The Chronicles of Professionalization: the Expert, the Child, and the Making of American Children’S Literature

Home , Anne Carroll Moore, Caroline Hewins, Frances Clarke Sayers, Literature in the 1970s, Little Golden Books, Louise Seaman Bechtel

THE CHRONICLES OF PROFESSIONALIZATION: THE EXPERT, THE CHILD, AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

REBEKAH FITZSIMMONS

A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA

2015

To my husband Rob: Thank you for riding this roller coaster with me.

3 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I would like to thank my dissertation director, Dr. Kenneth Kidd. Since the first time I visited UF in 2008, you have been my cheerleader, my inspiration, and my ideal mentor. To my dissertation committee: Dr. Anastasia Ulanowicz, Dr. Susan

Hegeman, and Dr. Sevan Terzian. I am constantly in awe of the work that you do and the generosity with which you share your abundant knowledge and very limited time.

I have been extremely lucky to be a part of a vibrant community of children’s literature scholars. I want to thank Casey Wilson, Mariko Turk, Akilah Brown, Mary

Roca, Kendra Hare, Poushali Bhadury, John Cech and everyone else for their brilliance, conversation, feedback, thoughts, ideas, and sympathy. Also, special thanks to Suzan

Alteri and Rita Smith, for all of their help inside of the Baldwin (outside too).

I have also been lucky enough to spend time with other scholars at UF who have, over the years, provided invaluable support, encouragement, and friendship. I finish this project knowing that Kristen Denslow, Matt and Christy Snyder, David and Ginny

Lawrimore, Sarah Hayes, Sarah Traphagen, Jennifer Coenen, Emily McCann, John

Tinnel, Andrew Wilson and many others had a hand in my success and continued sanity. That encouragement and friendship was also abundant beyond the boundaries of Gainesville and graduate school: many thanks to Nicole Pasquarello, Devon Merling,

Lindsay Blackwell and so many others who have been cheering me on from a distance.

I would like to thank my family for a lifetime of love and support. Special thanks to my parents and sisters, who were always willing to come visit me in Florida (especially in the winter, go figure). Also, thank you to Pam Lavender, for putting me in touch with

Ellen Tuckner: Ms. Tuckner provided me with extremely valuable feedback about my theories on early reader picture books in the classroom while this project was in its

4 earliest genesis. Thank you also to my in-laws and extended Florida family, for helping me feel at home in Gainesville and supporting me in so many ways.

Finally, thank you to my husband, Rob. You have been with me for the entire dissertation process: you listened to me talk through ideas, supported me through exams, encouraged me constantly through the years of writing, and have handled a lot of crazy during the defense and final revision process. This project would not be what it is without all of your valuable input, help, support, and love. I am so lucky to have you in my life.

5 TABLE OF CONTENTS

page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... 4

LIST OF FIGURES ...... 9

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ...... 10

ABSTRACT ...... 11

CHAPTER

1 INTRODUCTION: PROFESSIONALISM AND CHILDHOOD IN AMERICA ...... 13

Rise of Professionalism in America ...... 16 The Cultural History of American Childhood ...... 23 Emerging Consumer Market for and about Children ...... 29 Canon Formation ...... 37 Theoretical Framework ...... 44

2 “RECOMMENDED FOR PURCHASE BY EXPERT”: EARLY 20TH CENTURY CHILDREN’S LITERATURE LIBRARIANS AS EDUBROW CANON MAKERS ..... 51

The Progressives and the Free Library Movements ...... 53 Professional History of Publishing ...... 63 Children Gain Access to Library Reading Rooms ...... 68 Book Lists by Influential Librarians ...... 73 Caroline Hewins ...... 74 Anne Carroll Moore ...... 80 Alice Jordan ...... 89 Book Lists in Books ...... 95 The Great Excluded; or, Books “Not Recommended for Purchase by Expert” ...... 96 Garden Walls: Librarians Build Professional Infrastructures in Support of Children’s Literature ...... 109 Children’s Book Week ...... 112 The Horn Book ...... 117 ALA Prizes: Newbery and Caldecott ...... 122 The Value of the ALA Prizes ...... 131

3 HOP ON POP: THE RISE OF EARLY READER BOOKS IN A NEW AGE OF EDUCATION ...... 146

Education Reforms in America ...... 149 The Reading Wars ...... 161 Early Reader Picture Books ...... 174 The Cat in the Hat ...... 176

6 Little Bear ...... 183 Reading Between Blurred Lines: Instruction and Delight ...... 189 An Expanding Market: Dividing Early Readers into Micro-niche Categories ...... 192

4 ALL FALL DOWN: THE DECLINING INFLUENCE OF LIBRARIANS AGAINST EMERGING RIVALS...... 204

The Librarians’ “Secret Garden” Enclave ...... 209 Rivalries Among Edubrow Professionals ...... 230 Librarians Versus Teachers ...... 232 Librarians Versus Publishers ...... 238 Librarians Versus Booksellers ...... 242 Rivalries in Action: Anne Carroll Moore Fails to Squash Stuart Little ...... 251

5 DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE: THE PAPERBACK REVOLUTION AND SHIFTING MARKETS IN THE GLOBAL CHILDREN’S LITERATURE FIELD ...... 260

Academics Take Notice of Children’s Literature ...... 263 The Paperback Revolution of the 1960s ...... 274 Paperbacks and the Children’s Literature Market ...... 281 Watership Down: Canons at Cross Purposes ...... 292 Watership Down: A British Prize Winner ...... 293 Watership Down: An American Bestseller ...... 297 Awards Versus Bestsellers: Which Prize is Most Prized? ...... 304

6 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE COMES OF AGE: BLOCKBUSTER BOOKS AND THE YOUNG ADULT REVOLUTION...... 314

Bestsellerdom Births the Blockbuster Strategy ...... 318 Conglomerates Become the Book Industry Norm ...... 330 Changes at the Publishing Level ...... 332 Super Bookstores ...... 336 YA Literature: Beginnings ...... 344 Defining YA ...... 344 The Emergence of YA Paperbacks in Britain ...... 349 YA Literature from 1970 to 1990s ...... 355 Commercial Book Market Response to the Emerging YA Genre ...... 359 Educational Response to the Emerging YA Genre ...... 363 The Hunger Games as YA Blockbuster Series ...... 369 The Blockbuster as the New Canon Maker ...... 376

7 CODA: UNCHARTED TASTE TERRITORY ...... 381

Neil Gaiman’s Introduction ...... 382 LeGuin’s Acceptance Speech ...... 387 What Comes Next ...... 400

LIST OF REFERENCES ...... 401

7 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 416

8 LIST OF FIGURES

Figure page

3-1 Advertisement for The Cat in the Hat ...... 201

3-2 Advertisement for Little Bear ...... 202

3-3 Advertisement for the Early I Can Read series ...... 203

9 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

ABA The American Booksellers Association

ALA The American Library Association

ALSC Association for Library Services to Children (A division of the ALA)

CHLA Children’s Literature Association

CILIP Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals

NYPL New York Public Library

YA Young Adult

YALSA Young Adult Library Service Association (A division of the ALA)

10 Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy

THE CHRONICLES OF PROFESSIONALIZATION: THE EXPERT, THE CHILD, AND THE MAKING OF AMERICAN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

Rebekah Fitzsimmons

May 2015

Chair: Kenneth Kidd Major: English

This dissertation examines the effect of professional culture on canon formation in 20th century American children’s literature. It focuses on the rise of the expert in children’s literature and the attempts of those experts to increase their cultural capital through professionalization. This project examines the professional histories of children’s literature experts such as librarians, teachers, publishers, booksellers, and academics. I will demonstrate that no one profession is responsible for the shape of the children’s literature canon. Rather, the ebb and flow of influence between these professions has created instabilities and controversies that contemporary children’s literature scholars struggle to reconcile today. I argue that the genres and canons of children’s literature were shaped not only by a historically changing notion of the child, but also by competing professional missions and variable levels of institutional power amongst those professions. Examining the processes of knowledge formation, cultural authority, and canonization through the lens of professionalization allows this study to combine previously written histories of children’s literature and American childhood with a more in depth concentration on genre, taste culture, and marketing techniques.

11 To illuminate these histories, my dissertation examines the controversial publication histories of canonical children’s texts such as The Cat in the Hat, The

Wizard of Oz, and Stuart Little. By studying these now classic texts at the moment of publication, this project examines the way children’s literature professionals used their cultural authority to apply specific taste hierarchies and evaluative criteria to these texts in order to act as institutional gatekeepers and prevent materials they deemed lowbrow from reaching children. By placing the publication histories of these texts within the broader historical context, along with cultural artifacts and paratextual elements, this project demonstrates how the children’s book buying public were often subject to conflicting messages from children’s literature experts about which books were best for children. This approach historicizes issues in the contemporary children’s literature market and elucidates the power dynamics and cultural authority struggles at play in the shifts towards new genres and digital media.

12 CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION: PROFESSIONALISM AND CHILDHOOD IN AMERICA

Over the course of the past century, the American conception of the child, childhood, and the role childhood plays in personal development has shifted dramatically. As scientific methods and fields of study have expanded in the 20th century, so has the physical, psychological, and mental map of a child. With these developments in science, technology, and fields of study, entirely new branches of science have come into being, many of which have proven useful for improving our understanding of childhood. New fields of expertise have emerged, and with them, new ways of thinking about child rearing, discipline, education, safety, and entertainment.

Everywhere the modern American parent looks, there is an expert advising them on what their child should read, watch, eat, play with, avoid, embrace, and desire. In the midst of this complex web of expertise, the study of children’s literature must negotiate a space for its critical analysis in a manner different from many other subfields of English literature studies.

In many sub-fields of literature studies, critical authority lies with authors, professional critics, subject-specific academics, and intellectuals: sometimes these categories overlap. These authority groups, often in concert with one another, decide on representative texts, definitions of a movement, and evaluative criteria of the subfield.

These evaluations weigh the aesthetic value, formal elements, political importance, and symbolic value of a group of texts or authors. Over time, these outlines of a field become more rigid, supported by anthologies, college course descriptions, syllabi, published academic works, and other institutional signs of support. As John Guillory argues in his book Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, canon

13 formation is both political and representative, driven by more than simply aesthetic evaluations. He argues that judgments made by these groups are only a part of the canonization process “and that it is only by understanding the social function and institutional protocols of the school that we will understand how works are preserved, reproduced, and disseminated over successive generations and centuries” (Guillory vii).

Guillory argues that the university plays a central role in determining, perpetuating, and reinforcing the canon. For example, a graduate student specializes in a specific sub- field and becomes a credentialed expert on a specific time period, literary movement, author, or genre. This credential crowns her as an authority in that specialization, and garners her the right to join the group of intellectuals that determine the boundaries and key texts that shape her sub-field. When that graduate student becomes a professor, she teaches classes based on her expertise and trains new graduate students in that sub-field.

However, the academic approach to children’s literature does not entirely adhere to this pattern. First, it is a rare academic field in which the body of literature in question is defined solely by its intended audience: children’s literature is comprised of texts written for children, a definitional pattern that does not apply to Romantic poetry or gothic novels. Second, children’s literature is rarely produced by members of its intended audience. Children do not write the picture books or early readers that fill their elementary school days, while the 20th century American literary novel was often written by a member of American literary culture, often in response to literary works of their contemporaries.1 Third, the ranks of experts involved in determining the boundaries of

1 Some children’s literature scholars, like Perry Nodelman and Karen Coats, argue a comparison between postcolonial literature and children’s literature, in which the subaltern figure is written about by a colonial

14 the children’s literature field and its canon expand beyond academics, critics, intellectuals, and authors. Additionally, teachers, librarians, publishers, specialized booksellers, filmmakers, parents, and even children themselves have a great influence on the texts that will become canonized. The evaluation and use of children’s literature extends beyond the literature of other academic fields in that it blurs the boundaries between the literary, the instructional, and the sentimental. Some children’s texts are passed on generation after generation not because of any great innovation in form or revolutionary approach to style, but because they are loved by parents, who seek to pass that love down to the next generation.

Finally, the complexity of children’s literature can be partly attributed to the complicated nature of childhood. Since this field of literature is defined by its readers, then the very nature of that audience must be examined carefully. Over the course of the 20th century, various professions emerged that sought to do just that. This project seeks to track the origins of some of those experts back to the early stages of each profession. By examining the process of professionalization of these occupations, such as children’s library services, elementary education, and children’s literature publishing, this project will demonstrate how each profession has had a hand in shaping the

American conception of childhood and the outlines of the children’s literature field. This project will demonstrate that as each group sought to professionalize and raise its social and cultural capital within the hierarchy of American professions, the process affected the way American parents and children accessed, read, enjoyed, consumed, and understood children’s literature. Ultimately, my interest is less focused on figure. Coats interprets this colonizing force as a patriarchal one, while Nodleman cites Edward Said in The Hidden Adult.

15 professionalism in and of itself, but more focused on the relation of professionalism to the formation of children’s literature within 20th century American literary culture.

Rise of Professionalism in America

The rise of professionalism in America is tied to the rise of industrialism and the corporate capitalist system. Starting in the late 19th century and continuing into the

20th, as industrialism opened new avenues of production and as science expanded to explore new ideas, more occupations turned towards a systematic professionalization in order to locate themselves within the hierarchy of workers and to establish their place within the rapidly changing economy. As Magali Sarfatti Larson argues in her book The

Rise of Professionalism: A Sociological Analysis, many of these new professions were engaged in creating a new market, both for their area of specialized knowledge, or expertise, and for themselves as a product. Professionalization, then, is the process by which the expert seeks to “constitute and control a market” for his or her specialized skills or body of knowledge (Larson xvii; emphasis original). With the appropriate credentials, education, and professional associations, an expert can become a professional. That professional is then marketed as a product as much as any medical procedure or legal service and is able to translate his or her skills into social and economic rewards.

When it comes to key terms, in this project generally, “expert” refers to the broad category of highly educated, specialized workers, “occupation” refers to a specific subset of specialized jobs, and “profession” describes a specific group of experts who have undertaken the processes of professionalization described in this section. However, a

16 number of the texts that I work with, including Larson and Bledstein, use these terms interchangeably, sometimes as synonyms.

Larson further argues that the success of an occupation in its attempts to professionalize hinges on the ability to monopolize a market, both through an exclusivity of knowledge and through the support of the state in limiting non-credentialed practitioners from providing competition. This monopoly on knowledge allowed professionals to standardize practices within their field as well as police quality, participants, and content. Further, based on the economic principles of scarcity, the more exclusive the profession, the higher the social and economic rewards. This concept of a monopoly on knowledge greatly affects the field of children’s literature, as no one profession has ever successfully claimed a monopoly on knowing and understanding what literature is good for or popular with children. Multiple groups, including teachers, librarians, publishers, psychologists, sociologists, and booksellers, claim competing authority in this field: each group has a different approach to the use and understanding of children’s literature. As a result, it is often unclear to non-experts, especially parents, which group’s advice to follow, especially when those groups disagree. As we will see, many of these differences in expert opinion end up being settled by the mass-market and popular appeals to the non-expert audience.

In his book, The Culture of Professionalism: The Middle Class and the

Development of Higher Education in America, Burton Bledstein joins Larson in acknowledging that during the turn of the century, professionalism rapidly became associated with the middle-class. Aspiring to be a part of one of the established professions often meant aspiring to an upwardly mobile position. Further, certain

17 occupations invoked the process of professionalization in an attempt to raise the class level of that occupation. The steps taken by members of these occupations, like establishing professional organizations, holding national conferences, establishing certificates, and creating university degree programs, were all a part of the process that

Larson identifies as standardization. These steps were also an attempt to establish certain standards of professionalism that could be used to demand higher wages, full- time employment, improved job titles, and a higher level of respect from employers and from associated fields. Many of the organizations and professions involved with developing and promoting children’s literature began their drive to professionalize simultaneously, which led to struggles over legitimacy, authority, and the kind of monopoly on knowledge that Larson argues is necessary for successful professionalization. These turf wars between developing professions laid the groundwork for some of the larger instabilities within the field of children’s literature, many of which remain controversial today. Examining the professional formations around children’s literature will allow me to unpack some of those instabilities in productive and meaningful ways.

Larson’s definition of professional also includes the appearance of serving the community selflessly. She argues those in the original professions (law, medicine, and religion) had specific claims to helping the community and were often viewed as excluded from the marketplace. With the rise of professionalism, this myth of separation from the market remained, and professional organizations often portrayed themselves as working towards the good of the general population through research, collaboration, and improved practices (189-190). For example, medical professionals emphasized

18 their desire to better care for individuals and to standardize practices of care so everyone could be ensured of proper and modern scientific health care, regardless of wealth or status. These claims helped medical professionals appear altruistic and democratic, despite the fact that doctors with appropriate credentials could make more money on the open market. Larson terms this concept “social credit” and allows that a certain amount of social credit is needed from the public at large in order to allow the profession to do its work successfully (21-25).

When this social credit is lost, professionals encounter some of the effects detailed in Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. Hofstadter argues that professionals who have lost their social credit are critiqued and challenged for having an easy life, for being too focused on their own interests, for not actually doing the world any good, and for occupying a place in the middle-class that the hard working, common sense individual cannot challenge. For example, during the periods of widespread anti-intellectualism in America that Hofstadter describes, a teacher is more likely to be met with criticism about having summers off, an easy schedule, and playing with children all day instead of doing “real” work. Professionals who have lost this social credit are often believed to be charlatans or trespassers in middle-class society.

When it comes to the professions associated with children, the claim to social credit is more easily made, for obvious reasons: working with children is vital to the survival of any society. American society is naturally predisposed to award these professions a certain amount of sentimental and social credit.2 However, the threshold

2 The high levels of social credit attributed to work with children can occasionally work against claims of professionalism. Teachers, librarians, and children’s authors, for instance, sometimes face claims that they should be paid less money for their labor because they should be doing their jobs out of love of children and literature or from a sense of calling.

19 for violating the boundary between social credit-accruing work and market forces is much more fragile for these fields. Educators, librarians, and children’s book publishers must avoid overt entrance into the marketplace because American society holds that the (primarily white middle-class) child that these professionals serve should be kept clear of all market concerns. Jacqueline Rose famously points out that the dirty, heavily circulated nature of money threatens to contaminate the pure child in her seminal work

The Case of Peter Pan: or, The Impossibility of Children’s Fiction.3 Lisa Jacobson expands on this theory in her book, Children and the American Mass Market in the Early

Twentieth Century. In her discussion of post-war American consumer society and its shift to targeting children as consumers, she writes:

Many early-twentieth-century Americans found children’s consumption unsettling because it raised profound questions about what constituted a protected childhood in an age of mass culture and mass consumption… child consumers were increasingly exposed to the selling pressures of the marketplace and the sensual allures of mass culture. (3)

So while all those in a profession must be careful not to appear too profit driven, those in professions that are exclusively concerned with children must be especially careful: attacks based on profit-motivation are even more detrimental to the child-centred professional’s cause. This boundary is rarely invoked for educators and librarians, who are usually not the ones selling or profiting from texts, but is more often a concern for booksellers and publishers. They must continue to professionalize and unify, and their products must claim a certain amount of social credit (reading education for elementary

3 “The association of money and childhood is not a comfortable one. Money is something impure. It circulates and passes from hand to hand (children are warned that coins are dirty). Money relies on traffic. The value of a piece of money depends on what it can be exchanged for (goods) and what it can be compared with (more, or less, money) . . . Perhaps talking about children's fiction as commerce makes it too clear that what we are dealing with is an essentially adult trade. The association of children and trade is, however, a dangerous one” (87-88).

20 school children, didactic problem novels for teens). Otherwise, their products may be declared mere mass-market “trash” and dismissed by the professional elite. In such cases, other professions will act as the authorities that maintain the gates of good culture and taste and are quick to dismiss pretenders to the professional throne. The tension between professional social credit and the market is a major narrative thread in the story of the children’s literature professionals discussed in this project.

Through the professionalization process, the emerging occupations associated with children or children’s literature shaped not only the concept of the American child, but also the formation of the American children’s literature canon(s). This project investigates the interaction between these evolving groups of professionals and their influence on the field of children’s literature in 20th century America. The primary professions discussed in this project include children’s literature librarians, teachers, publishers, and booksellers. This project argues that as each of these groups carved out professional territory and defended the legitimacy of their own emerging field, they created and sustained a specific vision of childhood, American children’s culture, and children’s literature. These sometimes disparate visions of childhood supported each group’s professional goals and created opportunities for increased influence on children’s culture over the course of the century. As each group of professionals sought to gain prestige within the hierarchy of American professional culture, they relied on increases in internal professional standards, in credentials granted to members, in professional organizations with public visibility, and in appeals to legitimacy directed at other established professions, the popular media, and the public. These groups often sought to define themselves in terms of a new vision of the American child and

21 presented a path through which their profession might help American parents to raise a more ideal child in a less ideal world. The ways in which these groups (un)successfully interacted with the mass-market and mass culture also largely informed their success in influencing the canonicity of key texts and their position within the hierarchy of professions.

For many of those groups, children’s literature was a key element in that path.

According to Rose, children’s fiction is an impossibility because it hangs on the

“impossible relation between adult and child” (1). Her ground-breaking theoretical work on children’s literature declares that children’s fiction is therefore also impossible. She writes:

Children’s fiction is clearly about that relation, but it has the remarkable characteristic of being about something which it hardly ever talks of. Children’s fiction sets up a world in which the adult comes first (author, maker, giver) and the child comes after (reader, product, receiver), but where neither of them enter the space in between. (1-2)

This impossible relation features heavily at the turn of the 20th century, as adults were heavily invested in creating, reforming, and authoring theories about “the child.”

Children were rarely involved in the production of these theories or in the execution of reforms that would affect the ways they were raised, educated, trained, disciplined, protected, or valued by their families and the state. Further, children are rarely involved in the production or purchase of the literature that they consume, meaning that adults are often responsible for writing, publishing, and purchasing the texts on their behalf.

Scholars like Rose and Perry Nodelman in The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s

Literature, have noted that this leads to the envisioning of “the child” as a general construct, rather than a specific child as an individual. Adults involved with the production side of children’s literature often attempt to write or produce a book that will

22 appeal to “the child” as it is ideally envisioned by the parent, teacher, or librarian who will purchase the book. In order to appeal to this vision of “the child,” authors, publishers, and marketers have to find ways to reassure these gatekeepers that the texts for sale are beneficial in some way to the child and superior to other (purely materialistic) consumer goods.

As professionals like children’s publishers and children’s librarians sought to expand the U.S. market for children’s books in the early part of the 20th century, they were often on the lookout for techniques to persuade parents that books were the ideal consumer product for their child. Parents, already somewhat reassured by the cultural capital of books over other goods, needed to be convinced that purchasing a particular book would bring their child closer to the imagined ideal. As each profession sought to establish its foothold in terms of professional hierarchy, sources of funding, and professional credentialing, they also sought to define the child and children’s literature in ways that would benefit their purposes and persuade non-expert adults that their profession could best enter and negotiate the space between the adult and the child.

The Cultural History of American Childhood

While children have always existed as a vital part of any society, the modern concept of childhood as a distinct stage of development, separate from adulthood, and therefore privileged with special rights, needs, and protections, is a relatively recent invention. Further, the expectations and definitions of childhood are culturally and historically bound. The age at which a boy becomes a man, the rituals that indicate independence from one’s parents, or the tangible signs of clothing or hair style that designate a child’s age and role in society, are all dependent on the national, religious, cultural, and historical moment in which that child is raised. For example, the American

23 child historically differs from the British or European child, being the distinct offspring of a unique environment. According to John Sommerville’s book The Rise and Fall of

Childhood, British visitors to 19th century America “frequently declared that there were no children there! It just did not seem that the precocious and insubordinate youngsters they met in America were the same kind of beings that were being raised in respectable society in England” (177). Sommerville claims this difference could have indicated

America’s forward-thinking in terms of child-centered society, or its cultural lag as a more simple society without the strict rules governing children. However, this observation by British visitors ultimately reveals that adults had a vision of what the child was supposed to be and expected the child to conform to that concept rather than the other way around (177).

The history of childhood in the United States is extremely complex: what follows is a brief summary of the changes and broad patterns of thought in American culture leading into the 20th century to help contextualize the time period under examination in the rest of this project. In general, this project will attempt to move chronologically through the 20th century in its discussion of trends and key texts. It is important to keep in mind, however, that the evolution of childhood is neither a progressive one of improvement over time, nor one of decline. Steven Mintz argues that “there is a tendency to conceive of the history of childhood as a story of steps forward over time: of parental engagement replacing emotional distance, of kindness and leniency supplanting strict and stern punishment, of scientific enlightenment superseding superstition and misguided moralism” (3). He warns scholars against buying into this narrative and instead emphasizes how the cultural value of childhood is shaped by

24 parents, educators, policy makers, and children themselves in response to the historical moment, without an overarching narrative of improvement or decline. Further, our own cultural understanding of childhood is likely to inform the way that we read and interpret conceptions of childhood from different eras.

In the 19th century, Americans were intensely interested in childhood and the family; American children’s literature emerged around 1820. Breaking out of the didactic mold, publishers sought to produce a national literature for children rather than merely to import pirated children’s books from England (MacLeod 88). Children were increasingly seen and represented as innocents in a corrupt world, kept pure by their youth and in need of protection from the evil world. Decreasing birth rates led to an increasing sentimental value for children (Hulbert 35). As Viviana Zelizer wrote in

Pricing the Priceless Child: the Changing Social Value of Children, this smaller, more social family gave rise to an affectionate view of children within the social (rather than economic) family unit. Children were rarer, and were no longer merely additional farm hands or potential sources of income but small, precious members of the family with their own desires, needs, and fears, to be cared for and cherished by more affectionate parental figures. While labouring class families were still required to send their children to work in order to sustain themselves, the middle class increasingly began to value childhood as a developmental stage free from work, full of innocent and enjoyable experiences, focused on education, both secular and moral (Mintz 135). It is this model of childhood that many of the pioneers of the children’s literature professions were raised under.

25 For the middle and upper classes, childhood as a special, separate period of life from adulthood meant a separate and special set of literature, toys, furniture, and even space within the home. Childhood was increasingly romanticized, as British Victorian notions of childhood made their way to the United States in the mid-1800s. Anne

MacLeod notes in American Childhood: Essays on Children’s Literature of the

Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries that the 19th century was the highpoint of this romantic notion of childhood:

Conventional opinion idealized childhood as a free, golden period when children were close to God and nature, when ‘the real business of life… [was] play.’ At the popular level, the romantic outlook was sentimental, dwelling on children’s beauty and innocence. At the aesthetic level, romanticism went farther, surrounding childhood with an aura of myth, seeing in children the elemental qualities of nature unspoiled. (118)

Childhood, as represented in literature and art of the age, came to stand for all that the age was not: uncorrupted, pure, innocent, and removed from the business of technology, war, colonialism, and urbanization (Sommerville 132). In order to protect the child from the increasingly dangerous and unsavoury world, mid-19th century reformers became involved with the child saving movement: they passed laws and changed infrastructures to protect the child from exploitation and immorality. Mintz identifies three distinct historical phases of child saving: the first from 1790-1840, the second following the Civil War, and the third coinciding with the Progressive Era, from 1890 to the start of the first World War.4

4 Mintz argues that the first phase was a Christian movement aimed at saving children from corruption and providing them with “order and discipline that their families lacked” (156). The second phase used government intervention to rescue children from “neglect, exploitation and abuse” and passed laws raising the age of sexual consent and removing children from almshouses (156). The third was linked to the Progressive movement.

