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)ORULGD6WDWH8QLYHUVLW\/LEUDULHV 2018 Why Young Adult Fiction: From 1960s to Today Eleanor Cleveland Follow this and additional works at DigiNole: FSU's Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected] FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES WHY YOUNG ADULT LITERATURE: FROM 1960s TO TODAY By ELEANOR CLEVELAND A Thesis submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in the Major Degree Awarded: Spring, 2018 1 The members of the Defense Committee approve the thesis of Eleanor Cleveland defended on April 19, 2018. Professor Ned Stuckey-French Thesis Director Dr. Melissa Gross Outside Committee Member Dr. Leigh Edwards Committee Member 2 INTRODUCTION Young adult literature is a genre or category of books that are written for teenagers and feature a teenage protagonist. This genre has created confusion, however, with its meaning, intended audience and what should qualify. As Michael Cart notes, the term is “…inherently amorphous, for its constituent terms ‘young adult’ and ‘literature’ are dynamic, changing as culture and society – which provide their context – change” (“The Value of Young Adult Literature”). This makes the term have different meanings to each generation, and it forces the question of what can, or should, qualify for teenagers and young adults to read. These debates started with the first novel published as young adult, S.E. Hinton’s 1966 debut, The Outsiders, which wasn’t what adults wanted their teenagers to be reading, though it depicted the reality they were living. Young adult literature didn’t exist until the late 1960s, with this publication, and though there were a few novels before then that were very early “adolescent” novels, they were always published as adult books. Since then, the genre has expanded throughout the 1970s and 1980s and exploded in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Today, young adult literature is prolific and respected, but that is a recent development, due to the success of the Harry Potter series, John Green, and others. The public libraries were crucial in the forming of young adult literature and understanding of teenagers’ needs as different from children and adults. They are still an access point for young adult literature and all young adults, regardless of socioeconomic status. The Young Adult Library Services Association has helped to create awards that honor literary young adult novels, and mark the critically acclaimed novels, while offering services and materials for young adults. I have grown up reading this genre for as long as I can remember, and it, and the work of Sarah Dessen in particular, has guided me to where I am today. Young adult literature is 3 crucial for the psychological and moral development of youth, as it offers readers a place to learn and explore the physical and emotional changes of adolescence, and a place for in depth connection with characters unlike the readers, which creates and fosters empathy. Young adult literature also creates a place of belonging by creating stories with characters like the reader, too. This thesis explores the beginnings of young adult literature, its growth, and why young adult literature matters – personally and psychologically. I begin with the defining of the term, the history of the library’s defining role, and the start of it all. I explore the decades that helped define and shape young adult literature before the Harry Potter series, and then I explore the effect of the Harry Potter series, convergence culture, and transmedia in the book publishing industry. I also include author interviews that offer an understanding of young adult literature by those who create it. Since I am someone who wants to write young adult novels one day, these interviews were crucial and fascinating to understanding the author’s perspective of the value of young adult literature. I also include personal and psychological reasons why young adult literature is a valuable and critical piece of culture, entertainment, and moral education for adolescents, and how young adult literature can change and shape someone’s life, as it did mine. 4 PART ONE: Young Adult Definition, Explanations, and Early History In the late 1800s, Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott both published “adolescent reform novels,” with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Little Women, respectively. Both books, though published seventeen years apart, deal with the growth of the adolescent as a reflection of social commentary and moral reform. As Huck Finn grapples with race and Jo March grapples with gender and limiting female roles, both Twain and Alcott “…base their social criticism in an adolescent’s ironic self-perception that he or she is inferior because of his or her non- conformity” (Trites 34). Huck Finn is perhaps the first western novel of adolescence to deal with the search for identity, which is today a standard of young adult novels (Hilton and Nikolajeva 4). These novels communicate that