experts as Robin Brenner, Eva Volin, Mike Pawuk, and Francisca Goldsmith, all of whom have worked as YA librarians.

  The library market’s new prestige also translates into sales: for example, the recent inclusion on YALSA’s Alex Awards list of Jeff Lemire’s graphic novel Tales from the Farm (Top Shelf, 2007) almost immediately generated ten thousand new sales of the book! (MacDonald et al. 2008)

  Clearly, there is no question about the growing popularity of the graphic novel form with librarians and teachers. The books are now regularly reviewed by all the professional journals (Booklist even publishes an annual “spotlight” on graphic novels), and since 2005 virtually every publisher of series nonfiction—Rosen, Capstone, Stone Arch, World Almanac, Lerner, ABDO, and others—has been releasing titles in this format, too.

  Anxious to expand their market, juvenile trade publishers have recently begun mining their backlists for print books—both fiction and nonfiction—that can be adapted as graphic novels. HarperCollins, for example, published a graphic version of Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, and Simon & Schuster launched ongoing adaptations of its Pendragon and Childhood of Famous Americans series. Scholastic is offering a graphic version of Ann Martin’s popular Babysitter’s Club series, and Yen Press (the graphic novel division of Hachette Book Group) has launched adaptations of James Patterson’s Maximum Ride series and has announced plans to do a graphic novel version of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight series. Meanwhile, the comics publisher Marvel has announced plans to publish graphic novel versions of Margaret Edwards Award–winner Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow, as well as an adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand.

  Though sales of graphic novels in both book and comic stores actually dropped approximately 8 percent during the first half of 2009 (thanks to America’s dramatic economic downturn), sales nevertheless remain such a strong part of the overall book market that, in the spring of 2009, the New York Times launched its first graphic books best-seller list, featuring three categories: hardcover, softcover, and manga. Obviously a once-niche-market phenomenon has entered the mainstream, and all indications are that it is there to stay.

  Notes

  1. The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1924). For the record, the other six were movies, musical comedy, vaudeville, radio, popular music, and dance.

  2. University at Buffalo, “Comic Books of the 1950s,” http://libweb.lib.buffalo.edu /comics/index.html.

  3. The fundamental introduction to the comics medium remains Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (Kitchen Sink Press, 1993), and a good introduction to library use of the medium is Francisca Goldsmith’s Graphic Novels Now (American Library Association, 2005).

  4. While Buell did the single-panel Lulu cartoons that appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, the Lulu comic books were, in large part, also the work of a man, John Stanley, who—along with Carl Barks, who drew Uncle Scrooge for Disney—is regarded as one of the two great creative talents in the history of comic books.

  5. A comprehensive and beautifully designed history of manga is Paul Gravett’s Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics (Harper Design International).

  6. Shonen manga for adult men is called seinen.

  7. The Friends of Lulu, a nonprofit organization, was founded in 1994 to promote female readership and participation in the comics field.

  the eyes have it—

  other visual forms

  Photo Essays and the New Nonfiction

  Today’s children are the first generation to grow up more accustomed to digital screens than the printed page; as wireless devices proliferate, kids increasingly understand and appreciate data that is transmitted to them in visual form.

  —James Bickers, “The Young and the Graphic Novel,” 2007

  In the early 1990s, at about the same time that the crossover picture book was becoming a phenomenon, the author-artist Diane Stanley was beginning to use the traditionally fictional form to limn the real lives of historical figures like Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, Leonardo da Vinci, Cleopatra, and others. As a result, the picture book became another crossover vehicle, this time one to convey information, both textual and visual. Of course, some of the earlier work of David Macaulay and the more contemporaneous work of Peter Sis also enriched this category. Readers interested in pursing this subcategory further are referred to Patricia J. Cianciolo’s 1999 book Informational Picture Books for Children (American Library Association), which offers a cogent analysis of the form and describes and analyzes more than 250 examples of informational picture books.