26 The Progressive Era, which spurred many of the events discussed in this project, focused on a series of reforms aimed at social welfare, poverty, urban problems of sanitation, health care, and workers’ rights, which set the stage for later New Deal policies (156). These concepts of social welfare led to the rise of many of the professions under discussion in this project, including educators, librarians, and child- rearing experts. The Progressive Era introduced new fields of social work, gynecology, obstetrics, and pediatrics, which helped to improve the life expectancy of young children through infancy while educating parents on how to better care for their children. Legal reformers sought new ways to regulate marriage, divorce, adoptions, juvenile delinquency, and child labor as well as to fund programs to aid the poor (Mintz and

Kellogg 119).

Experts and professionals in newly emerging child-centric fields claimed that there were new and better ways to feed, clothe, educate, discipline, protect, and care for the children of the new (20th) century. These experts often advocated for standards that valued the white, upper-middle-class, heterosexual, able-bodied male child as the ideal, leaving females, immigrants, minorities, the disabled, and the poor in the margins of their scientific studies and emerging theories of the child.5 While this new idealized vision of the child encouraged positive reforms in education, health care, child labor, and social welfare, it also produced harsher punishments for children who could not live up to that ideal.6 Many of these Progressive Era reforms were aimed at helping

5 These ideals unfortunately permeate children’s literature for nearly a century. As discussed in Chapter 6, this white, middle-class male as standard reemerges with the concept of the adolescent at mid-century and is initially assumed to be the primary audience for YA literature (Cart, Young Adult 6).

6 According to Mintz: “Progressivism's legacy was mixed . . . it also expanded the definition of the status offenses for which juveniles (but not adults) could be punished, weakened due-process protections for

27 American families adapt to new standards of modern living, as well as aiding immigrants in their transition to American life. According to Mintz and Susan Kellogg in Domestic

Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life: “Between 1890 and 1930, the watchwords of reform were ‘education,’ ‘social science,’ ‘government regulation,’ and

‘professional expertise’”(119). Thus, as the conception of childhood changed, the adult institutional world of schools, prisons, workhouses, hospitals, and government changed with it.

As more adults claimed to know what was good for children at the turn of the 20th century, a vision of the child in need of highly specialized care, directed attention, and scientific study emerged and was placed at the very center of the evolving educational system. Reformers believed that restructuring the way children were educated in the

United States could have a larger effect and eventually improve society as a whole. The

Progressive Era reforms of the American educational system of the late 19th and early

20th century, often associated with the writings of John Dewey, aimed to capitalize on this new vision of the child in order to improve the education system to better reflect

American democratic ideals. According to Anne Lundin in Constructing the Canon of

Children’s Literature: Behind Library Walls and Ivory Towers: “Believing that education could redeem the larger society, [Dewey] positioned the child, as critical to that remaking, at the very center of the school. Defining education essentially as growth,

Dewey believed that the realization of the individual child would foster the fulfillment of democratic society” (12). Hofstadter further argues that, essentially, Dewey recognized that education is naturally about reinforcing dominant structures, and so by putting minors accused of wrongdoing, and instituted harsh measures, including sterilization, for children regarded as feeble-minded” (172).

28 education in the hands of the child, Dewey hoped to undermine those structures (363).

Dewey also expected American infrastructure to support that promise through changes in curriculum, approach, and educational methods (388). By placing this newly conceptualized child, who Hofstadter points out was “no mere intellectual construct but the focus of a set of deep emotional commitments and demands” at the core of the educational reform movement, Dewey and his Progressive Era contemporaries endowed “the child” with the utopian power to change American society (363).

This reform movement led to the growth in educational experts and a rise in expectations of American schools to not only teach children the basics of reading and math, but also teach the basic tenants of American citizenship. Additional professional organizations and groups emerged to help establish, promote, and enforce those new standards. Dewey sought to do away with the passive, memorizing school child and replace that model with a more interactive, cooperative learning experience between students and the teacher (Hartman 10). Coupled with a slate of new laws removing children from the labor market and instituting compulsory school attendance, childhood rapidly became less about ‘play’ and more about school. By the end of the Progressive era, childhood and adolescence began to take on definitions that would be recognizable today (Mintz and Kellogg 60). I argue that the emergence of children’s literature and a group of experts charged with promoting, distributing, and evaluating that literature helped this concept of the child to expand and evolve over the course of the 20th century.

Emerging Consumer Market for and about Children

Most scholars trace the beginnings of the mass market of children’s books to

England, to John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book in 1744. Newbery’s book was

29 “intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss

Polly,” and was tagged with the Latin motto “Delectando momenus” (instruction with delight) (Paul 60-61). Each book came with a pincushion for girls and a ball for boys, thus marrying the themes of instruction and pleasure in a new and commercially savvy way (61). Britain is often seen as the birthplace and incubator of Anglophone contemporary children’s literature and prior to the 20th century, American children’s literature often lagged behind. At that time, importing and pirating British books was far more profitable for American publishers than encouraging and paying American authors to write original works. However, as this project will demonstrate, the U.S. children’s literature publishing industry was slow to develop and overeager to import texts, but through the urging of dedicated professionals in the fields of children’s publishing and librarianship, finally found its footing in the 20th century and outpaced the British side of the industry at mid-century.7 Ellen Key termed the 20th century the Century of the Child, so too was it the century of children’s literature.

The turn of the 20th century in America is a fulcrum point for children’s literature.

Near the end of the 19th century, adult and child culture was not all that separate.

Children often read whatever books they could find and MacLeod lists common texts appropriated by reading children: “Shakespeare, Thackeray, George Eliot, Alcott,

Dickens and the Brontës, Hawthorne, Cooper, and Robert Louis Stevenson” (116).

Adults and children often enjoyed the same past-times and read many of the same

7 Of course, the American children’s literature market did have a bit of an unfair advantage in outpacing the British market, as many British publishing houses were destroyed in the World War II bombings of London. The British publishing industry lost a great deal of equipment, including book plates, which seriously hindered their ability to pick up publishing at the conclusion of the war (Renyolds and Tucker 2- 3). This project considers the effects of World War II on the American and British children’s literature market in Chapter 5.

30 materials. It was far more likely in the late 1800s to find an author writing books or short stories for adults and children. According to Leonard Marcus in Minders of Make

Believe, after the Civil War, “some of the nation’s most distinguished writers (led by

Mark Twain and William Dean Howells) [opted] to write for young readers on occasion, and with such leading magazines as the Atlantic Monthly and The Nation devoting regular review space to the genre” (43). Many of the largest bestselling novels (based on sales) would today be classified as children’s literature.8

Further, this overlap in reading habits can be traced to the rise in periodicals in

America. Literary magazines regularly published stories aimed at younger audiences.

Magazine editors, like Horace Scudder from the Atlantic Monthly, also worked to publish books for children like “The Children’s Book, an anthology of ‘the classics of juvenile literature’” in 1881 (Lundin 14). Even magazines aimed directly at young people, like St.

Nicholas (1873-1940) featured stories and poems by authors who usually wrote for adults. Many canonical classics appeared first as serialized stories in this periodical, edited by Mary Mapes Dodge, including: “Alcott’s Eight Cousins, Thomas Nelson

Page’s Two Little Confederates, Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer Abroad, Rudyard Kipling’s

Just So Stories, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy, and Joel Chandler

Harris’s Daddy Jakes the Runaway” (Murray 115). At that time, it was seen as both acceptable and as not uncommon for a literary author to occasionally take up his or her pen on behalf of juvenile storytelling.

8 Those titles include: “from 1865 to 1879, Hans Brinker, Little Women, and Innocents Abroad; from 1870 to 1879, Little Men, The Hoosier School-Master, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; from 1880 to 1889, Uncle Remus, Heidi, Treasure Island, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Little Lord Fauntleroy; and from 1890 to 1899, Black Beauty” (Marcus, Minders 43)

31 Not only did 19th century children read adult texts, but adults also read juveniles.

MacLeod notes: “The twilight of Victorianism found many Americans weary of unbridled materialism and political corruption” (117). Further, the romantic view of childhood, both in life and as depicted in juvenile literature of the time, stood in stark contrast to the cultural mood of the adult world. The turn of the 20th century marked a growing rift between the haves and have-nots: “in spite of exuberant economic success, late nineteenth-century America was beset by social strains: poverty, slums, exploited labor, destitute children, urban crime, and growing class conflict. By the 1890s, consciousness of all these ills was high” (118). It was this awareness and attempts to reform the growing social ills that marked American culture leading up to World War I (118).

Children’s literature for many adults at the turn of the 20th century served as a nostalgic turn towards the agrarian, peaceful, idyllic past while permitting them access to the comfort and romantic world of the child. Reading these texts permitted adults to escape the current climate of social troubles for a more Romantic view of the world.

However, by the end of the Progressive Era, a cultural separation stood between childhood and adulthood, much as it does today (Ariès 37). This separation was reflected in some of the institutional changes mentioned previously, but it was also represented in the growing number of children’s books published in America. MacLeod argues that family literature of the early 20th century showed that adults and children were different and “that there was a necessary space between childhood and adulthood that children had to grow across, so to speak. It was not a matter of separation, exactly; children were thoroughly integrated into family and community in these books…

Integrated into, but not occupying quite the same space” (MacLeod 199). She argues

32 that children’s literature showed that children were meant to remain focused on childhood issues, while adults took care of the serious problems and ensured that each child was safe and loved (199). This view of childhood often reflected an upper-middle class white reality that was difficult to maintain for poor, immigrant, and minority families, both in urban and isolated rural settings. However, this belief did encompass many of the ideals of the Romantic child that originated with Locke and Rousseau.

As children’s literature began to reflect the more romantic, idyllic visions of childhood, the cultural gap between it and more “mature” forms of literature widened.

Beverly Lyon Clark argues in Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s

Literature in America that academics of American literature generally agree on how this split took place:

Elizabeth Renker argues that American literature created itself as a profession by shedding femininity and appropriating the language of science, a change fueled by two world wars.…Not for nothing was a 1915 manifesto of early-twentieth-century criticism by Van Wyck Brooks…titled America’s Coming-of-Age. If nineteenth-century America was pervaded by the metaphor of America as child, then the nation’s emergence as a world power in the twentieth century was marked by a desire to put away childish things. (Clark 58-9)

The academic institutions that were also attempting to professionalize and establish prestige for the growing body of original American literature did so by exploiting and widening the gap between “legitimate” (i.e. white, male, upper-middle class, Protestant, educated) literature and feminine and/or juvenile literature. It is no coincidence that many of the pioneers of children’s literature were women, since it was an area of literature that the “serious” (male) literary critics had dismissed. I will argue that the professionalization of these more female-centric occupations, such as children’s librarianship and children’s literature publishing, was an attempt to regain some of the

33 cultural capital lost during this split, using the social credit that many of the academics and literary elite discarded.

In her 1978 article “Children’s Literature: Theory and Practice,” Felicity Hughes asserts that the novel was originally a “family genre.” In order to shake the novel’s “low” reputation as entertainment rather than art, novelists like Henry James distanced themselves from women and children readers. She writes:

The ‘serious novel’ would have to earn its laurels, or win its spurs, at the cost of being unsuitable for women and children – beyond their reach not only because it dealt with facts of life from which such people had to be ‘protected,’ but because it was too difficult, requiring not only maturity but discrimination beyond the reach of all but the highly educated. Since no- one can start off life highly educated, children are ipso facto disqualified. (544)

Hughes argues that the American literary elite like James believed that the “serious” novel is only accessible to the elite few who have been properly educated in the best schools and brought up with the highest taste and discernment. Literature that is accessible to the masses, the uneducated, or the immature is then, by definition,

“unserious” and unworthy of scholarly or critical attention. Hughes continues: “popularity will diminish [the novel’s] chances of finding the elite audience the existence of which will justify its status as art. [James] thinks that being exclusive is a necessary condition for novels being serious. Popular novels cannot be good, they must be vulgar” (547). I highlight this section of her argument because this debate resurfaces again and again in the debate over popular, bestselling books, especially books designed for a female or young audience. A book that is accessible to millions of people does not maintain a

“serious” level of exclusivity, and, therefore, cannot be considered a good novel by the literary elite. This shift in the literary landscape, caused by the professionalization of

American literature intellectuals and novelists, cleared the way for the creation of

34 children’s literature as a field of art and study in its own right, even if it was lower on the cultural capital spectrum. A new form of literature aimed directly at a newly envisioned child opened up new avenues for writers, illustrators, publishers, and book distributors

(including librarians) to think about their work, especially in relation to the mass-market.

This new vision of the child also changed in relation to the child’s place in the consumer market. Prior to the reform era of the late 1800s, children were viewed as a vital part of the family economy: children often served as economic earners. Children were either vital parts of family farms and businesses or earners in various apprenticeships or low-wage positions. However, as childhood came to be valued as a time removed from the economic realities of life, children were increasingly seen as removed from the consumer sphere. Zelizer formulates the child’s new position as

“economically ‘worthless’ but emotionally ‘priceless,’” (11). She argues that children were increasingly shifted to a non-commercial “extra commercium” space where

“[p]roperly loved children, regardless of social class, belonged in a domesticated, nonproductive world of lessons, games, and token money” (11). She concludes: “the economic and sentimental value of children were thereby declared to be radically incompatible. Only mercenary or insensitive parents violated the boundary by accepting the wages and labour contributions of the useful child” (11). Mintz and Kellogg also note that this change in value of the child impacted the very purpose of the family, giving rise to the ‘companionate family’ rather than the family as an economic cooperative unit.

They argue that the middle class stopped considering their children to be “economic assets” who would work as apprentices or servants and contribute to the household economy. “Instead they became economic dependents requiring significant investments

35 in the form of education. The effect of these changes was to transform the family from a public unit serving as workplace, a school, and a welfare agency into a more private, specialized unit” (Mintz and Kellogg xix). So, the ideal vision of childhood romanticized not only the child’s relationship to adults and protected them from adult themes of literature, it also attempted to protect them from the economic realities of the world.

This economic shift came at a time when increasing amounts of specialized products were being made available to children. Many of those products were also increasingly recommended by child rearing experts as vital parts of a child’s upbringing.

This dialectic created an unsettling feeling in many parents: many struggled over the contradiction of protecting a child from the marketplace while exposing them to increased levels of conspicuous consumption (Jacobson 3). Child rearing experts exhorted parents to love their children enough to keep them out of the labor market, but at the same time encouraged increased levels of product consumption on behalf of the same child. “Paradoxically, even as child labour laws imposed new taboos on the commercial exploitation of children, child consumers were increasingly exposed to the selling pressures of the marketplace and the sensual allures of mass culture” (3).

New experts began to write books of advice for parents on how best to ensure their children passed through the newly discovered standardized stages of development in order to become well-adjusted and avoid any abnormalities (Sommerville 199-203).

Dr. L. Emmett Holt, one of America’s first pediatricians, published The Care and

Feeding of Children (1894) and Diseases of Infancy and Childhood (1897), and Dr. G.

Stanley Hall, the first Ph.D. in psychology in the U.S., published The Contents of

Children’s Minds on Entering School (1894) and Adolescence (1904) (Hulbert 1-62).

36 Books about childhood, child rearing, and scientific methods of feeding, weaning, toilet training, and disciplining children became extremely popular. One of the bestselling books of all time is Dr. Spock’s 1946 book titled The Common Sense Book of Baby and

Child Care. The post-WWII era saw a meteoric rise in products for children (games, toys, films, hygiene products, clothes, and furniture) as well as literature, guides, and advice about children for parents. The effects of the post-war mass-market on the children’s literature canon were extremely potent, as the second half of this project will demonstrate.

Thus, the concept of the child at the turn of the 20th century had a tenuous and liminal place in consumer culture that would continue to be complicated by Progressive

Era reforms, changing concepts of childhood, and the rise in mass consumer culture in

America. This project seeks to understand how the child-centered professional navigated this liminal space and helped to change the vision of the child and children’s literature. I argue that these professionals attempted to establish their authority by marketing themselves as the true and best arbiter of children’s literature. The tension between market forces and professional interests often affected the ways in which professionals approached their areas of influence within the field. At times, promoting the consumption of high quality children’s literature forced these professionals to interact with the mass-market in ways that endangered their social credit and professional authority.

Canon Formation

In “Sentiment and Significance: The Impossibility of Recovery in the Children’s

Literature Canon or, The Drowning of The Water-Babies,” Deborah Stevenson posits that while the concept of canon has become increasingly problematized in our current

37 political climate, from a pedagogical point of view, “we employ ‘canon’ to refer to that list of works we consider requisite for understanding a part of literature; that, in short, is what we must teach if we wish students to comprehend a subject” (113). In other words, traditionally, canons are most often established by the academic and expert audience of a specific literature and are considered the core set of texts that must be read, studied, and understood in order for an individual to be considered well-read within a specific field. This definition places the context of canon squarely within academic discourse and makes it the purview of experts at the university and professional level; for example, professors of English are tasked with instructing future generations on the key texts of

19th century British literature or of Romantic poetry.

Like John Guillory’s project, this dissertation is specifically interested in the process of canon formation. This project aims to examine the professional groups engaged in this process and the infrastructures and techniques they used in order to establish a core set of texts for the emerging literary subset of children’s literature. In examining this process of canon formation, I claim that there are multiple canons of children’s literature and that many were designed and promoted in an effort to support assertions of professionalism from child-centered experts. This project will examine the methods by which these canons were assembled, supported by professional mechanisms, and challenged by competing groups of professionals throughout the 20th century.

In addition to these professionally assembled canons, I also intend to incorporate

Stevenson’s theories on canon formation, which are especially pronounced in children’s literature. She claims that since the children’s literature canon formation is situated

38 outside of the traditional academy, there are actually two branches of that canon to keep in mind when discussing children’s literature classics. She writes that there exists a “canon of sentiment,” which consists of the texts that people love and pass down to their children due to a sentimental attachment to the story, and a “canon of significance,” which more closely resembles the traditional canons of other literatures and which is tended by cultural gatekeepers, tastemakers, and eventually, academics.

Stevenson contends that the canon of significance is more closely associated with complexity, literary merit, and the representation of specific time periods, cultures, historical moments, or formal experiments.

She further argues that the “long academic silence on children’s literature” comes partly from the relocation of the canon formation outside of the academy and from a

“lack of critical tools for its analysis” like academic anthologies and collections.9

Stevenson goes on to discuss the unique role that “beloved” books play in the children’s literature canon.

The goal of teaching the love of literature has been a commonly stated aim of libraries and library associations for years; children’s literature criticism, which for years came almost entirely from library science, speaks with similar enthusiasm of the love of individual books and of literature. The assumption of the necessity of such love is so great that the reasons for it are never explained; it is never clear why a love of literature or reading is necessary in order to profit from the activity. No other crucial activity or cornerstone of society is couched in terms of affection: we do not attempt to instill a love of law, a love of eating right, a love of exercise, a love of regular dental checkups. (122)

I highlight this quote at length because much of Stevenson’s argument is framed with the language of a professional canon: librarians aimed to teach a “love of literature” and

9 Since the publication of Stevenson’s article in 1997, anthologies and academic collections have been published, including The Norton Anthology of Children’s Literature (2005) and annotated academic editions of classic texts.

39 so a set of texts associated with that love is now identifiable. Stevenson notes that this emphasis on love has led to the downfall of many “classic” texts that fit all the requirements of a teachable, complex text that upholds the professional goals of teachers or academics simply because readers did not love the book enough to hand it down to their children (126). She also argues that “beloved” status may actually be misleading: many children interact with abridged versions or film versions of a story, rather than reading the actual text from the “significant canon.” She notes that Alice’s

Adventures in Wonderland is and probably always will be considered a classic of children’s literature because of its place in the Golden Age and its revolutionary approach to writing for children. However, the average child today is more likely to watch the Disney film adaptation or read an abridged illustrated version of the text than to encounter the complete original version from 1865 (126). Therefore, Alice’s “beloved” status is based on its cultural adaptations, not on the pure text itself.

Stevenson concludes that projects of recovery, or the “rescue” of significant children’s texts from obscurity, is a purely academic project, as it is extremely rare for a book to be able to find its place in the beloved canon of sentiment once the connection and generational tradition of the story has been lost (113, 126). She argues that the

“academic canon formation described by Richard Ohmann as taking place ‘in the interaction between large audiences and gatekeeper intellectuals,’ is not the process that creates lasting classics in children’s literature (‘Shaping’ 383)” (113). Children’s literature academics, coming to the project of canon formation from a much later position in the timeline, have specific goals in installing historically significant texts like

40 The Water-Babies into the academic canon. However, those texts are unlikely to reenter the canon of sentiment.

For the purposes of this dissertation, the discussion of canon will reflect both the sentimental canon recognized and appreciated by the general reading public as well as the canon of significance as defined and shaped by experts within the field of children’s literature. I am most interested in the shifts in the canon of significance based on the rise and fall of influence of different children’s literature professionals, such as the children’s literature librarians, book publishers, teachers, educationists, critics, academics, and booksellers. Further, I am interested in the tensions between these two canons; specifically, texts that remained sentimental favorites for long enough that they were eventually admitted into various professional canons of significance. It is my assertion that the professionalizing process for various groups within the field opened new avenues for certain types of books to enter either or both of these canons.

In my initial approach to this project, it was my intention to present the professional histories of a number of different occupations (including librarians, teachers, publishers, booksellers, authors, filmmakers, and academics) and analyze the work each group did in defining, promoting, and encouraging the growth of a professionally motivated canon of children’s texts with equal balance. However, extensive research demonstrated that it was the children’s librarians of the earliest part of the 20th century who sought to shape the sentimental canon into something resembling a canon of significance by molding young minds to love and appreciate texts of significant literary quality. By virtue of being the first group of professionals to take an interest in children’s literature, the history and evolution of librarians dominates the

41 formation, shape, and composition of the children’s literature canon. I discovered that the foundations laid by children’s librarians in the first half of the 20th century continue to support the field of children’s literature study today and I will argue that their infrastructures and standards continue to inform most of the work done in children’s literature today. While I still examine the professional histories of teachers, publishers, booksellers, and academics, their influence on the field of children’s literature and the emerging canon of books will most often be presented in relation to the legacy of children’s librarians.

Early on in the professional development of librarianship, Melville Dewey advocated for the outsourcing of aesthetic judgments about texts to university scholars and professional critics.10 Placing the process of canon formation outside librarians’ purview allowed them to focus on what Dewey believed to be the more important task: providing the “best books” to the public in the most efficient way possible. Those individuals responsible for laying the groundwork for professional library work believed experts in the academy should act as literary critics, judges, and evaluators.11 The professoriate was in charge of categorizing texts as highbrow literature or lowbrow trash, while the librarians were expected to then put the good literature into the hands of

10 One of Melville Dewey’s personal crusades was the simplification of the English language; specifically, through the elimination of doubled letters that did not affect pronunciation. Throughout his career, Dewey altered the spelling of his own name (Melvile Dewey, Melvil Dui): for simplicity, I have standardized my usage to the original spelling of his name, but some of my sources use these alternate spellings. For more see: Wiegand, Wayne A. Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey.

11 “Both the circulation of policies of the libraries and the tactics of the new literary curriculum in the lower schools were designed to teach the American population not only what to read but how to read it. The special concern of the upper-level English department was the identification, preservation, and dissemination of a narrowly defined category, the high literary or, more simply and colloquially, literature itself” (Radway Feeling 139).

42 a public that was rapidly becoming more literate and more interested in literature as a leisure pursuit (Grunzke 173).

The exception to this outsourcing was in children’s literature. Dewey “believed that cultured women had a natural talent in distinguishing ‘good’ from ‘bad’ reading.

Thus, children’s librarians were granted more autonomy in shaping canons and in assuming cultural roles of guardianship over children’s reading” (Lundin 31). Children’s librarians, unlike their colleagues, were expected to be experts in library functions and in the intellectual life of children. The assumption that women would so easily be able to intuit or judge children’s literature was often tied to the assumption that women were more nurturing and motherly. Theoretically, even those women without children of their own would be naturally superior at evaluating and recommending children’s books.

More practically, employing a female children’s librarian cost the public library system one-third to one-half of what it cost to employ a male children’s librarian.12

It was a group of female children’s librarians at the turn of the 20th century, that began to advocate for an improved children’s literature in America. Jacqueline Eddy describes this faction in Bookwomen: Creating an Empire in Children’s Book Publishing as a “metaphorical matriarchy” and “a professional nucleus that helped to develop the

‘library faith,’ a subcategory of the progressive ‘gospel’ of social welfare” (11;

33). Eddy’s text helped to bring new attention to these female pioneers of children’s literature, which also included female pioneers in publishing and in bookstores designed

12 According to Weigland, “Hiring college-educated women fit Dewey's concept of librarianship's professional boundaries. Their credentials indicated they possessed the right 'character' for librarianship, and thus would come to Columbia knowing the 'best reading' and understanding the rules by which it was determined. Because they were grateful for new professional opportunities, they would also come for less money (George Baker was hired at $1000 salary, the Wellesley Half Dozen for $500 each.) Everything fit together nicely. Although he did not say it, Dewey was, he believed, setting an example for the rest of librarianship; he was recruiting a work force with high character for low cost” (85).

43 for children. Anne Lundin’s book Constructing the Canon of Children’s Literature:

Behind Library Walls and Ivory Towers likewise details the important contributions of many of these female pioneers and their male colleagues who played important roles in the development of children’s literature from behind the library counter.

Theoretical Framework

This project relies on various forms of academic research, including histories of childhood, histories of children’s literature in America, and histories of professional developments in the fields of education, library science, child-rearing, and academia.

While these histories are all well-documented and have been extensively analyzed in isolation, the academic intervention at work here brings these histories into conversation. This study will be engaged with various theoretical concepts, including genre definitions, highbrow/lowbrow taste cultures, canonization, and consumer culture, specifically as it relates to the emerging field of children’s consumer culture of 20th century America. My examinations of taste cultures are built around the theories of

Bourdieu, Herbert Gans, Joan Shelly Rubin, Janice Radway, and John Guillory.

