A Journey Through a Century of John Newbery Award Books
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Butler University Digital Commons @ Butler University Graduate Thesis Collection Graduate Scholarship 2019 One Hundred Books: A journey through a century of John Newbery Award books Tyler Sassaman Butler University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/grtheses Part of the Creative Writing Commons, and the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Sassaman, Tyler, "One Hundred Books: A journey through a century of John Newbery Award books" (2019). Graduate Thesis Collection. 516. https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/grtheses/516 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Scholarship at Digital Commons @ Butler University. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Thesis Collection by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ Butler University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. One Hundred Books: A journey through a century of John Newbery Award books by Ty Sassaman Butler University MFA Creative Nonfiction 2019 2 Introduction A Gold Coin in the Blue Sky: The Announcement Frederic Melcher stood in the hot sun of one of the longest summer days of the year, June 22, 1921, holding his hat at his chest, waiting in line to speak at the American Library Association’s annual meeting in Swampscott, Massachusetts. Though he waited patiently, the air buzzed with speculation as to what he would announce. At the annual meeting only a two years earlier, Melcher had introduced “Children’s Book Week” to the American Library Association, which he had created with Franklin W. Matthews, chief librarian of the Boy Scouts of America. The recognition of a Children’s Book Week suggested, for the first time, that libraries devote shelf space to children’s books and raise awareness of these books in their collections. Children’s Book Week offered welcome attention to the growing field of children’s literature and was a resounding success. World War I had recently ended, and in the re-forming and strengthening of fractured family units, interest in literature for children was at levels not seen before. Books like May Gibbs’ The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie and Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding were flying off the shelves. As evidenced by their titles, these books for children, though very popular, were not concerned with literary merit as with earlier classics such as Treasure Island or Robinson Crusoe. Melcher recognized this and strove to make a change. The final event on the ALA schedule drew much attention because Melcher, already an influential book seller and editor of the popular trade magazine Publisher’s Weekly, was expected to release the details of a new idea promoting quality in children’s literature. More than 3 three hundred librarians—most of them members of the Children’s Library Association of the ALA— crowded the garage, the only annexed space with sufficient room for all of them. Fans thrummed to keep the hot air at bay as Melcher took a step up to the table on the podium and, placing both hands flat on the lectern, surely said something like, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I am pleased to introduce to you the annual award for distinguished literature for children, the John Newbery Medal!” Many years later, Melcher recalled what an important event it was, and how he felt in the moment: As I looked down from the platform at the three or four hundred people, I thought of the power they could have in encouraging the joy of reading among children. I could see that I was sure of having the librarians’ cooperation in Children’s Book Week, but I wanted to go further and secure their interest in the whole process of creating books for children, producing them, and bringing them to the children.1 Looking back, this day is remarkable; his was a simple idea offered to a receptive audience. Did anyone expect that, a century later, the award would still be in existence, that millions of books would have been sold with this golden seal on its cover, and that many fortunes would have been made from its mark? 1 Irene Smith, History of the Newbery and Caldecott Medals (New York: Viking Press, 1957), 36. 4 1 To Read Them All To all Young Gentlemen and Ladies who are good or intend to be good. —Dedication to Goody Two-Shoes (author anonymous) published by John Newbery, 1765 The first half of my fifth-grade year was a disaster. I attended public schools in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and my childhood was pretty unexceptional: I played soccer, had many friends, and hated math. What I loved more than anything was reading. At Parkwood-Upjohn elementary, my teacher, Mr. Steele, was loud, overbearing, and carried a sharpened yellow pencil for cataloging and punishing the ever-growing list of Bad Kids in the class. He would assign the Good Kids a worksheet and then, while everyone else was supposed to be concentrating, he would publicly reprimand, berate, and mock these supposedly offending students. Thankfully, I was on the Good list. But that didn’t mean things were actually good for me: there was no classroom library, and all the yelling made the classroom a challenging environment for a young introvert already not doing well in school and completely adrift with long division. I took the opportunity of Mr. Steele’s diverted attention to withdraw into my own world. I stopped doing any homework at all and eventually also stopped turning in any classwork. The days at my desk I spent drawing and writing fantasy stories about life in far-off galaxies. At some point my parents became suspicious of the lack of homework for Mr. Steele’s class, and his apparent lack of response to their many notes requesting updates on my progress. 5 They set up a conference. The principal, Mr. Steele, my parents, and I all sat around a beige kidney table at the back of the classroom. The meeting was short, and all I truly remember was getting in the car for the ride home and my father saying sternly, “You’re not going back to that school.” Things changed dramatically for me then, and the second half of fifth grade turned out to be magical. The Monday after the conference, I began Kalamazoo Academy, one of the few private schools in the city. “Welcome, Tyler,” the smiling teacher dressed in soft brown corduroy greeted me. How does she already know my name? I wondered. The place was kind of a miracle: students continued to work diligently when Mrs. Belonax stepped away to greet me at the door. For the two years I went to K.A., my world opened up. There were only twelve kids in my class, so the teacher made sure I understood each step of long division before moving on. No one yelled. Most importantly, there were books. Hundreds of them. “You can read any book you’d like,” Mrs. Belonax smiled, noticing my eyes scanning the shelves, mouth agape. “You just have to write a one-page summary when you finish each one so that other kids can get a sense of the book.” I became a sponge. I must have written a hundred book reports that year. Books saved my life. I don’t mean that lightly; if I hadn’t delved deeply into literature and reading anything available, there might still be that fifth-grade kid falling farther and farther behind, a skydiver with a faulty parachute. And I was a strong reader as a kid. Not the best in my class, but my love of reading grew with constant attention. I loved being immersed in a fantasy world, a movie, with characters playing out scenes page-by-page before my eyes. To me, it wasn’t important who wrote the 6 books or where they came from or whether they had won any prizes. I loved them for the stories, the worlds they created in my mind, and all the characters I wanted to imitate. One of my favorite characters was Jessie, the fifth-grade protagonist of Bridge to Terabithia. Jogging was a new thing in the early 1980s and it hit me at just the right age. In the book, Jessie was obsessed with running and so was I. Pouring over the details of his runs, I found myself slipping away, inhabiting the rhythms of his footfalls, becoming the character himself. The story turns on a tragic event: in a heavy rain, Jessie’s best friend Leslie slips on a log bridge at the entrance to their fort, Terabithia, and falls to her death. Each member of our class had a copy of the book and when Jessie died, the response seismic. Holding the book in front of my face, I wept silently, like Jessie trying to make sense of the loss. When I finally glanced around the cover to see if anyone had noticed my tears, I found the whole class crying, including Mrs. Belonax. That same book magic overcame me often. I lost myself in the mind-control experiments of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.I.M.H. and became giddy at the prospect of living full-time in the Museum of Natural History in New York City like the children in From the Mixed-Up Files of Dr. Basil E. Frankeweiler. But over the years, the power of those stories waned, and I did as most kids do: I forgot the books of my youth, leaving them to the next generation, and moved on to the science fiction of Isaac Asimov and book reports for The Scarlett Letter and Red Badge of Courage.