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Early Glimmers
Early Glimmers
It is possible to locate the origins of realistic Young Adult fiction in the nineteenth century, where YA fiction itself has its beginnings. At that time, the designation had not yet coalesced into the marketing behemoth that it is today, and the phenomenon known as adolescence had not yet been delimited as a socio-culturally distinct life stage and demographic, and yet there were faint glimmers of recognition that there exists a definable period between childhood and adulthood when one is neither child nor adult, and that young people experiencing this phase of life may have unique needs--and be drawn to certain types of stories. It is from these faint glimmers that realistic YA fiction emerges.
The Birth of Adolescence and the Rise of Realist YA
The Birth of Adolescence and the Rise of Realist YA
Prompted by the musings of G. Stanley Hall in his 1904 work, Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education, society was gradually coming to identify the teenager as a unique category, and authors and publishers were quickly catching on. Cart (2016) identifies first Louisa May Alcott and Horatio Alger in the post-Civil War era, then the Stratemeyer Syndicate (purveyor of the Bobbsey Twins, Hardy Boys, and Nancy Drew series) at the turn of the century and into the thirties and forties, as tapping into this newly acknowledged vein of readership. We can also place Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House series in this period as an early example of work that appealed in part to this emerging audience (Blakemore, 2015).
The 1936 publication by Little, Brown of Helen Boylston’s Sue Barton Student Nurse, which, along with its six sequels, became a perennial favorite, proved that fiction about and directed at this age group was viable and worth publisher's and librarians' attention. In terms of realistic fiction for the YA audience, perhaps the most significant aspect of Boylston’s series was “its verisimilitude….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.” (Cart, 2016). Realism, if only the semblance of it, was the original YA.
Setting the Stage for Variety
Setting the Stage for Variety
Little Women, Ragged Dick, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Sue Barton: From these early works, which at least tried to be grounded in reality, however stereotypical or even prudish they may seem to contemporary readers, the genre multiplies and divides into its present cast of sub-genres, which range from romance to war, from comedy to tragedy, from sports to survival. Perhaps fittingly, this series of subdivisions starts with Romance, in Maureen Daly’s 1942 work, Seventeenth Summer, which is hailed by many as “the first young adult novel,” and its imitators, Betty Cavanna's Going on Sixteen (1946) and Rosamund du Jardin’s Practically Seventeen (1949). This variety really explodes in the ensuing era, with the reification of teen culture in the fifties and the onset of the Civil Rights Movement and the rising social consciousness of the sixties, to attain what many see as a golden age in the seventies.
The 1950s, 60s, and 70s: The Rise of “The New Realism”
The 1950s, 60s, and 70s: The Rise of “The New Realism”
By the 1950’s, youth culture was a genuine, unmitigated thing, and teens were plied from all sides with teen-targeted media, books being no exception. By the sixties, we enter what Cart deems “The Rise of Realism and the first Golden Age.” Two novels sort of pin down this era of Young Adult fiction: J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951) and S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967). Both of these books helped to make realistic Young Adult fiction more sophisticated, complex, and, well, real, moving away from the somewhat trivial concerns about dances, friends, and work, and out onto the streets of the adult world, where teen protagonists can face encounters that are by turns humiliating, cruel, and grim--with the occasional uplift among them. As James (2008) notes, with the 60s we see the emergence of the teen “problem novel.”
Indeed, if realism in literature has a long history of being defined by depictions of the economically disenfranchised, of the downtrodden, troubled, abused, and oppressed in society, then the 60s may also be seen as the realist decade. As with realism for adults, realism for young adults acknowledges that life is marked by suffering, violence, cruelty, and disempowerment. Grappling with these forces, the protagonists of YA realistic fiction often must come to terms with systems of power which they had no part in creating but which threaten to either relegate them to the status of outsiders or destroy them completely (Trites, 2002).
By the 1970’s, it seems that no subject was too taboo to treat in realistic YA fiction. Maia Pank Mertz (1978) identifies several topics of the “New Realism” over which adults and censors fretted during the era: Writers of realism for young adults addressed drug abuse, queerness, abortion, draft dodging, changing family structure, parenthood out of wedlock, often fruitless confrontations with the power structure, and death. Books that appeared on censor’s lists included Ann Head’s Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jones and Paul Zindel’s My Darling, My Hamburger, Isabelle Holland’s The Man Without a Face, Lynn Hall’s Sticks and Stones, Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender, Alice Childress’s A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich, and S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and That Was Then, This is Now.