Theories of professionalism, such as Larson’s, Bledstein’s, and Glazer and Slater’s

Unequal Colleagues were extremely helpful in my discussion of professional culture in

America and within children’s literature in specific. My examinations of consumer culture and its relationship to children’s literature was greatly informed by Cohen’s A

Consumers’ Republic, Beverly Lyon Clark, Seiter’s Sold Separately, and Langer’s

Commodified Enchantment. Histories of book consumption and bookselling were also extremely useful in formulating this project: books like Radway’s Reading the Romance,

Elberse’s Blockbusters, Collins’s Bring on the Books for Everybody, and Miller’s

Reluctant Capitalists, among others. Finally, scholarship on the history of children’s

44 literature, such as works by Marcus, Mintz, Lundin, Clark, MacLeod, and Murry have been foundational in building my own scholarly understanding of these various professions. This theoretical approach is combined with analysis of cultural artifacts, like advertisements for books and bestseller lists, as well as analysis of paratextual elements, such as book jacket blurbs and Newbery Medal stickers.

This project argues that the increasing mass consumer culture of 20th century

America placed the idealized child within an ever increasing locus of consumer products and that at stake in the competition for rank in the hierarchy of professionalization was the ability for each group to serve as tastemakers. As tastemakers, the recommendations of a specific profession would hold the most weight with parents and therefore retain a monetary value in the marketplace. Thus, the competition for rank and status among teachers, librarians, child-rearing experts, publishers, and academics was not merely one of intellectual prowess, but also of financial and cultural capital. The rise and decline of influence of these professional groups not only affected the social rank of its members, but also the very real financial value of expert endorsement and recommendation when it came to the texts that would become an accepted part of the children’s literature canon. Further, this project will discuss how the tension between public approval, professional social credit, and the mass market spurred these various professional fields to higher levels of professionalism. These steps towards standardization and professional infrastructures eventually meant more specific definitions of children’s literature, more competitive methods of marketing, and more competition between professions.

45 Each chapter will seek to identify ways in which the development of a child- centered profession (teachers, librarians, publishers, booksellers, or academics) functioned within a locus of increased professionalization in American society. I will demonstrate how the struggle for status within the hierarchy of that professional world affected the claims of each group on the field of children’s literature. Each chapter will therefore expose some of the historical instabilities in the definition of American children’s literature and seek to unpack those instabilities or moments of crisis as rooted in professional disagreements. In doing so, it is my goal to help elucidate the ways that contemporary shifts in children’s and young adult literature have historic precedent.

In service of these goals, each chapter of this dissertation will focus on a specific historical moment in the development of American children’s literature. Chapter 2,

“Recommended for Purchase by Expert,” will examine the process of professionalization of librarians, specifically children’s librarians in free public libraries from 1890 to 1920. It contrasts this history with the evolution of publishing in the United

States. Chapter 2 examines the evolution of children’s reading rooms in public libraries, as pioneering leaders such as Caroline Hewins and Anne Carroll Moore struggled to acquire increasing levels of authority, prestige, and recognition within American literary culture. Chapter 2 will do a close reading of lists of recommended books written by these women, as well as take specific note of texts that were intentionally left off of those lists, like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Chapter 2 places early librarians’ designation of Oz as a lowbrow fantasy series in conversation with the emerging infrastructures of library professionalism, specifically prizing mechanisms and cross- occupation cooperative projects like Children’s Book Week. This chapter demonstrates

46 that for the first third of the 20th century, children’s librarians were able to exert enormous amounts of influence over other experts in their field and were able to shape the emerging field of children’s literature to fit a specific middlebrow vision of childhood, literature, and culture because of their successful professionalization.

Chapter 3, “Hop on Pop,” will look at the process of professionalization undertaken by teachers, focusing specifically on the growing divide between primary school teachers and the ranks of “professional educationists” in university departments of education and government bureaucracies from 1870-1950. This divide ultimately meant classroom teachers, who were overwhelmingly young women, were unable to successfully acquire professional levels of authority, autonomy, or respect while the educationist suffered from a specific anti-intellectual backlash because of a loss of social credit. Chapter 3 examines the professional controversy of the highly publicized

“Reading Wars” of the late 1950s and argues that the split between classroom teachers and the educationists over the proper way to teach reading allowed a space for publishers to produce mass-market products, namely early reader picture books, to usurp the professional authority of teachers. Examining the publishing histories of Little

Bear by Else Minarik and The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Suess, in the context of popular culture critiques of reading instruction, such as Why Johnny Can’t Read by Rudolph

Flesch, helps to further demonstrate the growing tension between the mass market and educationally-minded professionals like teachers and librarians.

Chapter 4, “All Fall Down,” focuses on the growing tension between cultural gatekeepers like children’s literature librarians and mass-market figures like children’s literature publishers at mid-century, 1930-1960. Chapter 4 emphasizes that the political,

47 economic, and cultural shifts of the Great Depression, World War II and the post-war

Baby Boom greatly altered the field of children’s literature, forcing librarians to actively engage with issues of censorship and professional entanglements with the mass market. As professionalized librarians became increasingly insular in this time period, tensions between once cooperative groups grew. As a result, new models of book sales, new publication technologies, and new professional organizations created a more commercial children’s book market that relied less heavily on the purchasing power of librarians. Chapter 4 examines the controversial publication of E.B. White’s Stuart Little as a demonstration of the decline of influence of the children’s literature librarians by the end of this time period.

Chapter 5, “Down the Rabbit Hole” will briefly examine the development of academic interest in children’s literature in American universities. It will then discuss the rise of consumer culture and the Paperback Revolution in publishing in the context of children’s literature, both in contrast to and in parallel with the increase in academic attention. Cultural shifts in post-war America affected the way children’s literature was published, sold, marketed, and evaluated as well as the cultural value of new delivery systems like paperback books. These changes occurred against the backdrop of a severely changed British book market: after World War II, the American market began to dominate the children’s book industry. Chapter 5 will examine the curious case of

Watership Down, a text that I argue meets all the requirements for academic attention, yet has been largely ignored because of its odd publication history and interaction with the mass market. Macmillan, an American publishing house, purchased the rights to this award-winning British children’s text and rebranded it as an adult text in order to

48 capitalize on its potential adult paperback bestseller status. By comparing reviews and sales figures to the literary qualities of Watership Down, I demonstrate how this assertion of authority by publishers reshaped previously established genre designations and exacerbated existing instabilities within the children’s literature institutional infrastructures.

Chapter 6, “Children’s Literature Comes of Age,” will discuss professional developments in book sales and marketing, focusing on the rise of massive publishing conglomerates and super bookstores like Barnes & Noble from 1980-2000s. It also examines how young adult literature (YA) emerged as a major marketing category in the

1970s within these contexts, both in America and Great Britain. I demonstrate how YA grew exponentially as publishers were able to market the crossover potential between adult and child reading audiences, echoing the shared reading patterns of the late 19th century. Out of this centralization of the book business (indeed, all entertainment businesses) emerges the “blockbuster strategy” of marketing and distributing entertainment products, which has proven to be especially lucrative and successful in the children’s literature category of YA literature. I argue that the popularity and high visibility of select YA texts, like the Harry Potter series, The Hunger Games series, and

The Fault in Our Stars has come to represent a hypercanon of texts by which the canon of children’s literature is increasingly identified.

This project concludes by dwelling on the speeches and controversies of the

2014 National Book Awards ceremony. It considers how the current upheavals in genre, technology, publishing, and cultural diversity might similarly shift influences within contemporary children’s literature. It questions how developments like e-readers and an

49 ever growing YA market will change the way consumers view the child, the teen, and the adult. It also examines how new players in the field, like Amazon.com, have changed the way children’s literature publishers and booksellers interact with the market. It historicizes the contemporary debates over the shift to digital media and examines the professional ambitions and cultural hierarchies at stake; namely, which profession(s) will act as the new tastemakers and canon shapers of the 21st century.

By the end of this project, it should become clear that the social construction of childhood affects which books are published and taught within the field of children’s literature. Because childhood is socially constructed, the canon is likewise shaped by philosophy, public policy, and visions of “the child.” As that vision changes, so does the canon and the professionals in charge of maintaining entrance into that canon. This social construction of childhood also takes place within a context of professions that are competing for social capital. The jostling for placement within the professional hierarchy has financial, social, and cultural stakes. It should also be evident that children’s literature has always been linked to the consumer market, starting with Newbery’s A

Little Pretty Pocket-Book in the 18th century. Contemporary concerns over the consumer-based market of children’s books and goods are largely influenced by the gains made by publishers and booksellers within the cultural hierarchy of children’s literature professions. If history is any lesson, this higher level of influence is not new, permanent, nor is it complete.

50 CHAPTER 2 “RECOMMENDED FOR PURCHASE BY EXPERT”: EARLY 20TH CENTURY CHILDREN’S LITERATURE LIBRARIANS AS EDUBROW CANON MAKERS

The emergence of a distinct form of literature for children is directly entwined with the emergence of free public libraries and the resulting professionalization of librarians in early 20th century America. Chapter 2 will explore this relationship, focusing on the development of the American Library Association (ALA), its Section for Library Work with Children, and resulting infrastructure elements like children’s literature prizes.

Further, Chapter 2 will explore the way pioneering children’s librarians formed and affected the modes of production and consumption of children’s literature through the production of lists of books “recommended for purchase by expert” for new children’s literature collections in public libraries.1 I argue that choices made by this group of women in terms of professionalizing library work with children within the ALA, establishing brow levels for library collections, and creating lists of ideal texts of children’s literature, were significant contributions in shaping the children’s literature canon. It is my argument that the “edubrow” choices made by women like Caroline

Hewins, Anne Carroll Moore, and Alice Jordan made a specific distinction between popular, best-selling books and high quality, literary books for children.

By virtue of Larson’s theories of professionalism, I argue that these “founding mothers” of children’s librarianship also imbued the profession with their own “social

1 According to Lepore, Anne Carroll Moore once had a large rubber stamp on her desk in room 105 of the New York Public Library that read “Not Recommended for Purchase by Expert.” She would use it when going through publishers’ catalogues of children’s books for sale, liberally stamping each title she deemed unworthy of being purchased for her library. Lepore asserts that this stamp often meant that no other librarian would purchase that book for her branch (2). Chapter 2 will examine the way librarians established gatekeeping mechanisms, both positive and negative, in order to shape the early children’s literature canon. In the case of the Chapter 2 title, then, I have chosen to drop Moore’s negative; Chapter 2 will focus first on the books Moore and her colleagues did choose to recommend, before addressing those they did not.

51 characteristics”; the “personal charisma” of these women continued to influence library work for decades after their tenure was over (41). I assert that these leaders’ preferences continue to shape the children’s literature canon today. In suggesting standardized library stock selections librarians like Hewins and Moore exerted a tremendous amount of influence over the children’s literature field and their colleagues.

Additionally, their critical work on children’s literature reached far beyond the library halls and into the publishing and bookselling industry. This level of influence allowed librarians to determine what qualified as “literary merit” for the entire field of children’s literature. Through public criticism and the purchasing power of the library, they were able to distribute and promote those texts that met their high standards. Further, public library circulation and positive critical reviews meant financial and cultural success for the texts that made the list.

In addition to composing lists of key children’s texts, these founding mothers were responsible for the organization and execution of some of the central infrastructures of the children’s literature field. Some of these infrastructures, like the

Newbery and Caldecott book prizes, were established under the exclusive purview of the ALA. Others, like Children’s Book Week and The Horn Book magazine, exist outside of the ALA, but remained heavily influenced by the librarians. All of these projects, founded prior to 1920, demonstrated the early cooperative attitude of pioneers in children’s libraries, publishing divisions, book stores, and other child-oriented organizations. Many of these groups turned to the librarians for assistance in planning, organizing, and maintaining these early examples of infrastructure in order to capitalize on the progress children’s librarians had made towards professionalization. The

52 participation of children’s librarians in these projects often meant increased clout and a higher rate of both financial and cultural success.

The opinions of these influential librarians were highly sought after; however, the judgments made by these librarians sometimes caused controversy. This was most often true when they condemned books that were extremely popular with the public, like

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum. Baum’s Oz books exemplify the opposition to series books and the fantasy genre held by many early children’s literature librarians. Despite objections to the series’ style and literary merit (and later objections based on the series’ ideology) Oz is now considered one of America’s golden age texts and is regularly included on late 20th century lists of best American children’s books.2

Chapter 2 will examine the exclusion of Oz from the core texts of books recommended to stock emerging children’s reading rooms in public libraries: despite being excluded from the emerging infrastructures of the ALA, Oz demonstrates the growing tension between the social credit of the librarians and the unpredictable nature of the children’s literature mass market. Oz will come to represent the power of the sentimental canon in resisting the pronouncements of the cultural gatekeepers.

The Progressives and the Free Library Movements

In the late 1800s, the free library movement gained traction in the United States.

Progressive ideals led to a growing demand for public access to books through an established, state-run, public library system. Based on the democratic ideal that access to books and information should not be contingent on individual wealth, communities across the country petitioned for a public library system that would grant every citizen

2 Chapter 4 will briefly discuss the role books like Oz played in the development of the ALA’s policy on ideological censorship.

53 free access to a storehouse of knowledge. Civic minded book proponents hoped access to a carefully curated selection of texts would help the lower classes to raise their status, help immigrants better acclimate to the American way of life, and help to eliminate the influence of sensational literature on the reading habits of the masses

(MacLeod 122).

The establishment of public libraries coincided with the passage of the

International Copyright Act in 1891. Prior to this law, it was common practice for publishers to reprint stories of foreign, mostly British, publishers and undersell the competition because they were not required to pay royalties to the original author.

Inexpensive paper-bound versions of fiction were also increasingly available through news dealers and bookstores in the 1870s and 1880s (Rubin 18). The masses were often able to meet their needs for inexpensive popular reading material, but access to educational texts, reference material, and classic books was still restricted due to cost.

The upper classes could afford to furnish their own personal libraries or attend universities with institutionally supported libraries: for the poor and middle class, these luxuries were often out of reach.

To meet the rising demand for public access to books, Boston opened the first free public library in the United States in 1858 (Marcus, Minders64). Built on Boylston

Street, the library cost the city of Boston $364,000 and employed 22 people.

Benefactors of the library included George Ticknor and Edward Everett (Eddy 27).

Twenty years later, in 1876, the U.S. Commissioner of Education surveyed the public library service available in the United States and found there were 2,500 public libraries housing a total of 12 million books (Marcus, Minders64). This rapid expansion of the

54 public library system benefited from the philanthropic donations of some of America’s wealthiest individuals, including Andrew Carnegie’s extensive interest at the turn of the

20th century.

Originally, public libraries were designed for use by adults: these adults included high school graduates hoping to continue their education without attending college, working class men attempting to learn new skills, and individuals of voting age informing themselves about the issues of the day. Originally, this library patron was imagined as a young, white, native-born male; only later did women, immigrants, minorities, and children enter into the image of the American public library patron. However, even within this limiting vision of the library patron, Eddy notes:

The library was billed as the capstone of the educational system and librarians frequently encouraged citizens to patronize the library in order to engage in lifelong learning. In addition to developing educated, patriotic citizens, the library promised to be ‘a destroyer of class distinctions, sectional antagonisms, and international ill will.’ (16)

Progressive librarians promoted “their vision of social good and social mobility through democratic access to the Book” and promised to ensure access to “the best books” which would help patrons improve their lives (Lundin 31). The library was envisioned as the place where the self-motivated man could better himself; with a little guidance from a librarian, any willing citizen could persevere to improve his station in life, as well as his community and country.

Within this framework, librarians strove to be identified as the group with specialized and refined knowledge about the best books an individual could read to improve their knowledge, culture, and taste rather than mere commodity vendors or clerks. Bledstein argues that budding professionals like the librarians steeped themselves in American democratic ideals. The very idea of professionalism, he

55 claimed, “embodied a more radical idea of democracy than even the Jacksonian had dared to dream” (87). He argues that the standardization and regulation of professions actually served to free the individual:

The culture of professionalism emancipated the active ego of a sovereign person as he performed organized activities within comprehensive spaces. The culture of professionalism incarnated the radical idea of the independent democrat, a liberated person seeking to free the power of nature within every worldly sphere, a self-governing individual exercising his trained judgment in an open society. (87)

In this vein, professionalized librarians viewed themselves as using their trained judgment in the service of the democratic ideal of self-education: the library was the place where everyone could come to further their education through study and conversation. Librarians saw themselves as enablers of this self-improvement: they ensured those individuals seeking to improve their minds or cultural standing were guided to the best texts (Eddy 38).

This active engagement with democratic, populist concepts also allowed librarians to align themselves with the Protestant Christian traditions of morality and self-improvement. They also incorporated the ethics of the Progressive movement into their professional standards (Wiegand 19). Moral education was just as important to the

Progressives as reading, writing, and arithmetic, and librarians actively attached moral character and the qualities of good citizenship to the reading of good literature (Kidd,

“Prizing” 172). However, there were multiple approaches to ensuring a moral education through the Progressive movement. One group felt reinforcing a traditional 19th century moral education would “provide the young with time-tested values that would serve them well in the modern world” (Grunzke 109). The second group “following the lead of

John Dewey, believed in the creation of a new moral education that reflected the social

56 climate would provide students with the character to lead productive lives” (109). The matriarchs of the library often fell into the first camp, emphasizing an East coast, intellectual, upper-middle class, white, high culture value system through the 19th century classic and Romantic texts they recommended be stocked in new children’s collections. Since their recommended texts became the foundation of the children’s literature canon, these values were carried over into the evaluation of children’s literature for decades.

In carefully selecting texts for a collection, librarians attempted to use their position as gatekeepers to influence and shape the tastes of the reading public, rather than catering to already existing tastes. In general, many librarians refused to acknowledge the existing taste cultures of the lower classes and attempted to shift their taste cultures towards a higher brow of reading materials. Herbert Gans notes that all taste cultures claim their standards to be the best but “the prestige of high culture derives from its historical alignment with the elite… as well as from the status of its own public and its claim to cultural expertise, which is legitimated by the many creators, critics, and scholars in its public.…” (116). Thus, at the time the librarians were attempting to codify and professionalize their own field, the most acceptable and reliable taste culture was high culture. Gans continues:

high culture standards are explicit and to some extent even codified; they are constantly applied in the literary journals, discussed by scholars and critics, and taught in the most prestigious universities.… The standards of the other taste cultures are rarely discussed and taught, and are thus implicit, unmodified, and for all practical purposes, invisible. (116)

Librarians as a group were attempting to professionalize largely through the standardization of a specific body of knowledge and an appeal to “a culture with roots in a classic past” (Larson 14). For them, relying on an existing high culture canon as a

57 base for establishing their new field of knowledge lent prestige, as well as intellectual legitimacy, to the project of the public library (xv).

As libraries became more prevalent and popular throughout the United States, individuals charged with staffing the library, curating the collections, and monitoring the users sought to improve the efficiency of their work. Pronounced library goals, such as increasing the social mobility of all social classes by granting them equal access to literature, meshed well with the Progressive aim of using modern technology to improve the lives of the American citizen (Grunzke 91). Many Progressives “advocated educational reforms modeled after the structural changes in industrial production. In part, they felt that modeling school structure after Taylorist factories would increase the access of lower classes to education, reduce class conflict, eliminate vice and crime, and promote economic development” (74). Individuals like Melville Dewey, creator of the Dewey Decimal system, worked to standardize library functions within and across institutions in order to increase efficiency (Eddy 17). This meant specialized systems for filing, record keeping, purchasing, and distribution; however, new technologies like card catalogues and classification systems also meant increased amounts of training were required in order to work on any library staff. The demand for specialized training, along with a centralized position of respect in a number of influential communities like Boston,

New York, and Philadelphia encouraged librarians across the country to cooperate and share their innovations with one another, for the good of the emerging profession.

The ALA was founded in 1876 and functioned as a centralized organization that advocated for the professionalization of library employees. The ALA advocated for the standardization of credentials, library school curriculums, library employee position

58 requirements, salaries, and benefits at a national level. Soon after its founding, the ALA published its first professional journal (1876), held its first annual conference (1877), sponsored studies, and endorsed texts that dealt with various aspects of library work

(Wiegand 44-48). The ALA publicly advocated for these marks of professionalism, reassuring the public that a better trained and better paid library staff would ultimately lead to improved techniques for providing library patrons with access to higher quality library collections.3

Librarians followed the proscribed track in transforming librarianship into a skilled profession: they established library schools, librarian certificates, and eventually, degrees from universities in library science. Librarians strove to identify themselves with other professionals, steeped in knowledge and specialized skill, rather than being viewed as mere clerks or booksellers. This vision of a profession fell into line with the view of traditional professions (clergy, doctors and lawyers). According to Bledstein:

The professional did not vend a commodity, or exclusively pursue a self- interest. He did not sell a service by a contract which called for specific results in a specific time or restitution for errors. Rather, through a special understanding of a segment of the universe, the professional person released nature’s potential and rearranged reality on grounds which were neither artificial, arbitrary, faddish, convenient, nor at the mercy of popular whim. Such was the august basis for the authority of the professional. (90)

The patriotic ideals and moral arguments about self-improvement helped the public library movement to sublimate its self-interest and differentiated librarians from

3 I do not intend to claim, however, that all librarians approached their task in a uniform manner or that the work of establishing and expanding library collections was achieved in a linear, straightforward path without setbacks, advances, disagreements, or transformative innovations. This dissertation will often deal with the larger scope of professionalization movements and in doing so will in some cases be dealing in generalities and broad strokes. For more on the specifics of particular librarians and work at specific institutions see the following: Wiegand Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey, Lundin Constructing the Canon of Children's Literature, Eddy Bookwomen, Sayers Anne Carroll Moore: A Biography.

59 booksellers and clerks. The emphasis on poetry, history, learning, and literature as timeless pieces of national and cultural importance to be preserved, maintained, and shared with the populous helped to lift general librarians away from the faddish and popular. Children’s librarians of those early decades in particular were adamant in denying the purely popular from reaching the shelves of the children’s reading rooms.

Any book admitted to the children’s library was deemed to have literary, scholarly, or moral merit. And yet, professionalizing also allowed librarians to demand higher salaries, greater benefits, and more professional respect.

The ALA sought to ensure the greatest number of individuals had access to the most valuable forms of literature and reference material in order to ensure an improvement in the nation’s overall well-being. Like other budding professional organizations, the ALA sought to standardize a body of knowledge, namely how to organize library collections, how to best distribute literature to the masses, and how to create a standardized process of training for future librarians (Larson 40). The ALA sought to define itself as the arbiter of “the best books,” making available for the first time democratic access to all those Americans who wanted to read and learn, not just those Americans who could afford to own books.4 In order to advocate for these best books, public librarians very often found themselves in opposition to the popular literature of the day, condemning dime novels and penny dreadfuls in favor of higher brow reading materials. This division was exceedingly clear in the writings of the early children’s literature librarians, who often wrote and published lists of the best books for

4 According to Lundin, the professional emphasis here was on ensuring those books could reach the masses. Many early librarians, including Melvile Dewey, felt the cultural authority to decide which books were “the best books” should be left to “other professionals, more engrained in literary and scholarly matters” (31).

60 children and made recommendations about which books should be included in a fledgling children’s collection.

In choosing to define themselves against low-brow literature and popular culture, librarians staked a claim to a higherbrow status. For children’s literature librarians, this meant establishing what Kenneth Kidd terms “edubrow” standards. “Edubrow” describes a literature that relies on classics, educational standards, and brow level mediation in order to be deemed appropriate for children (“Prizing” 169). The ALA later reinforced the concept of edubrow literature through the ALA sponsored children’s literature awards, the Newbery and the Caldecott, which will be discussed in more detail later in Chapter

2. However, the librarians’ focus on edubrow literature was not the same as focusing on education. The concept of edubrow is much more focused on establishing a taste culture for young people, one that will lead them to read not just any book, but the right book. An edubrow reading program will help to define a refined, middlebrow reading habit that will follow children through the rest of their lives (ideally, through a college education and into a career).

Strong personalities, like Dewey and Anne Carroll Moore, were pivotal in establishing the standardized methods of practice and theory central to the professionalization process. Further, these founding figures exerted a great amount of influence on the “social characteristics” that future librarians would share or “the place of unique individual genius and the criteria of talent ‘that cannot be taught’” within the library field (Larson 40). This meant that while the standard criteria for training and practice were being solidified around professional credentials, accredited library science programs, and technological innovations, the ineffable qualities of librarians were also

61 being formed in the image of those early library pioneers, creating a place for “personal charisma” and “individual genius” to shine within the standardized work (Larson 41).

The early figures in library professionalization set the standards both for credentialing and for the personality types that would excel in the developing profession. The values and philosophies of women like Hewins and Moore informed the training of generations of children’s literature librarians, as well as the place those women would hold in the public imagination.

However, on a larger, professional level, the ALA aimed to separate itself from other professional groups; specifically, from both publishers and educators. Educators, publishers, and librarians all had a keen interest in improving the nation’s literacy levels, the public education system, the availability of high quality American-authored literature, and public access to those texts. However, each professional group approached these

Progressive goals in different ways. Further, while federal, state, and municipal budgets often included money for education or literacy programs, funds were often limited and some representative professional organizations were more successful than others in lobbying for those funds. Each group genuinely thought their professional approach was the best to ensure proper reading habits, socialization, moral behavior, and continuing education in America. While some felt that the library, school system, and other institutions, like newspapers, supported Progressive goals, the debate often came down to which of these institutions was the most important and therefore entitled to the most state support (Grunzke 92). The arguments in favor of primacy over the children’s literature canon established by the first generation of children’s librarians became central to the profession in subsequent decades.

62 Professional History of Publishing

Publishing in America also has a long and storied tradition. In the 1700s, the publisher of a text was very often the author, printer, and distributor as well. Famous printers, like Benjamin Franklin, distributed newspapers, books, and pamphlets on religion, advice, and politics. Texts were most often imported from England, either in book form, or as stories that were then pirated and reprinted in the U.S. for a much lower cost, since publishers did not pay international royalties. In Revolution and the

Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, Cathy Davidson asserts that prior to the

Revolutionary War, “most books in America were imported rather than published at home; and only a limited number of books (chapbooks, almanacs, Bibles, and a few other steady sellers) were readily available to the populace at large” (74). In addition to the actual books, the majority of the materials necessary for bookmaking such as paper, ink and especially type, were imported from England (74). In the 1720s, “North America lacked even a single type foundry, and type imported from England came at considerable cost” (Marcus, Minders 5).