  The idea that pictures can convey information and understanding as well as or better than text is hardly a new one. Bishop Comenius, the Czech educational reformer whose 1658 visual encyclopedia Orbis Pictus is often regarded as the first picture book, once observed, “For it is apparent that children (even from their infancy almost) are delighted with pictures and willingly please their eyes with these sights” (Avery 1995, 7).

  Nevertheless, for many years American nonfiction remained earnestly unadorned. And no wonder—from its beginnings in the 1820s work of Samuel Griswold Goodrich (Peter Parley), its purpose was utilitarian and its presentation dryly didactic.

  The purpose-driven, curriculum-related nature of nonfiction continued to dominate the field for more than a century, and as a result, most (though not all) nonfiction came in the form of series from institutional publishers. Its appearance was often forbidding, distinguished by pages of dense, pedestrian text unbroken by pictures; when images did appear, they were often small, black and white, and—as often as not—culled from the files of the Bettman Archives.

  This finally began to change in the 1950s, when children’s publishing entered a period of expansion and Random House launched Landmark Books, its influential and wildly popular series of history and biography titles. In 1958 a Congress worried that America was losing the space race to Russia passed the National Defense Education Act, which generously funded libraries’ purchase of books in the sciences; this, in turn, led to the appearance of still more nonfiction series—such as Crowell’s Let’s Read and Find Out—as well as the debut of such soon-to-be-celebrated writers of nonfiction as Isaac Asimov, Franklyn Branley, Millicent E. Selsam, Herbert S. Zim, and others. The boom years continued through the sixties, thanks in large part to another infusion of federal money, this time from the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which was part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation. Anxious to spend their windfalls quickly, libraries issued a de facto demand to publishers for more new books.

  And, the publisher and author James Cross Giblin (1988, 29) recalls, “Publishers scurried to meet [the demand] by launching new series of information books for every age group in every conceivable subject area.”

  Unfortunately, the well of federal funding abruptly ran dry in 1969, when as a result of its focus on the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration turned its attention from books to bullets, and juvenile nonfiction was one of the first victims.

  Publishing being a famously cyclical business, however, the depressed— and depressing—situation of nonfiction began gradually to improve in the mid-seventies, thanks, this time, not to an infusion of funds but to exciting visual content; these visuals were crisply produced photographs offered in the form of what soon came to be called the photo essay. Though pioneered by the Life magazine photographers Alfred Eisenstaedt, Margaret Bourke-White, Thomas McAvoy, and Peter Stackpole, it is the editor Norma Jean Sawicki, then at Crown, that Giblin credits with establishing “the photoessay as a genre unto itself. Led by the interest in photoessays,” Giblin (1988, 30) continues, “the juvenile nonfiction area made a quiet but
steady comeback in the early 1980s.”

  The texts of these books improved appreciably, too, thanks to the entrance into the field of a new generation of writers, like Brent Ashabranner, Betsy Maestro, Gail Gibbons, Dorothy Hinshaw Patent, Milton Meltzer, Jean Fritz, and Russell Freedman. And when engaging text and captivating, impeccably researched visual content came together in an artistically seamless whole in Freedman’s Lincoln: A Photobiography (Clarion, 1987), a nonfiction book won the Newbery Medal for the first time in thirty-two years, and a new kind of informational book was born.

  Also contributing to that birth was the British publisher Dorling Kindersley, which—in the late 1980s—had launched its revolutionary series Eyewitness Books, which were published in the United States by Knopf. Employing what it called a “lexigraphic approach,” DK devised a new way to publish nonfiction. The publisher Peter Kindersley explained, “One of the problems with words is that they’re incredibly slow, while pictures are incredibly fast. When you put them together, they work in completely different ways. (Children’s Software Review 1997).