Cart (2016) and Trites (2002) both hold up Robert Cormier, especially his novel The Chocolate War, as genuinely exposing readers to the unrelenting harshness of reality. Analyzing the work, Trite refers to Scott MacLeod, who notes that Cormier’s novels "violate the unwritten rule that fiction for the young, however sternly realistic the narrative material, must offer some portion of hope, must end at least with some affirmative message,” while Cart writes that “Cormier’s is a deterministic view that sees evil—sometimes institutionalized—in a world where conventional morality may not prevail, and where there are powerful, faceless forces that will destroy us if we disturb them.” Noting the influence of Cormier’s work, Cart continues: ”Such a revolutionary view opened enormous areas of thematic possibility for writers who would come after him.”
Judy Blume, Lois Duncan, Walter Dean Myers, and Lois Lowry continue in that tradition through the 70’s, while Chris Crutcher’s debut Running Loose appears in 1983, Adam Rapp enters the scene in 1994 with Missing the Piano and Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak appears in 1999.
The 1980s
The 1980s
Coming back to the tremendous variety that characterizes realistic YA fiction, we find ourselves in the 1980’s, when, true to the somewhat materialistic spirit of the decade, we see the rise of more pulpy titles and series, a sort of regurgitation of the pioneers of the 40s and 50s teen romance, only with slicker production values and well-honed plot formulas, presented in the facile form of the mass-market paperback. Publishers all contribute to these trends, with the Sweet Valley High Series being perhaps the most recognizable (Cart, 2016).
However, the decade is certainly not lost in trivialities, for the 80s is also when writers of color begin to attain more widespread recognition for their work (Cart, 2016), authors such as Walter Dean Myers, Alice Childress, Mildred Taylor, Virginia Hamilton, Laurence Yep, Rudolfo Anaya, and Sandra Cisneros. The 80’s is also when critics begin to sketch the outlines of the YA canon, naming classics such as Cormier’s The Chocolate War and Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret. (Blakemore, 2015)
The Turn of the Millennium: The 1990’s to the Present
The Turn of the Millennium: The 1990’s to the Present
The history of realistic YA fiction has offered YA authors a truly impressive foundation of literature to build upon. As it fledged from the insular, often escapist portrayals of mostly white protagonists whose problems may have seemed remote from those of many teens even then, as authors began to to search their own experiences for the truth of teen life in all of its staggering depth, horror, beauty, and authenticity, realistic YA fiction has taken flight across time and space to encompass almost every possible demographic and almost every need. Rosemary Chance, in her 2014 book Young Adult Literature in Action: a Librarian's Guide: Realistic Fiction, breaks realistic YA into several sub-categories, allowing her to offer a diverse range of subject matter, protagonists, and titles for librarians to consider. Authors and titles she recommends include (to name only a few):
Humor
Carolyn Mackler’s Love and Other Four-Letter Words
Christopher Paul Curtis’s The Watsons Go to Birmingham·1963
Joan Bauer’s Close to Famous
Chick Lit
Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging
Libby Bray’s Beauty Queens
Humor For Boys
Gary Paulsen’s Harris and Me
Sue Townsend’s The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4.
Adventure
Scott O’Dell’s Island of the Blue Dolphins
Will Hobbs’ Far North
Sports
Chris Crutcher’s Running Loose, Stotan! The Crazy Horse Electric Game, Ironman
Mick Cochrane The Girl Who Threw Butterflies
LGBTQ
Nancy Garden’s Annie on My Mind
A.S. King’s Ask the Passengers
Cris Beam’s I Am J
Emily Horner’s A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend
To these many offerings I would add the works of the authors featured on this blog: Jacqueline Woodson, Angie Thomas, Nic Stone, John Green, and Adam Rapp. They, and so, so many others, continue to add to realistic YA fiction's rich, amazing history and its position as a lodestar for all of YA literature.
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