Davidson argues that the Revolutionary War also caused a revolution in the

American publishing world, as the war forced a break in the established British trade and forced American printers to look locally for their needs (74). When regular trade resumed during peace time: “a relatively large class of artisans, craftsmen, and entrepreneurs was already well established in the book trade and anxious both to protect and to extend what had been a recently flourishing business” (74). Many of these groups initiated steps towards professionalization, much like librarians would at the turn of the 20th century. According to Davidson, these groups recognized the value of professional status, both to internal standards and within society at large. “Trade

63 associations such as the Asylum Company of Journeymen Printers (1800) were formed, partly as professional organizations designed to assure the continuance of the apprentice system, but mostly to pressure Congress to enact protective tariffs for the

American book trade” (74). Through these professional organizations, printers and publishers pushed for copyright laws in order to protect their slim profit margins: many printers paid an author for a book, only to see other printers sell pirated versions of the same novels without the upfront costs.

The Federal Copyright Act of 1790 “granted authors copyright privileges over their own work for a fourteen-year period that could be extended by the author for a second fourteen years” (Davidson 96-97). However, it wasn’t until Congress began levying taxes on foreign book titles (Tariff Act of 1816) and passed the International

Copyright Law of 1830 that the American printers began to prefer publishing American- authored books to foreign-authored, pirated books (97). I argue it was the development of what Davidson terms an “indigenous book industry” in the mid-19th century that eventually led to a push towards an indigenous children’s literature industry in America in the early 20th.

Publishing for children can also cite early beginnings in American culture and is closely tied to the formation of American culture. Marcus notes that “A Connecticut statute of 1650 obliged parents to catechize their children and servants weekly” and required all children and servants to be able to read Scriptures and “other good and profitable printed Books in the English tongue” (Minders 1-2). The New-England Primer appears in most histories of children’s literature as the first “children’s book of American origin issued from Boston” in 1689: this text was designed to help children learn to read

64 as well as to familiarize them with the basic tenants of Christian teachings (2).

Historically, Americans associated education with morality: in the years following the

American Revolution “childhood, for the first time in American history, became the object of political discourse. Convinced that the stability of the new republic depended on a virtuous citizenry, the post-revolutionary generation called for more intensive styles of childrearing and more prolonged and systemic forms of education” (Mintz 54). This responsibility fell to American mothers and a new system of schools “that would not simply transmit skills and knowledge but also shape children’s moral character” (55).

When Progressive reformists called for an increase in the output of high quality children’s literature from American authors, illustrators, and publishers at the turn of the

20th century, their motivation was largely drawn from this Revolutionary era association of morality with educational reading materials.

American children’s literature greatly resembled British children’s literature prior to the Civil War. John Newbery published A Little Pretty Pocket-Book in England in

1744, and began to advertise the sale of the same book in the colonies in 1750

(Marcus, Minders 7). Harper & Brothers, begun in 1817 in New York, was the first

American publisher to establish a line of series books directed towards young readers.

The Boy’s and Girl’s Library “offered an eclectic mix of fact and fiction. Among its first titles were two works of nonfiction, Indian Traits and Tales of the American Revolution…

The Swiss Family Robinson made its first American appearance as another title in the series” (Marcus, Minders 18). After Congress passed the Copyright Act of 1790,

American publishers were expected to pay royalties to American authors, and so

65 pirating British texts cut down on costs significantly.5 However, British texts (especially texts for children) continued to be a great influence on American children’s literature.

According to Kimberly Renyolds: “British publishers led the world in producing books for young readers” (20). The British publishers were most adept at applying technological advances “from steam presses to cheaper paper” to the manufacture of books of “all qualities, prices and appearances” (20). Renyolds argues that these innovations allowed British publishers to create “extensive lists covering most of the genres read today and targeted at specific groups of readers (determined on the basis of age, sex and/or class)” (20). The American market often copied these innovations, but it was a century before they caught up to the breadth and variety of their British counterparts.

During the first half of the 20th century, American librarians pushed for the development of a native American children’s literature that could compete with the imported British works. British illustrators, such as Caldecott, Arthur Rackham, and Kate

Greenaway were held up by librarians as models for American picture book illustrators to emulate, or ideally, to improve upon. The American children’s literature publishers could be described as the British industry’s younger, less developed sibling, striving to keep up with the big kid across the pond.

One of the precipitating concerns for library founders was the rise of inexpensive reading materials as a result of improved printing techniques (also imported from

Britain). These cheap books included the five cent ‘story papers’ which originated in

1839; the five-by-8 ½-inch dime novel which debuted in 1845; and the revised 4-by-6

5 The International Copyright Act of 1891 extended copyright to all books, foreign and domestic, and required royalties to be paid to their original author. This ended “a century of unscrupulous piracy and with it the first battles in the Paperback Revolution” in which the reprint rights of bestselling books now became commodities of value (Davis 34-35).

66 inch serialized dime novel which debuted in 1860 (Murray 79). The growing popularity of these sensationalized, over-sentimental dramas often contained broken families, mistaken identities, violence, crime, and romance plots that were usually aimed at adults; however, the low price made the texts accessible to children and young adults as well.6 As time passed, children’s librarians were pitted against books from the

Stratemeyer Syndicate series and other book “factories”: librarians worried mass produced texts lowered the taste level of the middle-class reader. According to

MacLeod, by the turn of the 20th century:

series books flourished, to the growing distress of librarians who deplored ‘juvenile series of the… ranting, canting, hypocritical sort.’ They sought to cast out Horatio Alger; Martha Finely, guilty of Elsie Dinsmore and its terrible sequels; Frank Baum, producer of endless Oz books, and the octopus empire of Edward Stratemeyer, outing forth the Rover Boys, Bobbsey Twins, Tom Swifts, and who could name what else. (122)

Librarians feared the public, including children, would grow addicted to these lowbrow books and come to enjoy reading not for moral instruction or mental improvement, but for the sensationalized entertainment. This is a concern that continues to pervade conversations about literacy and reading habits in America in the 21st century.

The quality of the physical texts also created additional reluctance among librarians to stock dime novels and series books on their shelves. Many librarians sought to exclude the ephemeral, lowbrow texts from library collections. With cheap paper and inexpensive binding technology, these paperbacks were often designed for a single reading, making the actual physical copies of the books into a disposable commodity rather than a treasureable classic (Miller, Reluctant Capitalists 43). The

6 This concern about inexpensive, lowbrow literature continues to be an issue throughout the development of children’s literature. We will revisit this concept in Chapter 6 in the discussion about the Paperback Revolution and YA blockbuster books.

67 physical qualities of the actual book often reflected the attitudes of the librarians towards the content: cheap, easily discarded, not written to last.

The Progressive missions of free public education and public libraries succeeded in increasing literacy rates and giving more individuals access to reading as a leisure pursuit. However, the market response made more texts available to these newer, less wealthy readers by providing cheap texts readily accessible to a lower income family than the “sturdy, well-constructed books of the major Eastern publishing houses” that tended to epitomize the type of classic, wholesome literary text that librarians preferred

(Grunzke 74-80). Series books, dime novels, and story papers did not belong in libraries because they could not hold up to the extended use, which implied the content was as disposable as the container.

Children Gain Access to Library Reading Rooms

Initially, children were not a consideration in the design and implementation of the free library system; in some cases, children were expressly forbidden from entering the doors of the library. They were often seen as noisy nuisances to the adult patrons

(Marcus, Minders 64). Prior to the advent of children’s rooms, libraries habitually denied library cards to children twelve-years-old and younger (Clark 69). Libraries and the ALA later viewed the segregation of library patrons into children’s rooms and adult’s rooms as insurance that children would not irritate, interrupt, or otherwise disturb the adult patrons (Eddy 34). However, library workers, educators, and parents soon recognized that the library system could be an important supplement to the newly flourishing public education system in America.

As discussed in the introduction, prior to the 20th century, rarely was a distinction made between texts written for adults and those written expressly for children. Primers

68 and textbooks were available for children through schools but there was very little in the way of literature or non-fiction produced exclusively with the child in mind. As more libraries began founding and curating collections for children, an ever growing rank of children’s librarians were able to raise the call for high quality literature designed for this specific audience. The growing ranks of reading children helped to increase the power of these librarians, as their budgets and professional prowess grew.

At the turn of the 20th century, books designed especially for children and bibliographical information on those texts was scarce. Additionally, the majority of children’s books read in America were British imports. The rise of the public library system, tied to American democratic ideals, meant that many children’s librarians sought to expand the American children’s book infrastructure. They sought not only to supply books that fit the reading needs of their charges, but also to encourage American production of children’s books and the development of American children’s authors and illustrators. Librarians were able to make strong arguments for admitting children to the population of citizens served that aligned with the established mission of the library.

Again, Boston led the nation by pioneering child access to the public library. In the 1870s, the Boston Public Library allowed children ten years and older to borrow books and by 1900, had expanded its services for children enough to require a full-time director (Eddy 27-28). Change came slowly, but gradually, as children were granted greater acceptance within library walls and eventually their own space within those walls. According to Marcus, Minerva Sanders of Pawtucket, Rhode Island was the first librarian “to set aside a corner of her reading room for children” in 1887 (Minders 64).

The next was the public library in Brookline, Massachusetts which “made over its

69 basement as the nation’s first children’s reading room” in 1880 (64). Marcus continues,

“In 1893 Cleveland’s librarians found a place for their city’s young people in a corridor” and a trend of incorporating children’s reading rooms into public libraries was officially born (Minders 64). Then, Miss Lutie Stearns of the Milwaukee Public Library presented

“A Report on the Reading of the Young” at the 1894 annual meeting of the ALA. That report “declared a policy of abolishing age limitations, presented the necessity of providing special rooms for the young, staffed by attendants ‘who liked children’ and were prepared to serve them with the same standards of excellence as obtained in libraries for adults (Eddy ix; emphasis original).

According to Eddy, “once the ALA accepted its role in children’s work, it heartily recognized such work as an appropriate space in the public library for women, creating, in effect, a group of experts (children’s librarians) within a group of experts (the ALA)”

(35). By developing this sub-field, the ALA created a space in which women were granted unique authority and were able to carve out a niche of expertise for themselves at a time when women were generally excluded from the professions. Eddy continues:

“In the process, professional opportunities for women in the library were enlarged by this ‘natural’ power base within which they might establish and exert authority” (35).

Children’s librarians were granted unique authority and status, but were also seen as a part of the larger functioning ALA professional network. For example, the first title published by the Publishing Section of the ALA was Books for the Young by Caroline

Hewins in 1882 (Clark 69). Children’s librarians were not only concerned with the development of standards for children’s reading rooms, but also with the development of a strong professional organization that would support them in their work. Other

70 professions open to women, such as teaching or social work, did not afford as many opportunities at autonomy, but the mostly female Section for Work with Children claimed more autonomy than their male peers (especially when it came to selecting the

“best books,” a process that general librarians outsourced to other professionals). Thus, the history of professionalization of librarians is often one that focuses on the successful entrance of women into this professional field, though admittedly through the feminized sphere of work with children. This autonomy and authority to select “the best books” continued to inform the professional goals and work of children’s librarians throughout the first half of the 20th century.

When the call went out from communities and from within the ALA for more children’s rooms in public libraries and librarians to supervise and stock these rooms, many women answered. These “bookwomen” found their way into male-dominated careers through the child-centered rungs. While the children’s rooms at major libraries were under the control of increasingly professionalized women, most public libraries employed men at the highest levels of library management. Many believed that the act of educating young children was not that far removed from the act of raising children, and so elementary education and children’s librarianship safely fit into the Victorian concept of the female sphere. As we will see in Chapter 3, education similarly became a stratified field in which women were involved in actual classroom education while men took on supervisory, advisory, and advanced educational roles. The social message was that in a professional setting, women could be trusted to do this feminized work, provided they were properly supervised by men. These lines were drawn clearly throughout the educational professions, as Herbst explains:

71 The classroom with its children, not the principal’s office, was the woman’s sphere. In it began the relegation of education to the realm of domesticity and gentility, a realm sharply different from the male world of enterprise, industry, and government. Middle- and upper-class women, the wives of professionals, encouraged the feminization of the classroom and the notion of the woman’s sphere. (29)

This led to a ceding of the children’s reading rooms to the control of women and often led to the stereotype of the uptight, serious female librarians seen in novels, films, and plays.7 The unique professional autonomy of children’s literature librarians was made possible by the fact that their authority fell into a traditionally female sphere that, for the moment, did not concern other professionals in academic or literary criticism.

Much like elementary school teachers, children’s librarians came to resent the assumption that their work was all emotion and nurture rather than difficult, rigorous, and highly specialized work. Anne Carroll Moore said “Why is it that they always think that all the whole thing amounts to is that for a few hours in the afternoon after school there is a mad rush of children, who come and read story books, and that for the rest of the time we all sit around and crochet?” (Sayers 188). This limited and infantilizing vision of the female labor in the children’s reading room failed to take into account much of the work involved in running and maintaining a library collection along with the very real challenges of working within a newly flourishing field of literature. The personalities of the early children’s librarians also established the professional standards that helped future generations of librarians to claim that the children’s reading room was entirely her domain.

7 My primary example for this is Marian the Librarian from The Music Man but many others exist.

72 Book Lists by Influential Librarians

One of the major tasks for the first generation of children’s librarians was to establish a set of books that should be considered standard for any children’s collection.

Unlike Melville Dewey and other early library professionals who outsourced canon formation to academics, children’s librarians were seen as the best possible group to address both sides of this process by virtue of their genteel feminine qualities.

Children’s librarians could both fill and maintain the library collection for children, while deciding on the qualities that made a book worthy of selection. It was over half a century before academics began to pay careful attention to what those choices were and what the academic implications of those choices meant for American children’s literature

(Clark 74). Until the 1970s, the academy in general had little interest in addressing children’s literature as a scholarly field, leaving librarians to shape children’s literature, through selection and criticism, for half a century.

The book choices made by children’s librarians were based on several criteria, and the selection process set a template for future librarians to follow. Thus, the lists of suggested texts produced by this first generation of children’s librarians had a lasting effect on both the definition of children’s literature and the aims and goals of children’s reading rooms. The effects of those lists continue to resonate with children’s literature experts today. Caroline Hewins, Anne Carroll Moore, Alice Jordan, and many others published pamphlets, professional articles, magazine articles, and books that recommended the best books for public libraries to provide to children. In order to produce these lists, the librarians had to establish a particular ethos or guiding principle that would govern their choices, defend those choices to other experts in the field, and allow room to expand those lists as the field of children’s literature expanded.

73 Many of these guiding principles came out the educational backgrounds of the librarians themselves: most were brought up in upper-middle class, East coast homes that valued Protestant Christian values of hard work, self-reliance, knowledge, community, and a respect for the classics. The literary values instilled in these women through a liberal arts education, focused on the humanities, letters, and the Western canon, obviously had an influence on the texts these women then chose to uphold as worthy of shelf space in the children’s reading room. As the proclaimed goals of the public library movement dealt with the Progressive ideals of equal access to education, emphasizing the morality of self-improvement, self-reliance, and social change through dedicated hard work, librarians were likely to choose texts that supported those ideals or sought to nurture them in readers. Librarians aimed to provide high quality texts that would improve the mind, the spirit, and the financial standing of the reader. I argue that this appeal to altrusitic social goals granted them the authority over other professionals, like booksellers and publishers. As a result, these lists stand as the foundation of the significant children’s literature canon and shaped children’s literature criticism and evaluation for decades.

Caroline Hewins

According to Lundin, Caroline Hewins was

the grand dame of the children’s library cause, its first outspoken advocate, mentor, institution-builder. While Melvil Dewey was the acknowledged forefather of the library profession whose vision formulated the parameters of the field, Caroline Hewins is the rather unacknowledged foremother of children’s librarianship whose vision exceeded these borders and braved new territory. (22)

Hewins, the librarian at The Young Men’s Institute at Hartford, Connecticut was also extremely active within the ALA. She “began contributing to a monthly column,

74 ‘Literature for the Young,’ to the newly founded Library Journal, which consisted of a list of new children’s books and quotations from reviews of them that had appeared in the press” (Lundin 22). In addition to her work in specialized professional journals, Hewins also wrote “The History of Children’s Books” for a mainstream literary periodical, The

Atlantic Monthly, in 1888. In it, Hewins challenges the idea that children’s books are a new concept, claiming that “[t]here have been children’s stories and folk-tales ever since man first learned to speak.… We shall nevertheless see that there were English books for children (and it is with no others that we have to deal) long before [the Georgian era]” (“History” 112). Hewins goes on to establish a long-reaching history of children’s literature, starting with books on manners and behavior such as Puer ad Mensam, ascribed to John Lydgate in approximately 1430 (113). Hewins continues to chronicle the evolution of children’s literature through hornbooks, children’s poetry, John Locke’s recommendations of fables, primers, John Newbery’s legacy, and adaptations of classics like Shakespeare for a children’s audience. By tying children’s literature to a longer historical framework, Hewins’s article creates a rich, varied, and very much grown-up history of children’s literature, which lends prestige and a sense of importance to the subject for a more generalist, public audience.

This approach was very much in line with Hewins’s overall professional goals within the ALA. According to Lundin, “It was Hewins who established the ‘adultist’ standard of selection adopted by the librarians who followed: children’s books, as part of the body of literature, must be evaluated in a similar manner as adult literature and must be appreciated by adults as well as children” (23). Hewins writings in both professional library journals and in mainstream literary publications helped her to establish the

75 reputation of children’s libraries with both her professional colleagues and with potential library users. Her Books for the Young: A Guide for Parents and Children (1882) was a standard guide for building children’s library collections as early as 1885 and its influence on similar lists that followed cannot be underestimated (Wiegand 116).

In Books for the Young, Hewins’s list of recommended books was prefaced by her introduction, a list of 8 rules on “How to teach the right use of books” and a brief prose section describing the best books on “English and American History for Children.”

(13-14; 15-22). Following these brief sections is “A Symposium on Books for Children”: an odd collection of quotes from authors and sources as varied as C. M. Yonge of

Macmillan’s magazine, Rt. Hon. Geo. J. Goschen writing in his book The Cultivation of the Imagination, Harriet Martineau in her book Household Education, T. W. Higginson, in the North American Review, and articles from The New England Journal of

Education, the New York Tribune and the Chicago Journal (Hewins Books 23-34).

These quotations, ranging from brief paragraphs to longer excerpts, all address the proper use of children’s literature and the importance of exposing children to the right type of literature from an early age. These excerpts discuss the difference between boys and girls books, the dangers of “trash” literature, the class distinctions implied through reading material, and the role of parents in instilling proper reading habits in their children. All of these treatises on children’s reading belie a strategic effort to demonstrate how taste cultures and a traditional view of humanistic literature informed

Hewins’s selection of texts. While the list of recommended titles and categories are very different from what we would recognize now, many of the arguments used to justify that list are commonplace or even cliché today. This early collection of opinions on what

76 children ought to read and how adult authority figures ought to encourage their development of taste and self-improvement is an early outline of the children’s librarians’ mission statement. Since Hewins’s is one of the first to create a library collection specifically for children and one of the first to publish guidelines on the subject, this Symposium and the list of recommended titles will have great influence on librarians and their future library collection selections. Likewise, children’s literature professionals up through the 21st century continue to debate many of the arguments presented in the Symposium.

Hewins’s “Preface” for the pamphlet makes clear that she is attempting to create a list of recommended titles for parents and librarians based on her expertise: she writes that her list is “the result of years spent not only trying to guide the reading of children, but in actually reading with them” (Books 3). At the end of her preface, Hewins directs those interested in further information on the reasoning behind her selections to her article in the Library Journal and provides specific date and call information. Hewins directly references a professional journal as support of her authority to write such a list of recommended titles. Hewins notes that “it is not the aim of this catalogue to indicate courses of reading for boys and girls after they have reached the age of fifteen or sixteen, when, if they have been rightly trained, they are ready to use with understanding and profit such lists on special topics” that libraries had begun publishing for adults (6). It is ultimately the goal of the children’s library, then, to train children to use the adult library properly, with less supervision, and for their own profit and personal improvement (6).

77 Hewins also notes that her list is not exhaustive and that “the books mentioned in it are not all the good ones which have been written for them, but fairly represent those which have become classics, and the best published during the last twenty or thirty years” (3). The list, then, is not complete (which Guillory claims it never can be),8 but is intended as a guide for trained children’s librarians in the selection of new books without direct supervision. The actual booklist itself is divided into several categories including:

 Home and School Life;

 Modern Fairy Tales;

 Travel and Adventure, Imaginary Voyages, and Stories of Various Countries (divided by continent);

 Myths, Legends and Traditional Fairy Tales;

 History, Historical Biography, Tales and Novels (divided by country, including European nations and the United States);

 Poetry for Reading and Speaking; and

 Science (including the subdivisions of Miscellaneous works; Astronomy; Chemistry and Physics; The Earth; Natural History; The Microscope; Farming, Gardening, Plants and Trees; Arts and Manufactures; Health and Strength; Out- door Sports, Household Arts and Amusements).

Conspicuously absent from this book list is any kind of age range recommendation or books recommended specifically for the very young. While some of the recommended titles, like Kate Greenaway’s Day in a Child’s Life or Randolph Caldecott’s The House that Jack Built are now known as classic children’s picture books, both appear under the

8 Guillory makes the following statement in regards to the course syllabus but the concept is applicable to these library lists as well: “It would be better to say that the canon is an imaginary totality of works. No one has access to the canon as a totality. This fact is true in the trivial sense that no one ever reads every canonical work; no one can, because the works invoked as canonical change continually according to many different occasions of judgment or contestation. What this means is that the canon is never other than an imaginary list; it never appears as a complete and uncontested list in any particular time and place, not even in the form of the omnibus anthology, which remains a selection from a larger list which does not itself appear anywhere in the anthology’s table of contents” (30).

78 “Poetry and Selections for Reading and Speaking” rather than in a separate “Picture

Book” category. Other selections in the poetry category include Geoffrey Chaucer,

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Mother Goose, and Shakespeare.

Looking at the categories in Hewins’s book list shows how much these kinds of lists have changed over time. Categories that feel commonplace in a contemporary bookstore or children’s library, such as early readers, picture books, Young Adult novels, or even fiction and non-fiction, are absent. Texts like Charles Dickens A Tale of

Two Cities, Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain’s Prince and the Pauper, Sir Walter Scott’s

Ivanhoe, James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-stocking Tales, and Harriet Beecher

Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin are all listed under “History, Historical Biography, Tales and

Novels” without any notation or distinction to separate these novels from more factual non-fiction histories. Despite that, Hewins’s work here is groundbreaking and foundational, especially considering many of the best known classics of the field were not yet written in 1888.

The American children’s literature trade was still far behind the British, but

Hewins tried to balance between British and American texts, with some categories (like

European history) being more heavily weighted with British authors. Hewins endorsed

British writers like Maria Edgeworth, Thomas Hughes, George MacDonald, Mrs.

Molesworth, Charles Dodgson, Charles Kingsley, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Sir Walter

Scott, Walter Crane, and Kate Greenaway. The list featured American writers like Mary

Dodge, Louisa May Alcott, Samuel Clemens, Washington Irving, Horace Scudder,

Jacob Abbott, and James Fenimore Cooper. Few authors from outside of America or

79 Great Britain are included on the list: Hans Christian Andersen and Aesop are two notable exceptions.

Anne Carroll Moore

Following in Hewins’s impressive footsteps, Anne Carroll Moore continued the tradition of publishing on children’s literature and children’s librarianship in both professional journals and in mainstream media. Moore has become widely known as a hugely influential figure in children’s literature. Moore is often granted “Godmother” status over children’s librarianship: she is profiled and treated as the grand matron of the profession. She is often described as the leading influence in the development of children’s literature in general, and the classic canon of children’s literature in specific.

Moore is best known for her work as Superintendent of Work with Children for the New

York Public Library (NYPL), during which time she also wrote reviews for various trade and mass-market book publications, consulted with children’s literature publishers, authors, and illustrators, and cultivated a community of children’s literature producers, sellers, collectors, scholars, and librarians. As Frances Clarke Sayers notes in her ultimately flattering biography of Moore, “There has been some hair-splitting among the

PhDs as to the validity of the assumption that no reviews of books for children preceded hers. As if it mattered. The truth of the matter is that these essays collected in My

Roads to Childhood far outreach the term ‘review’ (211).9

9 Sayers was Moore’s protégé and succeeded her as head children’s librarian at the NYPL, so her biography of Moore is not as critical as other portrayals of the librarian pioneer. However, other scholars support her assessment of Moore’s premier status in children’s literature reviewing. Murray claims: “It was Moore who began the first critical reviewing of children's books in The Bookman (1918) and in a weekly column called 'The Three Owls' in The New York Herald Tribune. She used the column as a megaphone to call for books displaying 'originality, beauty, spontaneous appeal, and an imaginative approach.’” (96).

80 Moore stands as one of the touchstone figures in children’s librarianship and children’s literature scholarship today. While Moore did not attend college, she was a graduate of the Pratt Institute Library School, which was founded in 1887. After graduation, Moore headed up the Pratt Free Institute Library’s children’s room. In 1900,

Moore was elected the first president of the Children’s Librarians’ Section (also known as the Section for Library Work with Children) (Batchelder 71). That group soon after became an officially sanctioned sub-division of the ALA (Sayers 276). Moore was often consulted by other children’s librarians and instructors in newly established training courses at the Pratt Institute Library School in Brooklyn, founded in 1898, and the

Training School for Children’s Librarians in Pittsburgh, founded in 1900 (Batchelder 71-

72). Moore, at this time, was already recognized as one of the foremost experts in the country on the topic. She taught and trained many of the nation’s first children’s librarians. She also wrote children’s literature reviews for The Bookman (1918-1926), for the New York Herald Tribune (1924-1930), and for The Horn Book (1936-1960) (Lepore

2-3).

Moore was responsible for a number of important innovations when it came to library work with children.10 At the Pratt library, Moore established the process by which children would receive their very own library card, a process that was widely adopted across the country. Children were asked to write their names in the library register, then swear an oath to carefully care for the books at the library and at home and to live up to the privileges and responsibilities that came with owning a library card. “The staffs of the children’s rooms in the New York Public Library were admonished to remember that for

10 When it comes to innovations and standards for the library, I would argue that Moore is to children’s reading rooms what Melville Dewey is to the free library.

81 most children library membership is their first independent act of citizenship. As such, it involves a reciprocal responsibility: the granting of a privilege and the obligation to abide by the rules that make the privilege possible” (Sayers 67-68). The oath, and the emphasis Moore placed on it, echoed the values and goals of the Progressive library: to instill moral and ethical responsibility in citizens, to lead to the improvement of moral character, and to instill a sense of the value and importance of reading in the general public.

Moore also established the children’s room as a place for more than just reading.

During her tenure, the NYPL’s reading room regularly featured talented storytellers, lectures by children’s book authors and illustrators, exhibits on topics of interest to children, and holiday celebrations (Sayers). Moore made a point to bring living plants into the library room, aware that many city children would not have the opportunity to interact with living, growing plants in their everyday city life. She encouraged all branches under her control to provide “periodically in the year’s calendar of events, some gesture from the earth, some small token of root and flower, be made the focal point in the arranged environment where children and books were brought together”

(Sayers 5). This focus on live, growing things echoed Moore’s own upbringing in the countryside and her romantic vision of childhood as a natural state, tied to the wonders of the earth and growing things (5).