adolescents are capable of making social change, and became a basis for future young adult novels. Twain established the American pattern of the bildungsroman as a picaresque: follow a boy on a trip, and you’ll follow him as he grows. These narrative elements – the ironic, vernacular, first-person narrator who is on a journey – are apparent in the adolescent novels that are most often compared to Huckleberry Finn (Trites 144). Harper Lee does the same thing in To Kill a Mockingbird, as does S.E. Hinton in The Outsiders, and J.D. Salinger in Catcher in the Rye. Similarly, “much of the so-called chick lit currently being published has evolved from the same strand of romanticism that inspired Alcott’s domestic dramas” (Ibid 160). Novels like The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Brashers, Gossip Girl by Cecily von Ziegesar, and Judy Blume novels explore the problems adolescents must overcome to mature, while validating female friendships, but do not go further into social commentary. Regardless, the goal of young adult literature to “help teenagers think about, and hopefully transcend, the rigid and 5 dysfunctional structures of popular culture, stereotyping, oppression, and injustice,” is reflected in these very early novels (Hilton and Nikolajeva 15). Today, young adult literature is understood as books written with an adolescent protagonist, therefore written “for” adolescents, or people ages thirteen to twenty. Often these books “touch the sensitive areas of adolescent life – sex, authority, schools, drugs, relationship to parents, relationship to adult society…” from the perspective of the teenager (Holland 65). Chris Crowe states that young adult literature “restricts itself to literature intended for teenagers,” emphasizing the marketing aspect of defining the genre (Crowe 121). Regardless, the term is ambiguous for each person, as is the audience and genre itself. The term “adolescent” did not appear until 1904, when G. Stanley Hall published Adolescence: Its Psychology, officially sanctioning the existence of this separate state of the time in between childhood and adulthood as adolescence (From Romance to Realism: 50 Years of Growth and Change in Young Adult Literature 4-5). The Great Depression pushed young people out of the workplace and into the classroom, creating for the first time a youth culture, as youth were in each other’s company every day (Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism 5). The marketing to this youth culture and teenagers flourished in the 1940s, and reached an early peak during post-World War II prosperity, cementing young adult literature as a “staunchly American tradition” (Garcia 5). Psychologists Robert James Havighurst and Erik Erikson’s works in 1950 defined stages of human development, defining two stages called “adolescence” and “young adulthood” as “thirteen through eighteen and nineteen through thirty (Havighurst) and twelve through eighteen and nineteen through forty (Erikson)” (Ibid 7). These works and definitions influenced educators and therapists, but also, libraries and, eventually, chain bookstores. 6 Librarians are cited with coming up with the term “young adult” and the need for a separate category for people who weren’t children, but not yet adults, in the library space. The New York Public Library hired Mabel Williams in 1914, a young librarian from Massachusetts, to continue her job of being reference librarian but also work with high school libraries on a bigger scale in New York City. She found other librarians to collaborate with, and they strived to create a distinctive space for these young adults in libraries (Rouyer). “Public libraries and young adult services are both built on a foundation with three pillars: reading, information and education, and community” (Walter x). These guiding principles were the core of what early young adult librarians were working to achieve, in creating spaces for young adults in libraries. In 1929, the New York Public Library published the “NYPL Books for Young People” list, now known as the “Best Books for Teens,” that was created annually and sent out to schools and libraries (Rouyer). Margaret Scoggin, one of the librarians Williams hired, wrote a column called “Books for Older Boys and Girls” in the Library Journal, but she then changed the name to “Books for Young Adults” in 1944, beginning the phrase of ‘young adult literature’ (Ibid). The American Library Association created a Young Adult Division in 1957. This division grew from a small, one-office, part-time job department into the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) in 1972 (“YALSA History”). Regardless of the name, this department organized, published, researched, and offered different materials for young adults, as well as people who work with young adults, or wrote and published for young adults. While YALSA defines its service range as users from age twelve to eighteen, the focus is mostly on the “second decade” from ten to twenty (Walter 38).

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