  As I wrote in Booklist in 2002, “What DK did—with almost revolutionary panache—was essentially to reinvent nonfiction books by breaking up the solid pages of gray type that had previously been their hallmark, reducing the text to bite-size, nonlinear nuggets and surrounding them with lavish white space and pictures that did more than adorn—they also conveyed information. Usually full-color, they were so crisply reproduced they seemed almost to leap off the page. Carter and Abrahamson, in their essential [book] ‘Nonfiction for Young Adults’ call the images ‘stunning visuals … all artfully arranged on the pages for visual appeal’” (Cart 2002a, 399). Kindersley may have best explained the new approach when he then wrote, “Through the picture I see reality and through the word I understand it” (Cart 2002a, 399).

  In the Know: Libraries and the New Nonfiction

  The word (i.e., the text) was the focus of yet another important YALSA preconference, important because it underscored the growing prominence of nonfiction in libraries. Held in 1990 and called “Just Say Know,” this one devoted two days to an exhaustive examination of the newfound importance and allure of nonfiction and information materials for young people. As Linda Waddle (1991, 361) wrote in Journal of Youth Services in Libraries, “The sessions were designed to help participants become better evaluators and users of the increasing quantity and variety of nonfiction materials.” Presentations ranged from “Booktalking Nonfiction” to “Apartheid in South Africa” and from “Evaluation and Review of Current Self-Help Books” to “Magazine Publishing: The Sassy Approach.”

  The keynote speakers were Betty Carter and Richard Abrahamson, whose book From Delight to Wisdom: Nonfiction for Young Adults Oryx Press had published that same year. The coauthors addressed attendees in the presentation “The Role of Nonfiction in Developing Lifetime Readers.” Staunch advocates of the form, they asserted that “young adults who want to know about this world, or this planet, or this society don’t care to continually extrapolate their ideas from fiction; they want to examine more reliable sources. Only nonfiction responds to this need” (Waddle 1991, 366–67). And what about those who want to know about themselves, instead? “Young adults read for identification. Neither fiction nor nonfiction dictates a reader’s stance; the reader always does. Frequently, the reader interacts on a personal level with nonfiction” (366). In other words, nonfiction provides the facts; it is the reader who provides the same kind of emotional response he or she would while reading fiction.

  Surprisingly, only one presentation addressed the visual aspect of nonfiction. In it James Cross Giblin and Norma Jean Sawicki offered their answer to the often-heard complaint: “But All They Do Is Look at the Pictures: Illustrations in Nonfiction Books.” And clearly they did look, for the impact of those pictures continued to inform the evolution of the informational book as established writers like Freedman, Jim Murphy, Rhoda Blumberg, Kathryn Lasky, and Patricia Lauber were joined by Albert Marrin, Janet Bode, Laurence Pringle, Susan Kuklin, Elizabeth Partridge, and James Cross Giblin himself, who had retired from publishing to devote himself full-time to his career as a writer of award-winning information books. All of these authors were extraordinarily good writers, but they also understood the importance of incorporating significant visual material into their texts.

  At the same time, another editor-publisher, Marc Aronson—whose name has been a fixture of these pages—was continuing to develop nonfiction for older young adults at Holt and, later, at Carus Publishing, where he had his own imprint, Marcato Books. However, he, too, retired and has since become not only one of America’s most eloquent advocates for nonfiction but also the author of some of its most intellectually challenging and stimulating titles in books like Sir Walter Raleigh and the Quest for El Dorado (Clarion, 2000), The Real Revolution (Clarion, 2005), Unsettled: The Problem of Loving Israel (Seo/Atheneum, 2008), and others.1

  There is no fictionalizing to be found in any of these fine writers’ books— no imagined conversations, no messing with history or chronology to make a better story—all demonstrate the importance of creating a narrative and, to that end, of borrowing techniques from novelists without violating the accuracy or the integrity of their books’ content. Freedman (1994, 138–39) has addressed this aspect of his work, saying, “I think of myself first of all as a storyteller, and I do my best to give dramatic shape to my subject whatever it may be…. By storytelling, I do not mean making things up, of course. I don’t mean invented scenes, or manufactured dialogue, or imaginary characters.”