Moore’s exhibitions became a popular addition to the NYPL children’s room, always changing and presenting relevant or interesting information in an effort to make the reading rooms into a space of constant learning and entertainment. In years when books were scarce, such as the 1930s and 40s, exhibitions were also useful in

82 supplying the greatest amount of information to children when the shelves were laid bare. For example, Sayers describes how Moore and her staff put together exhibitions on “heroism” and geography during WWI. Wall maps helped children whose fathers or brothers were stationed overseas during the wars to locate the origin of letters, or the cities where loved ones were “dug in” (209). These innovations in library card oaths and rotating library displays continue to appear in most children’s reading rooms and school libraries across the country today. Using Larson’s theory of professionalization, I argue that Moore’s personal charisma and ideologies were bound up in the emerging professional practices of the children’s literature librarian, so that the personal characteristics of future librarians often resembled the model established by Moore and her fellow founding mothers (Larson 41).

Moore also acted as an advisor and mentor for many women entering the children’s librarian field. Sayers quotes Julia Carter who worked in the Children’s Room at the NYPL with Moore on her teachings of what Carter terms “The Four Respects.”

Moore emphasized respect for the children, the books, their fellow workers, and the professional standing of the Children’s Librarian. Says Carter:

They were not to be dictated to by others against their better judgment. Miss Moore felt that children’s librarians were the best trained and most informed staff members on the subject of children’s books and reading. The children were to be allowed free use of books, and not just to use those that some authority thought belonged to their age group or to their school grade. (qtd in Sayers 127)

Moore here stressed a respect among children’s librarians for their in-field colleagues but also highlighted the respect due to children’s librarians from other field specialists within the larger library system. Her emphasis on professionalism within the field also helped set the standard for the behavior of children’s literature specialists in the library

83 system and for the standing of children’s rooms in relation to other library departments.

Moore’s emphasis on these respects may have been related to gender politics at play within the library: by claiming professional status for children’s librarians, Moore was helping to carve out a space in which women held authority over other (male) subject librarians. The teaching of these respects is also an example of how Moore’s own personality became folded into the training and standardization of library work with children.

During her time at the NYPL and after her retirement, publishers, authors, illustrators, venture businessmen, booksellers, magazine and newspaper editors, book editors, and educators regularly consulted Moore. According to Lepore, “Her verdict, not any bookseller’s, sealed a book’s fate. She kept a rubber stamp at her desk that she used, liberally, while paging through publishers’ catalogues: ‘Not recommended for purchase by expert.’ The end” (2). Moore was well-regarded both as a woman with impeccable taste, but also as a professional who wielded great amounts of capital: when Moore liked a book, she recommended it for purchase not only for the NYPL, but for its branch libraries as well. When Moore really liked a book, she recommended that bookstores stock it, educators teach it, parents buy it, and other experts in the book field read it for their own enjoyment and edification. Moore’s ability to address her preferences and criticisms to the public through popular literary magazines and newspaper columns gave her an effective loudspeaker through which to shape public opinion. Moore’s approval, then, resulted in very real cultural and economic capital and thus many authors and publishers made pilgrimages to her office in the NYPL to pay

84 homage and ask her advice.11 Needless to say, not every editor or author left that office pleased with the results: Moore was known for her exceptional taste, but also for her blunt pronouncements of disapproval (Clark 72).

While Moore had a strong sense of vision when it came to children’s literature, her views and stylistic preferences greatly influenced the way she read and critiqued books. Moore had very strong ideas about what constituted appropriate books for children. Just as upper-class white men set the canon for American literature in the early 20th century, Moore and her fellow white, middleclass women set the canon for children’s literature (Clark 58). Moore’s personal preferences for bucolic and Romantic literature, as well as her demands for a clear separation between realism and fantasy greatly influenced the formation of her booklist, as did her upbringing in Protestant New

England and her educational experiences (Moore Cross-Roads 11-21).

Moore compiled “A List of Books Recommended for A Children’s Library” on behalf of the Iowa Library Commission in 1903. The actual list of texts was prefaced by four full pages of introductory information. Moore broke down the different categories of texts she believed every children’s library should contain, including:

 picture books;

 “easy readers” (an early precursor to the early reader picture book niche genre discussed in Chapter 3);

 poetry, art and artists;

 fairy and folk tales;

 biography, history and travel;

11 Moore maintained this level of influence over the New York children’s publishing industry until the 1940s. Later, in the 1980s, buyers from large bookstore chains like Barnes & Noble would take on a similar advisory role to children’s publishers, as we will see in Chapter 6.

85  fiction; and

 reference books.

Moore noted that her list also included an additional set of distinctions not fully encapsulated in the category headings:

This list is not presented as a list of the best books for a children’s library. It has been compiled with the desire to include most of the books children ought to read, many of the books children themselves elect to read, and a fair number of the books used by children in connection with their school work, or in connection with special interests of a non-literary character. (“List” 3 emphasis original).

In this important excerpt, Moore distinguishes useful texts from literary texts, which is important to establishing the literary standing of children’s literature. Some critics dismiss all books for children as utilitarian, so Moore’s distinction within the category is important (Kidd, “Prizing” 167). Second, the designation between the books children ought to read and the books they elect to read is a central one. Moore embodies the

Progressive nature of the children’s library project: she believes that by stocking books children will enjoy, it will help librarians to encourage those children to also read the classics, or the books that will improve their economic and social station in life.

However, there are limits on this approach. Moore warns that young boys will “acquire the Henty habit” early on in life and need no urging to consume that type of low brow literature (“List” 3). She concedes: “The only way to promote good reading is to give the children plenty of good books to read. Using mediocre books as a means to this end is perfectly legitimate, provided it does not lead to a permanent substitution of the mediocre for the best” (4). Moore recognizes the power and value of the sentimental canon, but only as a brief stepping stone or gateway into a higher quality literature habit.

86 Moore also indicates that the current status of children’s literature “has not yet been cast into sufficiently permanent form” and as such, “many of the books entered in this list should be replaced by better books on the same subjects as soon as better books are published” (“List” 3). Her concern here is two-fold: Moore wants to provide children with only the best books in order to ensure their reading habits are founded on quality literature, but she also wants librarians to be aware that the best books that currently exist do not necessarily conform to her exacting ideals. Moore’s standards for these “best books” are in no way limited by the actual existence of real texts. Instead,

Moore uses this book list as a soap box to advocate for the improvement of children’s literature as a whole.

Moore insists that in order for children’s librarians to adequately stock their library with high quality books for children, there first must be “something approximating permanent literature for children, and that we shall never have if we base the selection of children’s books on the ephemeral interests of children rather than on the fundamental interests of child nature” (“List” 6; emphasis original). Moore advocates for basing entry into this new permanent literature for children, or a significant children’s literature canon, on timeless values of “the child” rather than the interests of the real and actual child. As Lundin notes, Moore was not the only children’s librarian to approach list making from this perspective. Lundin writes that librarians as a whole chose to focus on “knowledge and experience with literature rather than knowledge and experience with education: the best of books rather than the best of reading, literature over literacy - the Book as conveyer of meaning more than the Child as maker of meaning with particular wants and needs” (3). Moore is clearly advocating for a list of books to shape

87 the child user, rather than a list shaped by the reading preferences of those same children. Her desire to see a high standard applied to the idea of “best books” further reinforces this notion of the ideal over the actual.

Moore’s recommendations for fiction to be stocked in the children’s room establishes a basic early canon that fits this concept of “best books” when she notes:

The aim has been to include as many different kinds of stories as seems desirable to meet the demands of the boys and girls in their choice of story books. Those stories which have stood the test of time have been first included. The best stories have been supplemented by many stories without literary merit, but which are among the best of their kind. The importance of constant recommendation of the best books cannot be too often urged. (“List” 6)

Again, she notes that she has had to add texts that lack literary merit and advocates strongly for her fellow children’s librarians to discard the ephemeral and lower quality books as soon as something better comes along.

Her list is stocked with texts that we recognize today as both sentimental and significant classics, including Johanna Spyri’s Heidi, R. L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island,

Mark Twain’s Prince and the Pauper and Tom Sawyer, Louisa May Alcott’s Little

Women (and sequels), and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy (19-22).

Other classics, also known as “Golden Age texts” appear in other sections of Moore’s list, including Kingsley’s The Water Babies, Kipling’s Jungle Books, Washington Irving’s

Rip van Winkle and Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and George MacDonald’s Princess and the Goblin and At the Back of the North Wind (listed under “Mythology and Folklore,

Legends and Fairy Tales”) (8-9). Also listed: Jules Verne’s Great Explorers of the 19th

Century (listed under “History and Travel”), and various titles by Cervantes,

Shakespeare, Homer, and Herodotus (listed under “Tales from Old Storytellers”) (14;

10). Moore strikes a very careful balance between honoring the “obvious” choices to be

88 included in the children’s library (the “stories that have stood the test of time”) versus advocating for the inclusion of books that have not yet been written, provided they prove to be of higher quality than the texts already in existence.

There is a certain utopian vision in Moore’s writing here, assuring the reader that there will be a permanent children’s literature and the texts that will be produced for it will only increase in quality, so that they will have the potential to round out the collections of classics being offered to children. Because of its status as a professional document, Moore could advocate for this utopian vision of the development of children’s literature, assuring her likeminded colleagues that changes would come and they would be drastically better than the present. Moore’s optimistic approach also assumed the development of her fellow professionals in such a way that they would also be able to recognize these better books when they came along and would make similar judgments when it came to which books to replace and which to keep.

Alice Jordan

Like Hewins and Moore, Alice Jordan was best known for her work in a major northeastern urban library: the Boston Public Library. Like Moore, Jordan did not attend college but came from an upper-middle class family who valued education: her mother was a normal school graduate who home schooled the children, then moved the family to Massachusetts in order to better provide for the children’s education. Jordan took the required college equivalency exam in 1898 in order to begin work in the Boston Public

Library system (Eaton 27). She began working in the library in 1900 and acted as the

Supervisor of Work with Children from 1917 until 1922 (26). Jordan was an active member of the ALA: she was elected secretary of the Children’s Librarians’ Section in

1903 and president in 1906 (29). Jordan often worked closely with Hewins and Moore at

89 the annual ALA meetings (29). In an attempt to further professionalize and standardize the children’s librarians in the Boston area, Jordan founded the Round Table of

Children’s Librarians in 1906, where (mostly female) librarians could share best practices and discuss children’s literature (30). The group became well known for its ever-evolving list of children’s texts that ought to be considered classics: Round Table discussions greatly informed Jordan’s own list of classics (Lundin 52-53). It was through the Round Table that Jordan came to meet and mentor Bertha Mahoney, who founded the Bookshop for Boys and Girls and its monthly newsletter, which would eventually grow into The Horn Book. This vital element of professional infrastructure will be discussed later in Chapter 2.

Jordan was extremely prolific as an author and scholar in the field of children’s literature. She published scholarly works on children’s literature, including many articles in the Horn Book and a scholarly book, From Rollo to Tom Sawyer in 1948. Jordan’s book focused on American children’s literature and emphasized the importance of the classics, citing Matthew Arnold and other highbrow critics in defending her ideas.

Jordan also repeatedly connects advances in children’s publishing to improvement in

American children’s education, linking the advancement of her area of expertise to the altruistic goals of improving the educational system for all American children.

In 1931, informed by her time at the Boston Public Library, teaching at Simmons, serving on the ALA committee, and working with other librarians through the Round

Table, Alice Jordan began publishing her own lists of classic children’s books. First, she wrote “The Ideal Book from the Standpoint of the Children’s Librarian” in 1931: it was published in the profession-specific ALA Children’s Library Yearbook. As Lundin notes,

90 this list evaluates children’s literature very much “in terms set by women a half-century before” (23). Jordan echoed Hewins and Moore in claiming that the ideal children’s book is “one that is equally claimed by grown persons” (qtd in Lundin 23). Then, Jordan published what became known as the “most definitive canon” in The Horn Book in 1947, titled simply “Children’s Classics.” This essay on children’s classics echoes the tone set by Hewins and Moore decades before, evidence of Larson’s theory about the influence of individual charisma on the shape of a profession. In addition, throughout her essay,

Jordan emphasized the importance of children’s literature to the successful adult in society.

The brief, nine-page essay begins with an anecdote about two men on a train.

The first man finds that his watch is not working correctly.

Beside him was seated another man, a stranger who leaned toward him with the words, ‘I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works.’ Quick as a flash came back the answer, ‘It was the best butter.’ That was all, but each man settled back with the pleasant sense of an unexpected meeting with a member of his own fraternity, as it were. (Jordan, “Children’s Classics” 3)

In opening her essay with this reference to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jordan paints a picture in which knowledge of the classics of childhood provides a gentlemanly shibboleth, or coded reference, to a highbrow body of knowledge. The implication here is that had the man with the watch not understood the reference to Alice, the stranger on the train might have thought him a man lacking in education and taste. In the very next paragraph, Jordan notes that reading these classics may delight children but that

“to miss such a book when the time for it is ripe is to suffer a real loss in one’s store of mental treasure” (“Children’s Classics” 4). She describes the ways in which the knowledge of these classics will serve an adult, both in common references but also in stores of nostalgia and memory (4). Like members of the elite culture attempting to

91 differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche, Jordan implies that to appear fully cultured and to join the ranks of the elite taste culture, one must be able to demonstrate cultural capital accumulated from early childhood.

Jordan goes on to discuss what makes a classic, especially a classic of children’s literature. She cites Gilbert Murray’s discussion of Greek epics and his idea that “the greatness of a poem or work of imaginative art depends mostly upon two questions: how strongly we feel ourselves transported to this new world, and what sort of world it is when we get there, how great, or interesting, or beautiful” (qtd in “Children’s

Classics” 4). To this definition, Jordan adds, “until a book has weathered at least one generation and is accepted in the next, it can hardly be given the rank of a classic and no two people are likely to be in full agreement as to what should be included in a list of them” (4).12 Finally, she declares, in contrast to Moore “it is the children who make the final decision as to the vitality of books written for them” (5). Thus, Jordan includes

Stevenson’s canon of sentiment into her classic-crowning criteria, allowing for the feelings and reactions of children to take a guiding hand in the judgment of books.

While Jordan’s framework deviates from previous lists by including the canon of sentiment and enjoyment, her actual list, woven in and amongst her prose about how to choose the right books, does not deviate significantly from those booklists based on significance that came before. Her opening anecdote names Alice and Through the

Looking Glass with specific mention of the edition illustrated by John Tenniel

(“Children’s Classics” 3). She then describes the “four great books, not written for

12 As we will see in Chapters 6 and 7, this is why most experts agree that it is far too early to conclude whether or not popular 21st century YA texts such as Harry Potter and The Hunger Games will become canonical children’s texts.

92 children but adopted by them”: Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Don Quixote and

Pilgrim’s Progress (4). She names Andersen’s Fairy Tales, A Child’s Garden of Verses, and The Wind in the Willows as “books that rank high for the quality of their writing” while singling out Alice and Mary Poppins as books that evoke glee and joy in children

(4-5). Jordan continues, touching on many of the other categories that appear in other lists, naming only the top two or three texts in each category: for nonsense, Mother

Goose and Lear; for adventure, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; for illustrated texts,

Howard Pyle’s Merry Adventures of Robin Hood and Story of King Arthur, for realistic stories, Hans Brinker, Little Women, and Heidi (5-6). While her reasoning on classic- making criteria differs, none of the texts named in Jordan’s essay demonstrate a significant departure from the ideology of her foremothers.

According to Lundin: “Jordan’s ‘Classics’ was the most definitive canon that children’s librarians promoted” (38). Jordan’s list of classics is considered a “landmark essay” and was published in the Horn Book in 1947, then reprinted four times, “twice edited by Helen Adams Masten (1952, 1967) and Paul Heins (1976)” (38). Lundin also notes that Jordan’s list marks a significant shift in attention to edition and publisher:

“Classics were being commodified as librarians linked classics with recommended editions and publishers mentioned. Appearing in a parent-oriented guide like Horn

Book, the list was geared as a buying guide as well as an expression of canon” (38).

This list marked a specific shift in intended audience. Jordan’s list is short and it is unlikely that any public library in the country lacked for these texts; this list was written for the average American consumer.

93 For an upper-middle class parent seeking to ensure the child’s nursery was properly stocked with appropriate books, Jordan’s list (and subsequently updated versions) gave clear guidelines of what to look for in a text. Further, it advised which of the many illustrated versions of popular titles, like fairy tales, Arabian Nights, and

Mother Goose, were of higher quality and higher cultural capital. Jordan recommends against purchasing sets of famous books put out by a single publisher (in this case

Harper) in a “uniform edition.” “Collections of books with identical shape and binding, and with the same type of pictures, have a deadening effect on home and library shelves. Children’s classics deserve individual treatment, a fact of which relatives and friends of children should be definitely aware” (“Children’s Classics” 6).

Jordan seems to be speaking out against the uniform collection of books popular from 1900 to 1930, which Janice Radway describes in A Feeling for Books as an attempt by newly middle-class Americans to justify their educational and class status through the ostentatious display of books. Radway writes:

A set of books bound uniformly and elegantly and displayed prominently in the home implied metonymically that education had been neither piecemeal nor haphazard but complete, organically related, and fully refined… With the Little Leather Library Scherman offered his subscribers not simply a set of books but an opportunity to display the results of their hard-won progress through the still-new, national education system. (Feeling 161)

While Jordan’s comments do not directly address the uniform sets of adult books, she clearly condemns the idea of matching sets of inferior children’s books as displays of cultural capital. She does not refute the display of books in the home as a cultural marker; instead, she recommends specific titles and editions for purchase as an attempt to further codify those cultural markers. Her argument denigrates the shortcut version offered by Harper and others in their pre-selected matching sets of books. She argues

94 for books to be purchased with the highbrow standards of the classics in mind and to be kept in the home to be read and enjoyed. This argument also means that simply borrowing books from the library cannot lead to the same entry into the “fraternity” she describes at the beginning of her essay: to be a true member of the club, one must to purchase and display his copy of Alice in the home.

Book Lists in Books

Just as real life librarians at the turn of the 20th century helped to direct the formation of the children’s literature canon, so too did depictions of librarians in fictional texts. Fictional librarians and teachers came to play as important of a role in the taste culture of some young people (specifically young girls) as did brick and mortar libraries with their living breathing librarians. In “Betsy and the Canon,” Kelly Hager argues that children’s authors often used libraries or reading lists as a way to situate their characters on a spectrum of social order, to model the proper way of maturing into a

(female) young person, and to help situate the book they were writing within a suggested canon of texts (the company the author would like to be included in).13 In books like Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown, Little Women, Rose in Bloom, and Anne of

Green Gables, the young female protagonists begin by reading sensational or sentimental religious fiction, but are encouraged by an older, more mature role model to give up their immature reading habits and to become more literary, serious, and cultured (110-112). Hager argues that these books actually prescribe reading programs for the reader, and often present public librarians or teachers as reliable sources from

13 In her essay “Shopping Like It’s 1899: Gilded Age Nostalgia and Commodity Fetishism in Alloy’s Gossip Girl” Anastasia Ulanowicz argues that more contemporary texts like the Gossip Girl series situate their characters through consumer brands: “consumer choices become synechdochal expressions of key characters” (38). Choices in fashion and accessories, rather than choice in books, come to define the personalities of characters and serve as by which readers can categorize them as “preppy” or “gauche.”

95 whom young women should take reading suggestions seriously (113-116). Hager argues that the implied reading list in each novel creates “a topos in these books for girls, one that is crucial to the way in which these novels participate in canon formation”

(123). She references Guillory’s concept of the canon as an imaginary list that is never complete or uncontested (qtd 123). Each of the novels that she discusses indicates that the female character had fully come of age at the end of the novel through a change in her reading habits and her continued enjoyment of appropriate classic texts.

It was this kind of matured reading that Hewins, Moore, Jordan, and their colleagues kept in mind as they established the first children’s collections in libraries.

The lists written by these early library pioneers established basic guidelines and ideas about what a children’s library should be. In so doing, these lists set the educational and moral goals of the children’s reading room. By supporting the selection of edubrow literature, classics, and other traditionally respected texts, these early pioneers established a clear set of expectations for the types of books that could be found in a children’s reading room. These standards were so clear, they could be properly represented in fictional versions of libraries. Those moral and educational goals were folded into educational novels for girls, as authors also hoped to mold young minds and instill in them good reading habits. At the start of the 20th century, both real and fictional librarians consistently recommended steady but moderate reading habits, a preference for middle or highbrow literature, care and respect for the physical text, and good citizenship.

The Great Excluded; or, Books “Not Recommended for Purchase by Expert”

John Guillory argues that any attempt at canon-making is always incomplete; by definition, no one list can encompass every text within a specified category (29-30).

96 When pioneering librarians like Hewins and Moore wrote their early canon-making lists, they both indicated a utopian hope that their lists were incomplete, because the rest of the books that belonged in the children’s literature canon did not exist yet. We will continue to examine how these women worked to influence publishers and booksellers in order to bring about that future vision of the canon in Chapter 3. In this next section, we will examine why librairans excluded existing titles from their canonical lists.

If, as Lundin notes “canon walls fortified the child’s garden of books,” then the texts that librarians chose to exclude from library shelves can tell us a lot about the canon they were designing (13). Librarians worked actively to establish what Stevenson terms “the canon of significance” by purchasing, reviewing, and promoting texts that fit their edubrow notions of appropriate literature for children.14 The texts that were intentionally excluded from librarians’ lists of books recommended for purchase were those texts that were deemed to be lacking in either moral or educational value. Some of these texts were popular with children (and adults): many of those texts were serialized, mass-produced, or sensational. As librarians sought to build the canon of children’s literature on edubrow principles, they attempted to exclude a great number of these popular texts from circulation by refusing to stock them on library shelves.

However, some of the texts exiled by librarians were not easily discarded: some were able to find an audience and remain popular despite condemnation from these emerging children’s literature experts. Sometimes texts so affected an audience that readers eagerly passed those stories on to their own children. These books formed the

14 As discussed in the introduction, Stevenson essentially argues that some texts, like The Water Babies, are held up as significant canonical texts for academic reasons, but over time, those texts lose appeal with a general audience and so fade from the canon of sentiment. My argument here is essentially the reverse: The Wizard of Oz remained a steady presence within the canon of sentiment for so long that academics felt compelled to include it in the canon of significance: see Chapter 5 for more.

97 basis of Stevenson’s “canon of sentiment” and I argue that the texts that remained sentimental favorites for generations often found themselves (grudgingly and retroactively) incorporated into the canon of significance. My primary example of this canonical evolution is The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a book about outsiders. The heroine of the book,

Dorothy Gale, neither belongs in gray, drab Kansas nor colorful, unconventional Oz.

The Wizard himself is an interloper and self-described humbug. Dorothy’s travelling companions, Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion are likewise isolated and alone, lacking in the vital organs (brain, heart, guts) that will allow them to successfully associate with society. Like many of its characters, the novel The Wonderful Wizard of

Oz (1900), was an outcast when it came to the early lists drawn up by library matriarchs. The early children’s librarians determined the Oz series to be poorly written, heavily merchandised, and far too popular. For much of the 20th century, the tastemakers of early children’s literature declared the Oz books to be outside of their accepted canon and therefore off limits to their patrons. However, over time, the canon of sentiment, assisted by the popular 1939 film adaptation, forced tastemakers to change their minds. In part, this acceptance of Oz was due to the film, a greater acceptance of fantasy, the changing role of librarians in American society, and the role of academics in establishing a retroactive canon of significant American children’s literature texts.

Lyman Frank Baum published The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1900: the book was so successful that Baum was able to retire from all of his other odd jobs and money-making schemes and write full time. Starting in 1884, Baum’s family suffered a

98 series of financial troubles, which caused Baum to move his family from New York to the South Dakota Territory, then to Chicago in pursuit of various schemes (Hearn xxii).

Baum’s mother-in-law encouraged him to pursue fiction writing, and so he started to write children’s books, even as he worked as a travelling salesman, a store window- dresser, and newspaper journalist. Baum published Mother Goose in Prose (1897), My

Candelabra’s Glare (1898) and Father Goose (1899) with W.W. Denslow as illustrator:

Denslow would eventually illustrate the Oz books as well (Zipes xiii).

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was published in August 1900 by The George M.

Hill Company: they advertised a first printing of 10,000 copies. Hill reportedly ran three more printings, one of 15,000 copies in early October, the next of 10,000 in late

October, and a last of 30,000 in November (Hearn xli). “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz became the best-selling children’s book of the 1900 Christmas season, and it continued to sell into the new year. Hill said that in all the company printed nearly 90,000 copies”

(Hearn xli). When writing the first book, Baum never intended Oz to be a series.

Following Oz, he wrote and published Dot and Tot of Merryland and American Fairy

Tales (1901), The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus (1902) and The Enchanted

Island of Yew (1903) before returning to the land of Oz for a sequel: The Marvelous

Land of Oz (1904).

The Oz universe was extremely popular. As a result, Baum ended up writing sequels to Oz whenever he needed the money. Zipes claims that Baum liked to live well when he could, so whenever his other ventures failed, he would write another Oz book.

According to Zipes, Oz “was his pot of luck to which he could turn when he needed money, and it was the means through which he had formed a bond with hundreds if not

99 thousands of readers who wrote and gave him suggestions for characters, incidents, and plots” (xiii). Baum was an extremely enterprising man, but was ultimately bad at business and managing money: he reportedly made and lost many fortunes over his life

(xi). In 1910, the Baums moved to Hollywood: Baum had invested in a film company and they moved into the house where Baum would die in 1919. They named the house

“Ozcot” (Zipes xv). There, Baum wrote two other fantasy books for kids and seven more

Oz sequels, two of which were published posthumously. Baum also worked on multiple stage and film adaptations for Oz (Hearn lvi-lx). Baum suffered a stroke in his Ozcot home and died on May 6, 1919 (Zipes xvi).

Many scholars now identify The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as the first American fairy tale and the first real American fantasy novel. “Almost every great nation has its immortal work of juvenile fantasy. In England it is Lewis Carroll’s Alice books. Germany has Grimm’s fairy tales, France has the stories by Perrault, Denmark has its Andersen.

Italy’s classic is Pinocchio. In America the classic fantasy is, of course, L. Frank Baum’s

The Wizard of Oz” (Gardner xi). Just as traditional fairy tales transmit cultural messages and morals, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is often identified as an optimistic, even utopian, story that was unique in America at the time of its publication. According to

Carpenter:

Only with the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in the first year of the new century, did the United States produce a fantasy which, like its great British counterparts, examined society critically in fairy story terms.… America was still possessed with the kind of optimism that had infected British society around the time of the Great Exhibition; and optimistic societies do not, apparently, produce great fantasies. (16)

However, since fantasy was still very much a British import and not highly valued in

American fiction, Oz was highly suspect to the literary elite of America.

