In my brief study of the history of realistic YA fiction and readings of several exemplary novels in the genre, three things have become apparent.
Even before adolescence became widely recognized as a distinct period of life and YA fiction became an accepted category of literature, young people were drawn to stories about young people facing conflicts that approached some degree of verisimilitude. Alcott’s Little Women, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Alger’s Ragged Dick, Bolyston’s Sue Barton Student Nurse, Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer, and a host of other novels attracted teens with their depictions of people their age going through things they or those they knew may have gone through, things that spoke to their current lives, concerns, desires, and dreams.
The socio-cultural awakening of Western society prompted by the Civil Rights, Women’s, American Indian, Stonewall, and Chicano movements for recognition and liberation truly set the stage for YA authors to deepen the realism of their work and to open it up to often painful but even more authentic concerns. These movements also made it possible for a more diverse contingent of authors to write stories for a more diverse array of teens. This period in the history of our society, I feel, is what made it possible for so many important, once-marginalized voices to come to the fore and to offer works of the highest literary merit to young audiences that very much need to see themselves portrayed in books. Issues of class, race, sexuality, pregnancy, drug abuse, domestic violence, state violence, crime, alienation, power, suicide, oppression, poverty, rape, and so on, all found their way into realist YA fiction. Of course, there have been attempts, endless attempts, to censor the books that portray these issues, but as Carolyn Mackler reminded us in her interview with Dr. Wrenn-Estes, being able as a young person to find an honest depiction of what it’s really like to be a teen is salvific. And as Angie Thomas has said, “My job as a writer is to write the stories that make adults uncomfortable, because that’s what the kids need.”
From its inception, we can see this concern playing out, initially in the slow but growing recognition that there was an audience of people who are not children and not yet adults who want to find themselves in fiction, and later in the emergence of novels (in the 60s and beyond) that offer honest portrayals of teen life and of teens from every walk of life. This honesty and openness are what lend realist teen fiction its great variety. They also lead to stories that contend with the most pressing, important, and disturbing issues in our society. In the novels I read for this study, I encountered issues of poverty and race and suicide, celebrations of queerness, and interracial love affairs. As Claasz (2014) writes, “Teens are drawn to stories about real issues of concern. They also like to have their ways of thinking challenged, to see things in a different way.” Realist YA fiction’s commitment to representation is definitely a powerful way to make those things happen for teen readers.