  Freedman goes on to discuss the importance of developing character by including telling details (the contents of Lincoln’s pockets the night he was assassinated); using anecdotes; creating vivid scenes (including William Herndon’s description of the chaos Lincoln’s two sons wrought in his law office); and—to give readers a sense of what historical personages actually sounded like—quoting from letters, diaries, journals, speeches, and other written matter. When handled expertly, the result is a compelling narrative that offers the power of story without sacrificing any of the authenticity of fact.

  This is, surely, an art, and it is no wonder that since the mid-1970s, award attention has finally begun to be paid to this formerly unregarded form. The Boston Globe–Horn Book Awards, for example, added a category for nonfiction as early as 1976. The Society of Children’s Book Writers followed in 1977, and the Book Guild of Washington initiated a body of work award for nonfiction that same year. In 1983 a total of three Newbery honors were presented for nonfiction (to Kathryn Lasky, Rhoda Blumberg, and Patricia Lauber); and in 1988 Freedman received the Newbery itself for Lincoln. Two years later, the National Council of Teachers of English initiated its Orbis Pictus Award (the first winner was Jean Fritz, for her Great Little Madison), and in 2000 the Association of Library Service for Children, which also presents the Newbery and Caldecott medals, created the Robert F. Sibert Medal to be awarded annually to the author(s) and illustrator(s) of the most distinguished informational book published in English during the preceding year. The first award, presented in 2001, went to Marc Aronson for his Sir Walter Raleigh and the Quest for El Dorado, which many considered a young adult book. Interestingly, one of the four honor books that year—Judd Winick’s Pedro and Me—was also regarded as young adult and was a graphic novel, to boot. In the years since, award and honor recipients have included both children’s and YA titles—among the latter being the 2003 winner, James Cross Giblin’s The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, and—that same year—an honor to Jack Gantos for his edgy memoir A Hole in My Life, which was also the recipient of a Printz Honor Award.

  Why YALSA did not immediately follow suit with a similar award for the best informational YA book excited a great deal of discussion. Some pointed to the fact that nonfiction is eligible, after all, for the Printz (witness the Gantos book), but others have pointed out that no informational book has actually won this most prestigious YA award, and only
two such books have even received honors— A Hole in My Life and Elizabeth Partridge’s John Lennon.

  Still, nonfiction has always been represented on the annual Best Books for Young Adults lists, but even there the news is not altogether salutary. As Betty Carter noted in the first edition of Best Books for Young Adults, “Not only has BBYA changed from an almost exclusively adult list to a strongly juvenile one but it has also reversed from including mostly nonfiction books to containing a predominance of fiction titles…. In 1993 seventy-five percent of the books were fiction” (Carter 1994, 39–40). In the second edition, Carter again wrote, “Nonfiction fails to appear in representative numbers on BBYA lists. Part of that failure may be because of the reading tastes of the committee, but part is also because of publishing output” (2000, 12). (Though she doesn’t specify this, a total of 79 percent of the 1999 list were novels.)

  In the third edition of the book, published in 2007, the editor Holly Koelling reported that 20 percent of the titles on the 2001–2007 lists were nonfiction (80 percent, thus, are fiction), but she included poetry in her count (Carter did not), which suggests that the fiction-nonfiction imbalance is even greater than before on both the basic list and the BBYA Top Ten lists. During the period described by Koelling, only five of the seventy titles selected (i.e., 7 percent) for these lists were nonfiction. And when one looks at the six Teens Top Ten lists that YALSA has generated since 2003, the results are even more discouraging: the teens themselves have chosen not a single nonfiction title! The International Reading Association’s Young Adults’ Choices lists from 2002 to date are slightly but not much better: 9 of 180 titles (5 percent) selected by those teens are nonfiction.