100 On the one hand, fairy tales are meant to educate and pass on moral and ethical ideals to readers. As Grunzke points out, the United States did not have a readily available set of “native fairy tales” (which of course disregards the myths and legends of the American native peoples) and so it was up to American authors to create them.

Grunzke writes that Baum did just that: “By borrowing heavily from Pilgrim’s Progress in theme, characterization, and even structure… [Baum] was creating an American fairy tale that would come to perform a function similar to that of native fairy tales in other countries – transmission of cultural identity” (54). However, this educational role became somewhat problematic as Baum continued to publish books in the Oz series and it became clear that the educational lessons throughout were not always thought through or communicated consistently (Carpenter 16). Grunzke also asserts that “[t]he importance of Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is that it is one of the first novels for children that intentionally moved the moral of the tale to the level of subtext.” (Grunzke

27). This assertion might help to explain Baum’s popularity among young people and its reputation among children’s literature professionals, who, at the time of Oz’s publication, preferred more overtly moralistic and realistic texts for children.

On the other hand, there was something about the Oz books that captured the imagination of thousands of young people and made significant impacts on them. Baum referred to himself as “the Royal Historian of Oz” and felt that Oz was not really his, but that it belonged to his fans. Zipes writes:

“True, he had conceived this marvelous land and its inhabitants, but Baum had tapped a deeply rooted desire in himself and his readers to live in a peaceful country, one that maintained tolerance for the weirdest creatures and strange behavior… that country was not America, and the more Baum cultivated the socialist utopian relations and principles of Oz, the more he and his readers shared this knowledge. (xiii)

101 The utopian empire of Oz provided a place for children to project their desires and a way to understand what their own homeland was lacking. As a result, Oz has been described as a cult favorite and a series that was frowned upon by the emerging educational establishment. Nonetheless, the series remained a popular favorite, passed around and down by legions of fans decades before the MGM film made it a mainstream favorite.

With their fledgling professional status to consider, the early children’s literature librarians rejected Oz. Many felt “that the books lacked serious educational content and were written in a lackluster style” (Grunzke 14). In addition to the series’ associations with cheap literature like dime novels and story papers, librarians also strongly objected to what they perceived as a lack of quality in both the writing and the fantasy genre.

Excluding Oz from library shelves was a representative stance of librarians on one of the major dilemmas facing the growing profession. In Forbidden Books in American

Public Libraries: 1876-1936, Evelyn Geller outlines the three main dilemmas facing librarians as they began to professionalize. “The first is the populist-elitist dilemma. It involves the conflict between elite and popular culture, between the tastes of professionals and sponsors and the more popular taste for bestsellers of little literary value or lasting interest” (xviii-xix).15 Of her three dilemmas, the first version, of highbrow standards eliminating a perceived lowbrow text from the public library, is

15 Geller’s other two dilemmas are as follows: “The second in the neutrality-advocacy dilemma. It involves the librarian’s posture with regard to partisan conflict in the community and the efforts of dominant groups to impose their views on the library. . . . The third is the freedom-censorship dilemma. It involves the attitude toward deviant ideas outside the framework of conventional debate, ideas that seem to threaten the moral or the social order” (xvii-xix). The second and third dilemmas will become an issue for Oz later, as the public questions its socialist messages and librarians must decide whether or not to censor their collections based on ideology, rather than simply on quality.

102 applicable during the time that Hewins, Moore, and Jordan were composing their canon- affecting lists of recommended books.

Children’s librarians were in the process of arguing that children’s literature should be judged by the same criteria as “regular” or adult literature. The majority agreed that a “single standard to be applied to all literature, whether child’s or adult… everyone agreed that literary quality admitted books to libraries, while lack of it kept them out” (MacLeod 122-23). However, the early lists composed by Hewins and Moore were so influential because “the precisions of literary quality were less obvious; ‘whole souled’ and ‘mature in temper’ were abstract, to say the least” (123). By laying out a list of books that fit these criteria, the early librarians used examples to demonstrate what those abstract concepts looked like in practice. Based on those lists, the style of the Oz books was simple, neither elegant nor poetic. Further, as Baum produced more and more Oz books, many came to believe that he was writing more for profit than for the increase of the storyline. This profit-mindedness deeply offended many professionals within the children’s literature field, as they feared children were actually endangered by cheap, poorly written literature. Further, this profit-motive compromised any claim that

Baum might have made to an altruistic desire to educate children through his art.

Beyond abstract concepts of art and professionalism, many librarians and experts of the time firmly believed that reading the wrong kind of books could cause children to lose their minds and could “land a young reader in the asylum or in prison”

(Grunzke 111). In this way, experts believed censorship might actually protect the morality, health, and safety of children and could reduce crime and mental illness (111).

Many librarians sought to avoid purchasing the Oz books for their libraries, despite their

103 popularity among young readers because they felt Oz qualified as one of these dangerous, addictive books that would do more harm to children than good.

In general, librarians had come out in united opposition to mass-marketed fiction, often produced in the factory format by an army of authors writing to pre-determined outlines under pseudonyms like Edward Stratemeyer or Carolyn Keene. Librarians believed “dime novels dragged down the moral character of their readers, and, therefore, were blights on society and enemies of the Progressive librarian mission”

(Grunzke 111). According to Clark:

Librarians and other critics of children’s literature were wary, to say the least, of… this ‘mile-a-minute fiction’ - known to ‘debauch and vitiate’ and to do ‘incalculable’ harm… Baum’s standing with the arbiters of children’s literature was hardly helped by the fact that his Oz books were produced by publishers of such series-or that he himself would go on to write, under pseudonyms, the Sam Steele series, the Boy Fortune Hunters series, the Aunt Jane’s Nieces series. (136-37)

Baum’s association with the mass-market fiction publishers tarnished the reputation of his Oz books. Keeping dime novels and series fiction off of the shelves was a key strategy for librarians when it came to achieving their professed professional goals.

However, Hearn points out that not all series are automatically shut out of the library. He argues that while librarians regularly stock “acceptable series” like “the Peter Rabbit series, the Doctor Dolittle series, the Mary Poppins series, the Narnia series, the

Prydian series, the Borrowers series, the Green Knowle series, the Wrinkle in Time series, the Miss Bianca series, and the Little House series,” they banished Oz for the crime of being written in series (xcix; emphasis original). Arguments about the unplanned, opportunistic quality of the Oz series or the haste with which they were written do not absolve this seeming contradiction. I hypothesize that it was the figure of

Baum himself that the librarians took exception to. Baum closely resembled his own title

104 character: a bumbling huckster masquerading as a wizard (of words in Baum’s case).

While librarians were working to establish their own professional ethos, they could ill afford any cracks in their brand new canon. Admitting a travelling salesman who wrote children’s books on the side might have tainted their own professionalism by association.

Beverly Lyon Clark notes that while other classics of children’s literature like Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan embraced fantasy, the British tradition of fantasy permitted these texts a higher level of respect. However, Clark notes that American culture featured “the intermingling of traditions” in which fantasy occupied a different cultural position than it did in Britain. Since fantasy had not figured clearly in either the tradition of literature for American children or adults, not many of the literary elite knew what to do with that genre. Clark claims “when fantasy does appear, it is not taken seriously by either the custodians of high culture for adults or the custodians of children’s literature” (Clark 129). Clark also notes how this idea complicates the appreciation with which American readers treated British fantasy imports by comparing

Alice to Oz. The quality of the writing within the fantasy novel might provide some explanation. She also argues that the primarily female audience for Oz led to Baum’s series being placed lower in the cultural hierarchy than other children’s fantasy novels like Alice or Peter Pan that could claim a higher percentage of male (adult) readers

(140).

Clark goes on to claim that as the producers and critics of “serious” literature upheld the ideals of “art for art’s sake,” proponents of children’s literature excluded these mass-market books as representing “art for money’s sake” (137). By preventing

105 the entry of series books into their children’s rooms and the official canon of children’s literature, librarians sought to separate the commercial books from the “good” books

(Grunzke 124). While the librarians seemed universally opposed to series fiction, it was not the only kind of popular, commercialized children’s literature at the time. Clark highlights the case of Francis Hodgson Burnett’s Little Lord Fauntleroy published in

1893, which “traded heavily in commercial tie-ins. Little Lord Fauntleroy playing cards, writing paper, perfume, and his trademark velvet suits were all commercially available

(and popular)” (142). Oz had similar merchandizing: Clark noted that while librarians disliked Fauntleroy nearly as much as the Oz books, Burnett’s book did not have the same lasting popularity of the Oz books, and so the debate around whether or not to stock the book faded away relatively quickly. The Oz books, however, remained favorites among children for generations and so came to embody the debate of commercialism versus quality in children’s literature (Clark 142).16

While some libraries refrained from ever purchasing the Oz series, other libraries made a concerted effort to remove purchased Oz books from the shelves. Ann Carroll

Moore removed the entire Oz series from the shelves of the Central Children’s Reading

Room of the NYPL in 1933. “The Oz books remained missing from the shelves of the

New York Public Library for nearly three decades (not being reintroduced until the mid-

1960s)” (Grunzke 129). While Moore did not give a specific reason for their removal, she set a precedent for other branch libraries in New York, and possibly libraries across the country, to do the same (129). Though Hewins endorsed controversial texts like

Huckleberry Finn, she did not include Oz on any of her post-1900 lists. Neither Moore

16 This debate over market forces versus artistic merit never really goes away, but it will reemerge in force during the 1970s, with the emergence of mass-market paperbacks and the rise of YA literature.

106 nor Jordan included him on their lists of recommended books, an omission as useful to consider as the titles that are included on these lists.

Additionally, since libraries and schools made up a huge share of the children’s literature market in the first half of the century, leaving Oz off the list of books recommended for purchase could have meant a significant decrease in potential sales

(Grunzke 127). By removing Oz from the shelves, librarians were not only preventing new audiences from experiencing the books under the auspices of an educational institution, but were also denying the publisher the sales for replacement books, since readers were not wearing out copies of Oz. For other books, this lack of institutional support might have ensured a rapid decline in popularity and relegation to an out-of- print backlist, but Oz was popular enough with the general public to avoid this fate.

In addition to being banned from library shelves, children’s literature critics regularly excluded Baum from lists of recommended titles. Academics and literary scholars ignored Baum when putting together anthologies of American literature.

According to Grunzke,

None of Cornelia Meigs’ Critical History of Children’s Literature (1953), May Hill Arbuthnot’s Children and Books (1947), Bookman’s 1922 list of ‘One Hundred Story Books for Children,’ Laura E. Richard’s What Shall the Children Read? (1939), Alice M. Jordan’s Children’s Classics (1947), nor dozens of other such books mentioned either Baum or Oz. (14)

Clark lists the following texts as also guilty of excluding Baum: The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917-21), the 1948 Literary History of the United States, and the1988 Columbia Literary History of the United States. (132). However, while Baum was regularly excluded from these anthologies of the significant canon, the long lasting popularity of his series, coupled with the popularity of the MGM film adaptation in 1939,

107 helped maintain the book’s place in the sentimental canon, which in turn created a space for Baum in the official canon of children’s literature.

While the Oz books were not welcome on library shelves, there was plenty of room for them on the bestseller lists. According to Hearn, “[The Wonderful Wizard of

Oz] sold five million copies by the time it went into the public domain in 1956, the year of its author’s centenary. No one has dared estimate how many more millions have been sold since” (xi). Oz fans regularly claimed the first book was a “runaway bestseller,” and a perennial favorite among children.

In 1957 Martin Gardner referred to a survey of teenagers (conducted in 1956, the year the MGM film first appeared on television) in which they cited the Oz books most, among the books they liked best when young; he also reported that Milwaukee children had worn out 135 library copies of Oz in eight years. According to one estimate, more than ten million copies of Oz were in print by 1978. (Clark 131)

According to Frank L. Mott in Golden Multitudes “[Oz] never quite reached the best seller scale we have set up, but it was the most popular juvenile of the turn of the century and established a long line of Oz books” (224). Mott includes The Wonderful

Wizard of Oz on his list of “Better Sellers” or “the runners-up believed not to have reached the total sales required for the over-all best sellers” (315).17

Clark further notes that it is notoriously difficult to properly estimate the sales of a book once the copyright has lapsed and indicates that while claims of Baum’s bestseller status are ubiquitous, well respected list makers are inconsistent when it comes to their treatment of juvenile literature in general and the Oz series in particular. She writes:

17 Mott’s criteria for an Over-All Best Seller in the United States: “Each book in this list is believed to have had a total sale equal to one per cent of the population of continental United States (or the English Colonies in the years before the Revolution) for the decade in which it was published.…The list omits bibles, hymnals, textbooks, almanacs, cookbooks, doctor-books, manuals, and reference works” (303).

108 at one point [Mott] states that Oz ’was the most popular juvenile of the turn of the century,’ but elsewhere he indicates that its sales were exceeded by Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1901), The Call of the Wild (1904), Anne of Green Gables (1908), and A Girl of the Limberlost (1909), works that are now usually considered juvenile literature. (131)

While it may be difficult to accurately assess how many copies of Oz were actually sold, especially once the copyright lapsed, the ongoing popularity of the books within the juvenile market for the first half of the century helped the books to become a sentimental favorite. As we will see in Chapter 4, this long-term popularity also ensured long-term controversy for the Oz series. As the role of the library evolved in the 20th century, so did the objections to Baum’s series. However, as growing infrastructures helped librarians to better distribute their approved children’s literature to generations of

American children, the potential audience for all children’s texts, both edubrow and popular, continued to increase over the course of the 20th century.

Garden Walls: Librarians Build Professional Infrastructures in Support of Children’s Literature

As the free library movement became increasingly successful across the United

States, the field of children’s librarianship also expanded in members, influence, and measures of professionalism. In the early decades of the 20th century, children’s literature librarians were largely seen as the driving force behind the formation of an

American children’s literature canon. This is largely due to the fact that while children’s librarians were working to create a children’s litearture canon, the academy and other cultural critics were generally dismissive of children’s literature as a serious form of literary art. As previously discussed, the librarians first worked to form the canon through the composition of recommended texts that should comprise the basis of a children’s library collection. Through the publication of those lists in both elite

109 professional journals and more mainstream literary magazines and newspapers, the idea of a literature specifically designed for (upper-class white) children became more accessible to the general public.

By 1915, librarians had established graduate training programs at elite insitutions that had begun to issue certificates and other credentials as indications of professional training. The next step in the professionalization process, as theorized by Bledstein and

Larson, was the establishment of infrastructures like professional organizations and journals. The ALA had provided the general library profession with these markers of professionalization, and within that broader umbrella, children’s librarians had also set up an established sub-section and their own standards for specialized training. This section will examine the historical moment that children’s librarians began to expand the specific children’s literature-related professional infrastructures in order to make their goals more accessible to the public, 1915-1920. These new ventures included

Children’s Book Week, The Horn Book Magazine, and the ALA prizes for children’s literature, the Newbery and Caldecott Medals.

As noted in the introduction, at the turn of the 20th century, the division between writing for children and writing for adults became more distinct and authors and magazines that once catered to a mixed audience in the 19th century now became more specialized and segregated (Clark 48-50, 73). This shift was good for children’s literature in some ways, allowing more authors, illustrators, and publishers to specialize in creating texts for children. However, it was also detrimental to the standing of children’s literature (and its authors and experts) in the literary hierarchy of the day. As

Felicity A. Hughes notes, this shift centered around the attempt to recaset the novel as

110 a highbrow art form (542-3). In order to elevate the artistic novel, Henry James and others like him promoted new highbrow, literary qualities at the expense of literature aimed at women and children. This led to an overall lowering of the esteem for female- centered novels, like romances and novels with appeal to children.18

In response to this devaluing, experts on children’s literature began insisting on

“levels of distinction” within the children’s literature category. By canonizing highbrow and edubrow texts (some of which were usurped from adult literary categories) and eschewing lowbrow lit like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the pioneering librarians hoped to raise the standing of children’s literature more generally in the cultural hierarchy

(thereby also raising the cultural value of their own expertise). Kenneth Kidd argues that these efforts were “in effect creating a middlebrow tradition of children’s literature, and perhaps positioning ‘children’s literature’ as a middlebrow formulation more generally”

(“Prizing” 170). By establishing formal mechanisms to regulate the distribution, evaluation, and prizing of high quality children’s literature, children’s literature librarians also furthered their own professionalization process and established their own authority in the field.

These infrastructure elements also demonstrate how librarians often worked in concert and cooperation with other children’s literature experts: Children’s Book Week was a joint venture between the ALA, the American Bookseller’s Association (ABA), and the Boy Scouts of America. The Horn Book magazine was founded and published by

Bertha Mahoney, owner of a children’s bookstore in Boston, but Mahoney regularly

18 This devaluing remains relevant today, with a general dismissal of romance novels, as depicted by Radway in Reading the Romance. Children’s literature and young adult literature also remain devalued. For more reading see Clark’s Kiddie Lit.

111 consulted with librarians, like her mentor Alice Jordan. As it transformed from a local newsletter into a national, professional publication, The Horn Book came to be seen as a valuable reference for all experts in the children’s literature field. Frederic Melcher, editor of Publishers Weekly and president of the ABA originally conceived the Newbery

Medal and worked diligently with the ALA to establish the first children’s literature prize in America. This emerging architecture surrounding children’s literature was initially based on the cooperation of many diverse parties, all interested and (financially) invested in the widespread success of children’s literature. While these interests would eventually begin to diverge around mid-century, these cooperative foundations also ensured that children’s literature would never be fully controlled by any one profession.

Librarians were central and hugely influential in this field in the early decades of the 20th century, but even at the height of their influence, they had to rely on other professions to help build and improve children’s literature infrastructures, as well as to sell the concept of children’s literature to the American public.

Children’s Book Week

Children’s Book Week was a collaborative project between the ALA’s Division of

Children’s Services, the ABA and the Boy Scouts of America. While the first Children’s

Book Week took place in 1919, the idea for such a national celebration of children’s literature was “put forward in 1915 at the annual meeting of the American Booksellers

Association by the chief librarian of the Boy Scouts of America, Franklin K. Mathiews.”

(Marcus, Minders 73). World War I delayed the plans for the inaugural book week for a number of years, but Mathiews involved the co-editor of Publishers Weekly, Frederic

Melcher, to help him bring the idea to fruition. According to Sayers’s biography of

112 Moore, these two men came to Moore for help in making their plan a reality (208). She writes:

Mr. Melcher thought something could be accomplished by a sustained campaign, nationwide in scope, with a Children’s Book Week to be celebrated in schools, libraries, and bookshops across the country. He envisioned, too, a plan to encourage authors of children’s books and to entice others into the field. After preliminary talks they had come to Room 105, a location that had gained some repute as a hatching ground. The Three M’s - Moore, Mathiews, Melcher! Three musketeers who were troubadours as well and made things hum. (208)

While Sayers is especially enthusiastic about her mentor’s work, other scholars support the argument that Moore had gained a reputation, both within the ALA and in other book-related fields, as a woman with influence enough to make things happen.19 While

Moore’s concerns continued to be the improvement of the books published and made available to children, the involvment of the ABA also brought an element of the financial market into the equation. According to Murray, “The American Booksellers Association spearheaded the creation of Children’s Book Week to encourage the sales of children’s literature” (146). This motivation can be interpreted as less altruistic than Sayers’s description of men attempting to improve the materials read by boys (208). While neither nefarious nor dishonest, the ABA’s financial motivations could have raised concerns with parents or been used by competing groups of experts to undermine the social credit of the event. Involving Moore and the ALA ensured that Children’s Book

Week would retain some of the altruistic social credit that the librarians had so effectively accrued at the start of the century.

19 Marcus, Murray, and Eddy all tell similar versions of this meeting in Room 105 and credit Moore with the connections and political capital within the industry to accomplish such a large undertaking.

113 The ABA created a Children’s Book Week committee, which included Melcher and Mathiews, and dedicated five thousand dollars, collected from publishers, to the program (Tebbell 15). The committee “outlined a program for the first year and produced the initial slogan, ‘More Books in the Home.’ A syllabus advising how to conduct a Children’s Book Week was mailed to a list of four thousand, and Mathiews himself spent a month traveling through the West and Northwest to spread the gospel”

(15). The inter-agency cooperation between the ABA and the ALA proved to be vital to the project. “Anne Carroll Moore’s help proved to be of special value. Her name was closely associated with children’s reading and reading movements in general, and she was extremely persuasive with educational leaders and librarians in gaining their cooperation” (15). Moore’s name, reputation, and cultural capital allowed her to convince publishers, librarians, booksellers, authors, and illustrators to take part in this new promotional venture in a way that Melcher and Mathiews would not have been able to achieve on their own.

Moore’s reputation and social credit helped make the first book week a success.

The first Children’s Book Week, held in November of 1919, featured a talk by Kate

Douglas Wiggin, author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, at the NYPL. Nationwide, libraries sponsored school reading contests, communities held speeches, and newspapers published editorials on the importance of children being able to treasure books through owning and re-reading their favorites (Marcus, Minders 75). The poster for Children’s Book Week was distributed nationwide and was illustrated by Jessie

Willcox Smith, a well-known cover illustrator for Good Housekeeping (75). The poster featured “two well-groomed, rosy-cheeked youngsters at home – a schoolboy in an Eton

114 suit and his golden-tressed older sister – happily immersed together in stacks of books” and was aimed directly at “the nation’s book-buying mothers” (75). By general understanding, this program assumed that these “book-buying mothers” were upper or middle-class, white, educated, married, and Christian: the campaign appealed directly to that taste culture and set of values.

Marcus notes that the poster and its slogan of “More Books in the Home!” “had obvious appeal for booksellers, but it also served the purpose of their librarian friends, who considered children’s pride in book ownership a boon to their own mission of instilling in the young a sense of enfranchisement in the world of books” (Minders 75).

The month of November was chosen especially to feature the wares of publishers before the holiday buying season “then the only time of year when most publishers and booksellers featured juveniles on their lists and display tables. For librarians who regarded themselves with pride as bulwarks against the crass commercialism of the age, the plan held risk, but the chance to spur public interest in good books seemed far to outweigh the risk” (76).20 Moore acknowledged doubts about ABA’s involvement in the project and the obvious commercial implications of the program. She worried “that the success of children’s work would prompt the very commercialization she perceived to threaten traditional ideals. The market, she believed, had no use for values” (Eddy

96). Her fear was that the market would continue to popularize the very texts that the librarians had judged sub-par, or move the children’s literature field more broadly away from the values that Moore and her colleagues were working so hard to establish.

20 According to the ALSC “Frequently Asked Questions” page, Children’s Book Week was moved to May in 2008. This may be read as an attempt to remove the now established celebration to a less market- driven time of year or as an attempt to take advantage of the emerging summer reading market for children’s books.

115 From early on, Book Week was considered a great success and became a centralizing event in the children’s literature community. “In acknowledgement of its success, ‘Children’s Book Week, A National Movement’ was the theme of the ALA’s

1921 annual meeting, at Swampscott, Massachusetts. Such recognition no doubt strengthened the reputations of its organizers” (Eddy 96). Moore and others had called in favors and persuaded publishers and booksellers to participate in the new venture based on trust and character. According to Eddy, the event also became a unifying moment for the bookwomen involved with children’s literature across professions.

“Children’s Book Week, rich with the rituals of preparation, selection, anticipation, and celebration, became an important event around which bookwomen gathered as a community” (87). A designated week in which all the children’s literature experts came together to cooperatively promote and celebrate the literature they valued proved to be just as important to the field as the increase in sales and public awareness.

During the 1920s, the concept of designating a whole week to celebrate children’s books was a revolutionary one, as books for children were rarely purchased for home libraries and if given at all, were given as awards or gifts. In the poverty- stricken 1930s and the paper-rationed 1940s, books in the home seemed like an unattainable luxury. But by the 1950s, the idea of purchasing a home library of books for children was accepted as common wisdom, especially by the rapidly expanding

American middle class. Radway argues that books and home libraries became middle- class cultural markers of taste in the post-war years, and I argue so too did a home library for children’s books (148-152). Children’s Book Week did much to promote reading as a positive pastime for middle-class children, an ideal that benefitted all of the

116 professionals concerned with education and literacy. By the 1950s, the American middle-class needed very little convincing that children should be reading good books and so the cooperative mission of these groups diverged, as they struggled for primacy in convincing parents which books to purchase.

The Horn Book

From the start of their professionalization efforts, librarians wanted to separate themselves from booksellers. Thus, the professional aims of librarians quickly expanded beyond the democratic distribution of books and into an advisory and gatekeeping role.

Librarians sought to establish themselves as more knowledgeable than booksellers when it came to choosing the correct book, especially since they could claim that they had no financial incentive in the choice: librarians could recommend older or less popular texts without hurting a financial bottom line. With the rise of other forms of entertainment (radio, film, and television), booksellers were also increasingly vulnerable to accusations of mass-marketing and media tie-ins. This complex mix of marketing synergy and blockbuster strategies will be explored more in Chapter 6, but children’s books are often prime targets for this kind of cross marketing (Miller, Reluctant

Capitalists 132). Thus, librarians increasingly encouraged parents to view the library as a market-free zone, in which children would be encouraged to choose educative and highbrow literature, regardless of market trends, fads, or transmedia adaptations.

However, one of children’s literature’s most powerful publications, The Horn

Book, derrives from a significant cooperation between booksellers and librarians.

Originally designed in 1916 as a store newsletter for Boston’s Bookshop for Boys and

Girls (a project of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union), Bertha Mahony, store owner, published Volume 1, Issue 1 of the quarterly Horn Book magazine in October

117 1924 (Marcus, Minders 98; Sayers 238). The magazine started out as an eighteen-page illustrated quarterly devoted to reviews and notices about new children’s books, all of which were sold in the shop. The Horn Book was a powerful and influential source of information for children’s literature enthusiasts and was uniquely approved of and contributed to by some of the most poweful children’s literature librarians. According to

Marcus:

In the early going Mahony demonstrated both seriousness of purpose and political savvy by asking the Boston Public Library’s chief children’s librarian, Alice M. Jordan, to instruct her in the literature she intended to sell. Mahony then set out to win the confidence of other powerful library and publishing figures, including Anne Carroll Moore, Clara Whitehill Hunt, Hartford’s Caroline M. Hewins, and The Publisher’s Weekly’s Frederic Melcher. (Minders 98-99)

The key to this quote is the concept that Mahony’s consultation with Jordan constituted

“political savvy”: Marcus implies that while Mahony’s business sense was her own, her success in the children’s literature field is largely attributable to her networking with children’s librarians. She involved Jordan in her new venture, just as Melcher and

Mathiews did Anne Carroll Moore. This access to the librarians approval helped The

Horn Book to thrive and to acquire a good deal of cultural capital in the field of children’s literature.

Eddy’s book focuses an entire chapter on the relevance and importance of The

Horn Book to the development of children’s literature, locating it as a foundational text and influential mouthpiece for other “bookwomen” and for the development of children’s literature as an area of academic inquriy. She notes that Mahony became quite influential within the children’s book world by the end of the 1920s, and that she “used her unique and authoritative role in the children’s book world both to advance her opinions about ‘good’ reading for children and to expand the influence of the other book

118 women with whom she was closely connected” including the librarians, publishers, and authors (Eddy 130). Additionally, Mahony remained an active proprietor of her

Bookshop and was profiled in an article by Alice Jordon in the Atlantic Bookshelf in

1929, in an article titled “The Bookshop that is Bertha Mahony” (Eddy 130).

Jordan’s article noted Mahony’s excellent taste in books, keen sense of design, professional knowledge and training, and zeal for her work. Jordan, who trained

Mahony, congratulated Mahony for her work on The Horn Book, saying, “As it announces itself, so in truth it is, ‘the only magazine existing anywhere which is devoted to fine books and reading for young people.’ For those who have watched the growth of this slender offshoot, its comely maturity is peculiarly gratifying” (Jordan, “Bookshop”). I argue that Jordan is referring to herself here, as someone who was actively involved in the Bookshop’s growth from infancy to successful maturity: she is then declaring her own contentment in what the Horn Book has come to represent. In addition to her work in the shop and with The Horn Book, Jordan also notes that Mahony was responsible for:

Realms of Gold, by Bertha E. Mahony and Elinor Whitney, published this spring by Doubleday, Doran and Company… Full thirteen years ago in the beginning of its existence the first annotated catalogue, called a ‘suggestive purchase list,’ was issued by the shop. Kept up to date by fairly frequent revisions until 1922, this list has long been unobtainable, and Realms of Gold, its actual successor, is at the same time a wholly new book. (“Bookshop”)

With this publication, Mahony entered the same realm as the librarians who published suggested lists of books for children. Mahony was a bookseller, but had learned well from her mentors in the library. In fact, Jordan even refers to the bookstore’s collection as “a model library of children’s books,” surely one of the highest compliments a children’s librarian could pay.

119 The Horn Book was initially run by Bertha Mahony and her assistant editor Elinor

Whitney. While it was undoubtedly tied to a profit-motivated enterprise, the Bookshop,

Mahony’s goals for the magazine echoed those of the librarians with whom she actively cultivated relationships. Mahony wanted to encourage good reading habits in the young and assist parents and older relatives in encouraging those good habits. The magazine grew rapidly in subscriptions, influence, and contributors. Well-respected librarians, as well as children’s literature publishers, critics, authors, and illustrators, wrote columns for The Horn Book. She called upon the library pioneers to write for the newsletter, and even secured contributions from these women after they retired from their library work.

For example, Anne Carroll Moore published a regular column in The Horn Book, called

“The ‘Three Owls’ Notebook” from 1936-1960, even after she retired from the NYPL in

1941, and Alice Jordan held the position of book editor from 1939-1949 (Eddy 156). “As the magazine evolved, outdistancing its New England boundaries, it offered critical appraisal of a high order and, as a lagniappe, varied and fascinating articles concerning artists, editors, writers - all the tangential interests of those concerned with the making of books for children” (Sayers 238).21 Further distancing herself from profit motivations,

Mahony focused the magazine on similar Progressive ideals as the librarians from whom she had learned the trade.

Eddy is careful to note that Mahony was hesitant to include advertising in The

Horn Book as a means of financing the magazine and keeping subscription rates low.

Mahony was forced to “reluctantly” offer advertising space in the magazine starting in

1926, in addition to an annual subscription cost of $1. Eddy asserts that Mahony did not

21 A laginappe is a small gift given to a customer by a merchant at the time of a purchase or a bonus item.

120 want to include advertising because she saw the magazine as “a work of art, a service to readers, and a partnership with subscribers… No doubt, she also resisted advertising because it attached her to the commercialism she claimed to detest” (126). However, despite its ties to the commercial side of children’s literature, Mahoney and her contributors were able to link The Horn Book to the cultural capital of the children’s librarians. With the blessing and participation of some of the most influential librarians,

The Horn Book would become one of the most powerful publications in the field of children’s literature. The Horn Book survived the Depression and shifts in influence within the field of children’s literature and remains extremely influential today. According to the Horn Book website (Nov 2013):

Published bimonthly, The Horn Book Magazine features commentary, articles, book reviews of selected new titles, and other information related to children’s and young adult literature. Its sister publication, The Horn Book Guide, appears twice a year and contains only reviews, more than 2,000 in each issue, which are rated and extensively indexed… Chosen by Horn Book editors, Fanfare is the magazine’s selection of the best children’s and young adult books of the year. Published annually since 1938, with a few exceptions, the list currently appears in our January/February issue. (“Frequently Asked Questions”)

Thus, The Horn Book is now positioned as one of the most extensive indexes of children’s literature published each year. It is referenced by academics, librarians, booksellers, and other children’s literature professionals and enthusiasts. Additionally, its longevity now allows for a measure of influence, granting it tastemaking capabilities in the form of a “best books of the year” list that criticially outweighs nearly all others.

However, it is easy to see that much of The Horn Book’s success is drawn from its early ties to and approval from the children’s librarian establishment, which granted the publication an element of legitimacy and cultural capital that other booksellers could not achieve on their own. The magazine is financially dependent on publishers for

121 advertising revenue and industry connections, but remains neutral in that it represents books from all children’s literature publishers. In addition, contributions by children’s librarians grant The Horn Book a middlebrow or edubrow cultural standing, assuring that the books recommended or listed on a “best of” list have been evaluated by a trained eye, by an expert with discerning taste and highbrow leanings.

The Horn Book leaned on the cultural authority of children’s literature librarians in order to establish its own cultural capital. The shifting influences within the field soon allowed The Horn Book to stand on its own merits, and as the post-war economy shifted power and influence away from librarians and teachers and towards more financially motivated professionals like booksellers and publishers, The Horn Book remained a significant and respected publication throughout the field.

ALA Prizes: Newbery and Caldecott

One of the most important and long-lasting pieces of the children’s literature infrastructure is the ALA children’s literature prizes, specifically the Newbery and the

Caldecott Medals. The formation of this prize valued specific types of expertise and established authority to evaluate children’s literature with the children’s librarians, all while attempting to negotiate the potential market influences on such a prize. The

Newbery and Caldecott medals were imbued with the “edubrow” agenda of the children’s librarians and the list of texts selected for these awards created a concrete edubrow canon.

The idea for the Newbery Medal originated with Frederic Melcher, the co-editor of

Publishers Weekly and secretary of the ABA. Sayers claims Melcher approached Anne

Carroll Moore in her legendary office at the NYPL, Room 105, and asked her to help promote his cause of a prize for the best of children’s literature produced in a given

122 year, as a follow up to the success of Children’s Book Week (208). Melcher attended the 1918 ALA annual meeting in Massachusetts and gave a talk, in which he declared:

“that the time had come for children’s literature to have its own Pulitzer Prize as a vehicle for encouraging - and publicizing - high achievement in writing for the young, and that librarians, having no commercial stake in the fate of any particular book, constituted ‘the jury which could give value’ to it” (Marcus, Minders 86). The Pulitzer

Prize, modeled after the Nobel Prize, was launched in 1917 at Columbia University and awarded prizes for excellence in journalism, fiction, poetry, musical composition, history, and other cultural pursuits (85). The Pulitzer Prize was awarded to an example of

“distinguished fiction by an American author, preferably dealing with American life” or

“distinguished example of meritorious public service by a newspaper” in its reporting, editorials and other journalistic outputs (Topping). Similarly, the Newbery sought to award “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children” (Peterson xxii). Both awards allowed the judges to determine exactly what qualified for the award and how they would define “distinguished.” In this, the awards for American letters and

American children’s literature were on equal footing when it came to expertise and tastemakers.

In establishing the Newbery Medal, the ALA staked a claim that children’s literature was award worthy, in the same way that novels were Pulitzer Prize worthy.

The founding of the awards was an attempt by children’s literature professionals to earn increased levels of prestige for the field in which they worked. These awards were established under the auspices of the ALA because other children’s literature professionals were convinced that children’s literature librarians were the best possible

123 arbiters for this prize. However, the arguments by which Frederic Melcher convinced the librarians to arbitrate the awards betrays a number of insecurities that Americans have with awards in general, and with awards dedicated to cultural achievement in specific.

Melcher’s goals in having the ALA award the Newbery were three-fold. First, librarians were seen as being free of any financial stake in the selection and promotion of a book and thus would be viewed by the public as knowledgeable, trustworthy, and unbiased in their assessments of the field of children’s literature in any given year. This public view was based on the cultural capital that librarians had amassed based on their work to establish and promote a high quality literature for children, as well as the successful establishment of librarians as professionals with altruistic intentions towards the community at large (Larson 189-90; Reynolds and Tucker 25). This unbiased, financially free perspective would enhance the prize, allowing the public to trust the recommendations of the prize committee.

Second, Melcher hoped that involvement in the nomination, selection, and award process would “encourage librarians to become more aware of book production and view themselves as more than clerks distributing books” (Eddy 97). Some librarians, like

Moore and Jordan, maintained friendships with children’s literature publishing heads, agents, and authors. However, other librarians located outside of the major metropolitan areas of New York, Boston, and Chicago were not as deeply connected to the publishing industry. By soliciting the opinions of librarians on a yearly basis about the quality of books being published, the Newbery prize would encourage librarians to keep up with what was new in the world of publishing and seek to keep their collections up to date by purchasing new books. This was a valuable incentive for the ABA to endorse

124 the awards, as librarians represented a large percentage of book sales (90%) at that time, both for new books and backlists (Clark 73).22 With this much purchasing power, the ALA Section for Work with Children had quite a platform from which to pass judgment on texts. If Melcher could engage librarians with new books and encourage them to add the award winning titles to their collections, booksellers and librarians alike would be pleased with the results. Likewise, publishers quickly recognized the value of a prize that would point consumers to a specific title and publishing house as one that produced high quality, or even the highest quality title of the year (Eddy 87).

Third, Melcher felt an award would offer incentive to talented authors, illustrators, and editors to begin working in children’s literature, “thus stimulating the growth of children’s literature” (Eddy 97). While the children’s literature industry had grown exponentially in the first decade of the 20th century, it was still in its fledgling stages. The numbers of texts published for children was still far below the number of those published for adults, and nearly all children’s books were published during the pre-

Christmas season, with the assumption that most books for children were purchased as holiday gifts (Marcus, Minders 76). Melcher felt that an award would provide enough motivation for those artists on the fence about attempting children’s literature, while providing those same artists with an easy reference list of the best books in the past years (Marcus, Minders 87; Kidd, “Prizing” 171). In Eddy’s estimation: “The creation of

22 The educational market retained its massive influence over the children’s literature market throughout the first half of the century until after WWII. “In the years immediately following the 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act, 80 to 90 percent of children’s book sales were apparently to libraries, and even now [in 2003], after cuts in library funding, 50 to 60 percent continue to be” (Clark 73). Turow claims that even with that percentage drop, “during the 1974-75 school year, school libraries bought 46.2 million dollars worth of juvenile books and public libraries bought 32.9 million dollars worth” (8). Michael Cart indicates percentage of purchases in the juvenile market by libraries fell to 50-60% by 1993 (Young Adult 51).

125 the Newbery Medal in 1922, the first professional reward in the field of children’s books, lent prestige, encouraged new talent, bred a sense of competition, and heightened interdisciplinary interest” (87). The prize seemed like a wining formulation for everyone involved in the production and distribution of children’s literature and injected a sense of competition into the market as well.

The Newbery and Caldecott Awards granted the ALA a larger measure of authority over declaring which books would continue to be recognized and canonized as the “best.” Without competition from university faculty, professional book critics, or the literary elite, children’s librarians were able to carve out a cultural space in which to declare their preferences and publicly set the tone of the “best children’s books” debate.

Children’s booksellers were happy for the increase in exposure for quality children’s literature through reviews, columns, library expansions, and library displays: these measures also meant an increase in book sales in the mass market. The more work librarians did promoting books for children as a vital part of a middle-class education through programs like Book Week and the Newbery, the more booksellers saw a rise in customers and profits (Marcus, Minders 75).

The first ALA award was named after the famed British children’s publisher John

Newbery (1713-67) and was awarded to the best example of literature for children each year. The final criteria for the prize limited the prize to “books written by citizens or residents of the United States” within a given year (Marcus, Minders 87).23 The formal criteria for the medal are as follows:

23 The official criteria were decided and voted on 6 months after the first prize was awarded in November 1922. The ALA voted and approved the above listed criteria at their annual meeting in 1923.

126 The medal is to be awarded annually to the author of the ‘most distinguished contribution to American literature for children,’ the award being made to cover books whose publication in book form falls in the calendar year last elapsed. The author is restricted to authors who are citizens or residents of the United States. Reprints and compilations are not eligible for consideration. There are no limitations as to the character of the book considered except that it must be original work. It need not be written solely for children, the judgment of the librarians voting shall decide whether a book be a ‘contribution to the literature for children.’ The award considers only the books of one calendar year and does not pass judgment on the author’s previous works or other work during that year outside the volume that may be named. (Peterson xxii)

The process for selecting the winners was determined by a committee, headed by Clara

Whitehill Hunt, children’s librarian from the Brooklyn Public library. The committee decided that any librarian “engaged in at least part time work with children” was eligible to nominate a book and a final committee of “a few of the people of recognized high standards and experience” would be responsible for the final vote (Marcus, Minders 87).

There was an assumption that the professional training each public librarian received would qualify her to select nominees, but the committee process was designed to avoid any insinuation of popularity as one of the judging criteria for the prize.

While Melcher was actively involved in the creation of the medal and in the securing of funds to create the prize (he donated most of the money himself), he left the structure of the prize committee to the librarians (Marcus, Minders 87). In 1922, at the first Newbery award ceremony, Hunt first accepted the generous donation of the award from Melcher, then presented the first award to Dr. Hendrik Willem van Loon for The

Story of Mankind. According to Marcus:

Melcher was happy to accept that much public praise, but for the rest of his long, distinguished career he remained good as his word and safe- guarded his creation from even the appearance of its having been contrived as a commercially motivated ‘book campaign or publishers’ idea.’ Privately, he regarded the Newbery Medal as one of his proudest achievements. (Minders 88-89)

127 While Melcher attempted to scrub all associations of profit and bookselling from the legacy of the Newbery Medal, the fact remains that his motivations for founding and funding the first children’s literature prize was rooted in his own bookselling perspective.

This perspective ought to be weighed when analyzing the award, its recipients, and its legacy.

The reasons given for establishing the Caldecott are varied. First, “a great variety and number of picture books distinguished in illustration had been produced in the

United States during the preceding decade” and many in the field felt they were worthy of recognition (Peterson xxii). Second, the Newbery was routinely awarded to books for older children, with the exception being picture books by Wanda Gag in 1929 (Millions of Cats) and 1934 (ABC Bunny) (xxii). Third, with revolutionary new technologies for picture book publishing emerging, librarians, and booksellers wanted to encourage publishers to take chances and innovate when it came to illustrated books for young children. Thus, the Caldecott medal was introduced as a cousin to the Newbery in 1937.

The guidelines for Caldecott selection were also suggested by Melcher and approved by a vote of the ALA. That resolution stated:

The name of this medal shall be the Caldecott Medal. This medal shall be awarded to the artist of the most distinguished American Picture Book for Children published in the United States during the preceding year. The award shall go to the artist, who must be a citizen or resident of the United States, whether or not he be the author of the text. Members of the Newbery Medal Committee will serve as judges. (Peterson xxii)

Also in an effort to ensure publicity for a wide range of books, authors, and illustrators, rules were also established that prohibited one book from appearing on the publicly released nomination list for both awards. If a book was worthy of both awards, the ALA

128 awards committee was to vote on which category the book would appear under.24 In the interest of expanding these lists, the guidelines for awarding the Newbery were amended in 1932 to include a caveat: “it was decided that ‘the book of a previous recepient of the Newbery Medal shall recieve the award only upon the unaimous vote of the Newbery Committee’” (Peterson xxii).25

While a number of the guidelines for these medals are identical, such as the citizenship status of the author/illustrator or the time period of publication under consideration, there are a few minor changes in the language that are worth regarding closely. The first distinction is in the differentiation between the author and artist of a text, denoting a difference in the work being reviewed by the prize panel. I should also highlight that the assumed gender of the artist is masculine. The second distinction is the emphasis on original work for authors, disallowing reprints or compilations, while the originality of the illustrations is deemed a given. There is no rule that prohibits an illustrator from winning the Caldecott for creating original illustrations for retold stories, like fairy tales. Peterson notes: “Over the years, several of the Caldecott Medal and

Honor books… have been illustrated collections of one literary form or another. Mother

Goose, biblical scriptures… or nursery rhymes have remained favorite forms for compilations” (237). Dorothy Lathrop won the very first Caldecott Medal for her book

Animals of the Bible, which was a collection of bible verses selected by Helen Dean

Fish and illustrated in black and white by Lathrop (235).

24 As an example of infrastructure escaping the control of librarians, this prohibition was eliminated in the 1970s (Peterson xxiii). This demonstrates that the role librarians played in establishing children’s literature as a field was successful, leaving librarians looking for new ways to establish authority and influence in the field after WWII.

25 This restriction was eliminated in January 1958, “by the Children’s Services Division Board since the need to encourage new authors and illustrators no longer existed” (Peterson xxii).

129 The third distinction is in the award itself: the Newbery recognizes “the author of the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children,” whereas the

Caldecott recognizes “the artist of the most distinguished American Picture Book for

Children.” On the one hand, the first category is broad, almost vague, so that the award might encompass all forms of literature for children. The capitalization and specificity of

“American Picture Book for Children” gives this label the appearance of a formal, distinguished title, or of a proper noun.

On the other hand, if the Newbery is awarded to the greatest contribution in all

American literature for children in a given year and the Caldecott is awarded to the best of the Children’s Picture Books, then the field of texts for the Newbery is much larger, making the award that much more selective. An award dedicated to a subset of children’s literature, the American Picture Book, is therefore smaller in stature and prestige. We can also add the cultural valuation of text over image, and the cultural capital of professionals who deal with older children over those of infants and toddlers. It becomes clear that though they were both founded with the same goal in mind, the

Newbery is the more prestigious of the awards, and they are not on equal footing.

I would also like to note that in researching for this section, it is easy to find long, descriptive passages or book chapters on the founding of the Newbery. However, in nearly every text I read (save those with Caldecott in the title), the Caldecott medal’s founding was dealt with in a sentence or a brief paragraph, and nearly always treated as an afterthought. It is true that the histories of both awards are inextricably tied together, since they were founded and funded by Melcher and were approved and arbitrated by the ALA. Therefore, by virtue of coming second historically, the Caldecott needs less in

130 the way of introduction in historically minded texts. However, I would argue that the

Newbery receives more analysis and attention from scholars and journalists because the texts it evaluates are more easily compared to other literary prizes. Just as Melcher established the Newbery by comparing it to awards for adult literature, like the Pulitzer,

Newbery winners are often compared to adult books and even adult prize winning texts.

However, as Clark notes, regardless of the hierarchy among the children’s literature awards, “Both awards continue to be enormously influential especially given the numbers of children’s books purchased by libraries… If a library buys no other children’s books in a given year, it buys the Newbery and Caldecott winners” (73). In terms of Melcher’s original goals, both awards do provide librarians with guidance towards high quality new books and induce them to purchase the new titles on a regular basis. These awards continue to function as vital elements of the children’s literature infrastructure today, even as the influence of librarians over the general field has shifted.

The Value of the ALA Prizes

Kenneth Kidd’s 2007 article “Prizing Children’s Literature: The Case of Newbery

Gold,” lays out many principals that are foundational to any analysis of the ALA prizes.

First, Kidd notes that like the previously discussed lists written by librarians, the

Newbery emphasizes complexity, pedagogical importance, and morality in evaluting books for children. He asserts that these criteria created a pattern in the texts selected for the Newbery prize: “historical fiction, folklore, and comparative cultural fiction dominated the early Newbery scene” (176). This pattern demonstrates how children’s librarians, both through their self-selected canon and through prize mechanisms like the

Newbery Medal, narrowed the range of “high quality” texts within the expanding

131 children’s market to what Kidd labels an “edubrow” canon, which reflected “the middlebrow culture of public schools and libraries” (169).

Further, librarians argued that the best of children’s literature, as exemplified by these prize winning texts, could improve the moral standing of young people by emphasizing citizenship, good behavior, and ethical relationships to others (Kidd,

“Prizing” 172). Thus, librarians sought to establish good children’s literature as both literary and educational: they used the Newbery award to establish an edubrow

“shadow canon” (177). In this vein, Kidd notes that Newbery texts “are sometimes incorporated into curricula, often in geographical/historical or social studies units, and in

‘gifted and talented’ classes” (175). However, medal books are rarely used as primary teaching texts in the classroom: “instead, they form a kind of secondary or supplemental curriculum, part of that ‘extracurricular public space’” (175). Likewise, many of the texts selected for the librarians’ lists also served as supplemental or extracurricular reading, but in support of the overall aims and purposes of the newly developed public school system. Librarians sought to recommend, award, and stock books that lent themselves to this middlebrow, Progressive, edubrow mission.

By 1920, librarians had already firmly established the edubrow project within the library itself. However, with the first Newbery award in 1922, children’s literature librarians extended their influence even further beyond the walls of the library and into the broader world. The Newbery Medal was emblazoned on the front cover of each winning book, as a public sign that this title fit the standards of the librarian edubrow project. So while the books awarded the Newbery were often “edubrow” titles and useful in an educational setting, as noted above, they also began to form a canon of texts that

132 educators could easily incorporate into their evolving curriculum. Kidd notes that “If not exactly a canon, the Medal is part of the canonical architecture of children’s literature”

(“Prizing” 169). His analysis of Newbery winners over the past century demonstrates this trend over time, confirming the mission and preferences of the librarians as a whole.

This canonical architecture helped publishers to understand the types of books that children’s librarians wanted to purchase and thus helped encourage the production, publication, and distribution of edubrow books in America. The edubrow trend in

Newbery award winners exists not only because librarians’ tastes dominated the early children’s literature field, but also because publishers responded by producing more texts in that edubrow vein.

According to English’s seminal work The Economy of Prestige, “Every field (by virtue of its recognition as a field) is possessed of its own forms of capital, its own rules of negotiation and transaction, its own boundaries and constraints, above all its own unique stakes, and none may be simply reduced to any of the others” (English

9). Children’s literature, while advocating to be evaluated on the same grounds as “real”

(i.e. adult, literary) literature, maintains its own boundaries, definitions, and evaluative criteria upon which texts are determined to be of high quality or highbrow taste. Many of these criteria are based in the professional goals and purposes for those texts. As we will see in Chapter 5, children’s literature academics emphasize the complexity and academic or historical value when working with a canon of significance: primary school teachers value popular appeal and usability in the classroom. Librarians of the early 20th century emphasized moral tone and characterization over plot or popularity.

133 As with any field, the cultural capital held by an author, editor, or publishing house can also transfer onto the individual texts. For example, we saw how the reputation of Baum may have negatively affected the standing of Oz with cultural gatekeepers like librarians. Likewise, we will see in Chapter 3 how the cultural capital of

Dr. Seuss was directly applied to the successful marketing campaign of The Cat in the

Hat. When it comes to the ALA prizes, however, the cultural capital of education-minded publishers often transferred onto their products, which translated into higher levels of consideration for school reading lists and awards.26 For example, Viking Press, led by

May Massee (one of Eddy’s “Bookwomen”) published the Newbery Award winner in the year 1935, 1937, 1938, and 1940, with an additional eight runners-up in the same decade (Marcus, Minders 120). According to Marcus: “joke began to circulate that it was none other than Massee herself who tallied the Newbery committee’s ballots each year in private consultation with her old friend Anne Carroll Moore” (120).27 However, in all seriousness, publishers realized that to win the librarian sponsored award, and “to succeed in the specialized library-dominated market for juvenile books, a publishing house did indeed need to field specialists of its own” (120). As late as the 1970s, it was unusual for a children’s literature publisher or imprint to publish both mass-market and educational market books (Turow 6). The cultural capital needed to achieve entry and success in the educational market was often hindered by work with more popular titles.

26 Starting in the 1920s and continuing through to today’s children’s book market, certain publishers are known for putting out books aimed towards the educational market while others aim for more mass- market appeal. We will discuss this concept more in Chapter 6, or see Turow’s Getting Books to Children.

27 This is one example of how librarians were seen by publishing insiders as not entirely disinterested arbiters of the children’s literature prizes as originally intended. Committee members were seen as playing favorites with editors and publishers they were friends with. This kind of joke belies a professional backlash against the children’s literature librarians and their powerful influence in the field.

134 In establishing the Newbery and Caldecott awards, the ALA attempted to establish a specific marker of cultural capital exclusively for children’s literature, based on the values of the field in and of itself, with librarians directing the distribution of that cultural capital. English notes that in order for a prize to achieve success, it must also maintain “an element of bureaucratic control and administrative rigor” or risk being all pomp and no circumstance (36). When Melcher approached the children’s literature librarians as the potential selectors for the Newbery Award, he did so because he believed the librarians on the whole to represent an impartial, honorable, and tasteful group. However, the careful configuration of the rules of eligibility, nomination, and voting clearly embodies what English had in mind when it came to the bureaucratic control over the prizes themselves.

There are many who argue that at this point, librarianship still had its share of internal strife: Geller notes that ALA members chafed against bureaucratic regulations, conservative positions, and demanding academic standards. He notes that in 1931

“Morse A. Cartwright, executive secretary of the American Association for Adult

Education, told librarians that they had adopted the trappings but not the substance of a profession” (Geller 148). However, while the internal conflicts over political and professional goals continued behind closed convention center doors, the ALA presented itself as a united front publicly. The ALA saw the Newbery Award as a potential boon for the profession and a way to demonstrate further adherence to an ideology of merit, performance, and “service to the community, which presumably eschewed base concern for profit and reward” (Glazer and Slater 2). In terms of Larson’s theories of professionalism, establishing the Newbery achieved multiple goals: an uncontested,

135 publicly recognizable tool by which librarians could exert control over the children’s literature market, an opportunity to judge artists in the field against edubrow criteria, and an example of an altruistic service provided to the public.

The ALA, seeing in the prizing of adult literature a lack of cultural capital for children’s literature, established their own award to raise the profile and importance of children’s literature in the American cultural hierarchy. English explains this as a cycle of proliferation within the realm of prizes, wherein a group feels they are not represented by a specific award, so they form their own to better represent cultural products outside of the mainstream. However, as those awards become mainstream, new groups arise and, feeling unrepresented, found their own new awards (56-60). This can be seen on the larger scales of film and television awards that English describes in his chapter on

“The Logic of Proliferation,” but is also evident within the ALA awards. The ALA began with an award for excellence in children’s literature, and then introduced an award specifically for excellence in children’s picture books. But that was not the end.

As of this writing, the Association for Library Service for Children (ALSC) administers the Newbery, Caldecott, and eight additional awards.28 The Laura Ingalls

Wilder Award “was first given to its namesake in 1954. The award, a bronze medal, honors an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made, over a period of years, a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children”

(“About the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award”). The Mildred L. Batchelder Award was created in 1966 to recognize an outstanding book published outside of the U.S., in a language other than English, then translated and published in the U.S. (“About the Batchelder”).

28 In Chapter 6, I will more thoroughly discuss the split of the Section for Work with Children into the ALSC and the Young Adult Library Service Association (YALSA).

136 The Mary Hill Arbuthnot Honor Lecture was created in 1969 and is designed to honor

“annually an individual of distinction who shall prepare and present a paper which shall be a significant contribution to the field of children’s literature” (“The May Hill Arbuthnot

Honor”). In the field for multimedia works for children, The Carnegie Medal for

Excellence in Children’s Video was established in 1991, and the Odyssey Award for the best children’s literature audio book was established in 2008 (About the (Andrew)

Carnegie Medal”; “About the ALSC”). The Pura Belpré Award was founded in 1996 and

“is presented to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth” (“About the Pura Belpré Award”). The Robert F. Sibert Book was created in 2001 and is “awarded annually to the author(s) and illustrator(s) of the most distinguished informational book published in the United States in English” (“About the

Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal”). Finally, the Geisel Award was established in 2004, and first presented in 2006 for the author or illustrator of the best beginning reader published in the U.S. (“Theodor Seuss Geisel Award”).

The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) also presents a number of awards for excellence in literature aimed at young adults. These include the Michael

L. Printz Award which “is an award for a book that exemplifies literary excellence in young adult literature.” The Printz was established in 2000 and is considered the most prestigious of awards for young adult literature (“Printz Award”). The “Margaret A.

Edwards Award, established in 1988, honors an author, as well as a specific body of his or her work, for significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature” (“Edwards

Award”). Additionally, “The William C. Morris YA Debut Award, first awarded in 2009,

137 honors a debut book published by a first-time author writing for teens and celebrating impressive new voices in young adult literature” (“Morris Award”). “The Alex Awards are given to ten books written for adults that have special appeal to young adults, ages 12 through 18:” the awards were first given in 1998, and became official ALA awards in

2002 (“Alex Awards”). YALSA also publishes lists of the best literature for teens, including best fiction, best graphic novels, best audio books, and best films.

A third division of the ALA, the Ethnic & Multicultural Information Exchange

Roundtable of the ALA, awards the Coretta Scott King Awards “annually to outstanding

African American authors and illustrators of books for children and young adults that demonstrate an appreciation of African American culture and universal human values”

(“Coretta Scott King Book Award”). These awards include an Author Award Winner, an

Illustrator Award Winner, a John Steptoe Award for New Talent winner, and a Virginia

Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement award winner (“Coretta Scott King Book

Award”). The first Author Award was given out in 1970 and the first Illustrator Award in

1974. The Steptoe Award was inaugurated in 1995 and the Hamilton Award in 2010.

It is easy to see the proliferation of awards, even within the microcosm of ALA awards for children’s literature. In the 1970s, the rise of awards for children’s literature given by other groups indicated a loss of ALA authority: many felt librarians had lost touch with specific subsets of the children’s literature audience and sought to fill that void with awards of their own. A myriad of awards are given for children’s and young people’s literature by various groups, for example: The Horn Book Awards for fiction/poetry, nonfiction, and picture books (award established 1967); the Children’s

Literature Association’s Phoenix Award (1985); the National Council of Teachers of

138 English’s Orbis Pictus Award for children’s nonfiction (award established 1990); the

National Book Award for Young People’s Literature (1996); and the Association of

Booksellers’ EB White Read Aloud Award (2004). The number of prizes for children’s literature has increased, as well as the number of groups, associations, and professions awarding them. This clearly demonstrates English’s argument that prizes have a tendency to proliferate in order to fill a perceived lack of recognition for a specific type of book, thereby, creating niches for even more prizes.

English also argues that to establish an award is to establish cultural capital, but also to establish stigmas. He argues that prizes are valuable “not just to the bureaucrats of culture but also to those who accrue advantage or profit as they distance themselves from culture’s bureaucratic epicenters” (English 41). In other words, lists of prize winners give critics of a specific group or profession concrete data with which to work. A prize winner can gain status based on acceptance into the status quo, but can also lose status for conforming too closely to a system that critics view as corrupt or too heavily invested in one type of cultural capital. Books that are awarded a Newbery Medal are seen to be a very specific kind of book, suitable for school libraries, but not likely to find a place on the bestseller list. The stigma of being an ALA darling might include being seen as a stuffy, out-of-touch text that doesn’t meet the needs of real children in today’s modern world.

Extensive criticism of the ALA’s limited engagement with literature featuring minorities is likewise supported by the list of Newbery prize winners: most ALA prize winners value certain kinds of white, middle-class visions of childhood. Kidd notes that

“separate and unequal traditions of children’s literature long prevailed” and that while

139 books about African-Americans written by whites won Newbery Awards at mid-century, it wasn’t until “1974, the Medal went to an African American writer, Virginia Hamilton, for

M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974)” (“Prizing” 179-80). African-American authors like

Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps “were particularly sensitive to being excluded from Newbery recognition, and complimented each other’s work as worthy of that award” (178-9). In response to this critical oversight by the Newbery, the ALA created awards specifically to honor the work of African-American authors and illustrators.

Finally, in an argument that will gain importance as this dissertation continues,

English argues that the proliferation of prizes weakens the power of individual prizes and the individuals awarding the prize. Proliferation further demonstrates an increasing influence of consumer culture on the realms of art, literature, and other cultural achievements. He argues that the “feverish proliferation” of prizes in recent decades “is widely seen as one of the more glaring symptoms of a consumer society run rampant, a society that can conceive of artistic achievement only in terms of stardom and success, and that is fast replacing a rich and varied cultural world with a shallow and homogeneous McCulture based on the model of network TV” (2-3). In these terms,

English decries the use of prizes as marketing mechanisms, but also recognizes that prizes often function in this way. As prizes proliferate and dilute in terms of cultural capital, they become less valuable to the high culture elite. They become useful only to those looking for profit from the award-winners. The proliferation of prizes echoes the increasing power and influence of the mass-market over children’s literature experts, even though the Newbery was created so that librarians and experts could exercise their influence over the market.

140 Melcher and the ALA committee worked hard to remove any semblance of financial influence over the Newbery, and convinced the field that librarians had no financial motivation in choosing specific books. However, despite the lack of prize money or other financial reward tied to ALA’s awards, very real financial rewards come from winning the Newbery and Caldecott. The prize comes with a medal for the author and grants the publisher the right to emblazon an image of the medal on every future edition of that book; however, there is no direct cash prize. Kidd notes that winning the prize has financial advantages, such as increasing the shelf life of the winning book, doubling the sales of the book, and granting the book access to special displays or sections in bookstores reserved for prize winners (“Prizing” 168).

These medals can transfer cultural capital into economic capital far better than some of the more recently established children’s literature awards. In addition to librarian lists, the Newbery and the Caldecott came to represent the approval and recommendation of the ALA, which meant these texts were also part of the librarians’ list of books “recommended for purchase by expert.” English claims, “there are few fields of cultural consumption (children’s literature is one) in which prizes have a more direct and powerful effect on sales” (English 97).29 This is because most public and school libraries often feel keeping all the Newbery winning books in circulation to be highly important, even when funds are tight. This prioritization of medal winners ensures a higher level of purchase and circulation over a longer period of time. Clark notes that

“If a library buys no other children’s books in a given year, it buys the Newbery and

Caldecott winners… winning one of the medals can lead to total sales of sixty to a

29 In this particular passage, English’s primary example of a field of cultural consumption in which prizes are hugely influential is pornography.

141 hundred thousand copies - and comes close to ensuring a permanent place on publisher’s backlist” (73). Turow observes, “that most branches routinely purchase the annual Newbery and Caldecott award winners, even though those titles have a reputation of not being terribly popular with children” (62). Turow’s assertion, based on interviews with branch librarians, indicates that by the 1970s, the ALA book awards were seen by many, even within the library profession itself, as being out of touch with the purported audience. However, enough cultural capital remained to ensure that most librarians still purchase and promote the winners.

The longer a book remains in print on a publisher’s backlist, the more likely it is to become a part of both the sentimental and significant canon. An award-winning book might not be a fast seller and may never appear on a bestseller list, but steady sales over years will often make the publisher similar profits. Therefore, winning a Newbery or

Caldecott medal was an effective means of promotion for a book, even within the specialized education market. Some publishers even began to promote their books as

Newbery-worthy titles, much like film producers will aim to produce Oscar-worthy films and promote an “Oscar buzz” in the months leading up to the ceremony (Turow 25).

This relationship between prestige, quality, and financial success is a particularly uncomfortable one when it comes to children’s literature. While many adult booksellers often attempt to disguise their financial motives when it comes to selling high or middlebrow books, children’s publishers, booksellers, and librarians seem even less willing to acknowledge the role of the money in the exchange of children’s literature.30

The impurity of the market is kept at bay by the carefully negotiated position of experts

30For more on the desire to conceal the financial gain of bookselling as part of a middlebrow set of values, see Radway’s Feeling Chapter 7

142 like librarians: children can read and enjoy library services at no direct charge to them.

Children do not need a piggy bank or wallet to enjoy the local library services, only a library card which is granted to them based on their inaugural act of citizenship: the library card oath (Sayers 67).31

It is true that public funds, based on taxes paid by their parents, are the basis of local library budgets. Market forces act to influence the budgets, size, staff, pay scales, and services of branches at the local, state, and national level, but these are all forces kept invisible to the child patron. This is in contrast to the child patron of the bookstore, who may enjoy its services, but will then witness the direct exchange of money (or credit cards) before he or she can take home and consume the books he or she has chosen.

Thus, the argument goes, the local or national chain bookstore helps to train children as future mass culture consumers, while the local library trains children to be connoisseurs of literature and culture. However, the Newbery and Caldecott Medals often function in similar ways in these environments: both bookstores and libraries are more likely to stock the most recent winners, to maintain an active backlist of past winners, to dedicate display space to previous winners during award season, and to suggest award winners for children looking for a new book to read. Thus, the Newbery, while squarely the purview of the ALA, is a clear example of the turf that librarians share with other book vendors and the (often uncomfortable) relationship these different groups have with one another.

The establishment of the ALA awards was a clear attempt by the children’s literature librarians to stake a claim on an emerging form of credentialing (the prize) and

31 This model excludes potential library fines, of course.

143 an important role in the field (granting the prize). By inserting themselves into what would become a fundamental part of the children’s literature infrastructure, or what Kidd terms the “canonical architecture,” the librarians made themselves pillars of the children’s literature community (Kidd, “Prizing” 169). The specific culture of edubrow books promoted by these awards put librarians well within the realm of educational professionals, potentially stepping on the toes of teachers and “educationists.” The award helped to establish criteria for high quality children’s literature. The publicly accessible lists of winners and shortlisted nominees telegraphed to publishers the types of books that librarians were likely to recognize (and purchase) in future years.

However, I argue that by establishing these publically accessible infrastructures with transferable cultural capital, librarians left themselves vulnerable to professionals in other markets. Eventually, librarians would see a decline in the cultural capital that they worked so hard to establish through the process of professionalization. As we will see, other professionals, such as publishers and booksellers, begin to use these infrastructures to promote their own professional goals almost as soon as they are established.

Marcus writes that the founding of the awards was likely the first step in the decline of the librarian’s influence in the children’s literature field. He claims:

with the introduction of a new medal, the greater recognition for the field that Moore herself had fought so valiantly for over the years seemed more nearly within reach than ever. The children’s book world was coming of age. One inevitable consequence of the attainment of this new stage, she must have realized, was the rise in influence of institutional authority – in the form of awards committees, magazine editorial boards, book publishing departments, and the like – and the corresponding decline in the influence of the field’s pioneering individuals, including Moore herself. (Minders 135)

144 Moore, and others like her, had created a cultural icon of success within the children’s literature field, but it was an icon that would soon be reappropriated by other experts in the field in service of their own professional needs. The Newbery and Caldecott were eventually commandeered by publishers and booksellers as an easy reference for parents wanting to purchase books for their own home libraries in the post-war, consumer-oriented economy and once resounding voices like Moore’s were dimmed.

In Chapter 4, we will examine the process of professionalization undertaken by teachers and other educational experts. While this group followed a similar path to professionalization as the librarians, I will argue that a lack of internal cohesion between the classroom teachers and the “educationist” led to a faster loss of cultural capital.

Chapter 3 will demonstrate how competing groups, in this case children’s literature publishers, are able to take advantage of flaws in the professionalization process in order to usurp authority and improve their own professional standing. It will also note that, even while in decline, children’s literature librarians remained an influential profession in the development of new forms of children’s literature.

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CHAPTER 3 HOP ON POP: THE RISE OF EARLY READER BOOKS IN A NEW AGE OF EDUCATION

In Chapter 2, we examined the foundations of the children’s literature library profession. In Chapter 3, we will turn our focus to another important child-centered occupation: teaching. The first part of Chapter 3 will discuss the professionalization process in the field of education. Chapter 3 will outline the steps teachers took in order to professionalize, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Teachers followed a professionalization process similar to librarians by establishing graduate programs in universities, creating professional organizations, standardizing qualifications and credentials, and emphasizing their altruistic role in American society. However, I will argue that their attempts at professionalization were not as successful or unified as the librarians. The split between classroom teachers and what Arthur Bestor terms

“professional educationists” played a large role in undermining the professionalization efforts of teachers, and reinforcing the historically low place teachers held in the

American hierarchy of professions.

Other groups of experts, specifically in the media and book publishing, exploited the emerging internal division within the education profession in order to promote their own agendas. The second portion of Chapter 3 will demonstrate how, by simplifying and even misrepresenting the controversy of The Reading Wars to the public, these competing groups were able to further diminish the cultural capital of teachers and influence their professional practice. The Reading Wars represented a polarizing disagreement between researchers and educational experts over how to teach reading to young children (in short: phonics versus sight reading) (Kim 372-375). These disagreements over the scientific principles and pedagogical theory of literacy education

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greatly affected the training and practice of classroom teachers in newly formed university programs of education. In the post-war years, teachers, administrators, and researchers publicly expressed their professional opinions over how to best instruct young children in language arts. Teachers were especially hard pressed to improve their skills and techniques while dealing with a rapid expansion of the public school system during the Baby Boom (Mintz 287).

The evolving role of education in middle-class life meant that disputes over the best ways to accomplish specific reforms within America’s public education system were often openly debated in public forums by parents, educators, and other professionals. The social and political anxieties of the Cold War also spilled over into domestic concerns; World War II had made it clear that an educated citizenry was the key to safeguarding America from the communist threat (Fass 173-177). Aspiring to the growing middle-class suburban lifestyle meant American parents increasingly worried about how to keep their children safe, well-educated, and upwardly mobile. Child- rearing literature emphasized the importance of education for children’s social, economic, mental, and psychological health (Hulbert 19-40). In order to engage with these emerging middle-class concerns, popular writers embraced the Reading Wars controversy and published magazines articles and books aimed at middle-class parents, decrying the post-war American school system as one in crisis. In the second section of

Chapter 3, I will argue that this controversy over reading instruction allowed non-experts and experts from related fields, like Rudolf Flesch and John Hersey, to intervene in the professional work of the teaching profession. These authors usurped the autonomy and

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authority of educators at the classroom and educationist level while appropriating the inherent social credit that comes from teaching children to read.

The last section of Chapter 3 will examine the response to the Reading Wars by the children’s literature publishers at Harper Collins and Random House. In 1957, in response to Flesch and Hearsey’s work, both publishers introduced a new type of picture book specifically designed as an aid to children learning to read. These two publishers capitalized on the Reading Wars controversy in order to expand the children’s literature market and their own social credit. Both publishers sold these books directly to parents, rather than the traditional educational market. Introducing early reader picture books strategically reconciled the two sides of the Reading Wars through a generic appeal to expertise and an emphasis on the importance of literacy for young

American children, without reference to reading method.

The introduction of this new line of products also caused a shift in the way children’s literature was defined. Prior to this controversy, reading primers and other instructional tools were not considered children’s literature but were instead classified as useful texts. As we saw in Chapter 2, librarians like Anne Carroll Moore often distinguished between books children ought to or elect to read and useful reference texts like primers and encyclopedias. However, the introduction of the early reader picture book into the mass market blurred the canonical boundary between reading primers and children’s literature while undermining the role of teachers and librarians in policing that boundary. Texts like The Cat in the Hat and Little Bear are now considered to be significant canonical texts for young children, even though they were initially designed and marketed as an irreplaceable tool in teaching American children to read. I

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will argue that the introduction of the early reader picture book into the American children’s literature market created a new bestselling product that further complicated definitions of children’s literature and made authors/illustrators like Dr. Seuss, Else

Holmelund Minarik, Maurice Sendak, and others involved in the “I Can Read!” and

“Beginner Books” series even more famous and well-regarded. Further, like Oz, the popularity and longevity of these early reader picture books allowed for them to overcome professional objections about their taste level in order to become an accepted part of the children’s literature canon.

Education Reforms in America

In colonial America, public teaching as a profession was often disparately regulated, if at all. Up until the 19th century, teaching often had a low entry threshold: some towns or districts required teachers to pass basic general knowledge tests, or others simply required evidence of an upstanding and moral character. In many cases, teachers were men who were unwilling to commit to a long-term profession, were disabled, or were unable to perform other kinds of work (Herbst 20-25). “During the colonial era, prevailing social policy often awarded teaching positions to individuals who were incapable of succeeding financially in the competitive economy. Public jobs like gravedigging, bellringing, and schoolteaching customarily were offered to social dependents: the handicapped, widows, alcoholics” (Sedlak 260). Rich families hired tutors or governesses, leaving the lower classes to their own devices when it came to educating their children. Then, like now, teaching was viewed as a necessary profession, but not one of high esteem or high financial reward.

However, in the mid-19th century, a growing concern about the quality of education in the United States led to concerns about the quality of teachers. In 1834,

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Pennsylvania created the first state level requirement for teacher certification, based on a test in reading, writing, and arithmetic (Ravitch). In 1838, Massachusetts established the first state normal schools in order to train teachers in a rigorous and uniform manner

(Herbst 62). Spreading from New England into the Midwest, more and more states began to introduce controls over teacher qualifications: some insisted on state certification for teachers, based on proficiency in reading, writing, grammar, history, geography, and math while others insisted on a professional education (Ravitch). “By

1900, therefore, both professional educational credentials and examinations were widely used as reasons to bestow teaching certificates. Whether through examination or education, certification was becoming centralized at the state level” (Sedlak 265).

Starting in New England, states also began to pass reform bills, aimed at making elementary education compulsory and free for all children in the state: the first was

Connecticut in 1849, then Massachusetts in 1852.

From 1850-1925, reforms aimed at the professionalization of teaching became associated with the Progressive education movement, and echoed similar developments in other child-centered professions like children’s librarianship. As discussed in the introduction, John Dewey believed that society could be reformed and improved through a revision in education policies. Dewey’s theories of education held that the classroom should be child-centered, democratic, and based on concepts of human subjectivity (Hartman 16). According to Hartman, Dewey believed that the “task of the educational reformer was to take advantage of the disconnection between the cooperative instincts of children and the selfish routines of adults in order to reconstruct the social habitude via education” (16). Dewey saw childhood as pure, untainted by the

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ills of society: if that innocence could be harnessed, it could reform the nation. The innocence of children could not save flawed adults, but if the children could remain uncorrupted, they could remake society in their own utopian image. To do that, Dewey argued that adults should center the classroom on the child (Hofstadter 363). In order to accomplish this radical shift, adults seeking to become teachers needed to be trained in the proper methods of performing this social reconstruction through education. The reforms of the Progressive era pushed middle-class concepts of the innocent child and the transformative power of education into the mainstream. In this way, education became the key to middle-class entry in the United States (Fass 3).

In order to meet the growing demand for a certified and well-educated teaching force, states established Normal schools, offering courses in professionalization and required academic subjects. By the start of the 20th century, colleges and universities began to establish departments of education, focusing on educating future teachers, in competition with Normal schools (Beyer 25-31). Specialties like classroom management, curriculum development, administration, educational psychology, educational sociology, and school management developed. These new fields of study increased opportunities for college faculty members to research and publish on elementary and high school education methods (Herbst 8; 122). I argue that in addition to preparing the growing ranks of teachers, these academics sought to establish education as a formal profession through the formation of technical languages, specialized sub-fields, and established academic departments at universities across the country. According to Fraser in Preparing America’s Teachers: A History, certification requirements for teachers steadily shifted from subject specific courses in English or

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Math to courses in pedagogy and educational theories (139-147). Further, advocates of professionalization hoped this increase in university presence would adhere to emerging professional standards and raise teaching within the American cultural hierarchy.

Jurgen Herbst notes that like librarians, teachers adopted practices similar to established professions like the law and medicine. These professions “derive their status from the education they receive and the individual and collective autonomy they claim and enjoy in the exercise of their professional duties” (8). Herbst emphasizes that a well-established profession is one in which “professionals decide for themselves how to proceed” in terms of policy, regulation, and professional agendas. As teachers grew increasingly educated, credentialed, and organized, they sought more recognition as a formal profession. Along with that recognition, they believed that “as a right, teacher professionalism derives from the education and training teachers receive. As an obligation, it is the natural result of that education applied in daily practice” (8). This obligation echoes back to the altruism that Larson argues is imperative for professions to establish, in addition to a monopoly of knowledge and professional autonomy.

Evidence of market-free motivations became a central tenet to establishing teaching as a legitimate profession.

At a similar pace to librarians, teachers began to professionalize in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The ALA was founded in 1876; the National Teachers

Association (NTA) was founded in 1857 and renamed the National Educators

Association (NEA) in 1870. As formal schooling gradually became compulsory, school attendance rose, increasing the need for teachers. “Between 1870 and 1915, the

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number of children in school increased from seven to twenty million” (Mintz 174). Just as library construction steadily increased in the first decades of the 20th century, so too did school construction, largely due to the massive increases in student attendance.

Mintz writes: “between 1890 and 1918 high school attendance soared by over 700 percent, from 200,000 to 1.6 million, while the number of graduates doubled, to

213,000. A new high school opened every day in the first thirty years of the twentieth century” (175). Also like librarians, teachers worked towards professional standards in order to gain authority and autonomy over their particular growing field.

However, by establishing university training programs and aiming for an increased level of professionalization, I argue that the teaching profession was ultimately pulled in two separate directions. The proclaimed goal of university programs was to address the growing need for more highly qualified elementary and high school teachers for American public schools. Yet, in establishing a path to professionalization that was located in universities, these programs implicitly condoned the view that elementary school teaching was not a highly regarded part of professionalized education. The true professionals were high school teachers, university faculty, and administrators. Arthur Bestor termed this group of educators who functioned primarily within the growing educational bureaucracy the “interlocking directorate of professional educationists”: this group included the professors of education at normal schools and universities, the superintendents, principals, and other public school administrators, and the educational experts at the state and federal level (102). While universities and normal schools increasingly focused on training college faculty, principals, and high school administrators, many within the profession began to view classroom teaching as

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the first step on a ladder to middle-class success. To be promoted in the school system was to leave teaching behind and “move up” to principal, superintendent, and eventually, state-wide administrator.

This belief led to a split within the profession based not only on professional credentials like degrees and normal school training, but also based on gender. Like librarians, teaching started out in the male realm, and then became increasingly open to female workers. In the 18th century, men were generally employed as schoolteachers.

However, by “1918 every state had enacted compulsory education laws, with thirty-one states requiring attendance until the age of sixteen” (Mintz 174). Schools began extending education to the very young (through kindergarten classes) and to the older student, through the development of high schools (174-175). As a result, the need for teachers increased and women were gradually seen as a valuable resource for schoolrooms (Hughes 552). However, in both librarianship and education, men and women began to segregate. As we saw in Chapter 2, female librarians staked an autonomous claim in children’s reading rooms. For teachers, women were largely relegated to the elementary school classroom. Herbst argues a hierarchy emerged in the growing school system, where “the supervisors would make up a largely male corps of professional pedagogues directing the activities of an overwhelmingly female teaching force in the elementary schools” (104). Herbst notes further:

Women teachers resented the appeal of professionalization to ambitious male colleagues whom it drew out of the elementary or high school classroom into principalships and superintendencies, into positions as instructors in normal schools, teacher colleges, and university schools of education, into university professorships and editorial positions with professional journals. An academic degree usually provided men with the ticket for advancement, and by their departure from the classroom they then strengthened the widespread perception of school teaching as an

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activity of low prestige, suitable for anyone with a minimum of normal training, and thus taken up chiefly by women. (191)

I quote Herbst at length here in order to emphasize how the migration of men to the top of the hierarchy helped to depress the cultural value of elementary teaching. Those men with ambition worked their way into more significant jobs, while women, many of whom were denied similar opportunities, were left in the classroom.

Thus, education professionals slowly became stratified, as women were generally involved in the actual classroom roles while men generally took on supervisory, advisory, and advanced educational roles. Culturally, the act of educating young children was seen as not far removed from the act of raising children, and so elementary education safely fit into the lingering Victorian mindset about proper activities within the female sphere (as did children’s librarianship). Education of young children was associated with domesticity and gentility, which meant many experts believed middle- and upper-class women were inherently qualified to be teachers

(Herbst 29). In the emerging educational hierarchy, elementary level classroom teachers were at the bottom. Sommerville echoes Herbst’s assessment, noting that while the image of childhood is a powerful one in our society “the status of teacher and parent in our society is low” (19). He argues that the “restless experimentation in educational technique may be largely our teachers’ attempt to achieve the status of a technical elite - for that is what gives status in our society, not one’s contribution to human welfare” (19). While those individuals researching, reforming, and applying scientific concepts to the study of education appear higher on the social hierarchy stratum, much of the low esteem for teachers is due to profession’s association with the female schoolteacher.

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As normal schools and university programs competed for the best students and most state funds, they also competed over who would educate the future professionals of the emerging educational hierarchy, and who would be stuck educating the elementary school teachers. New university programs designed specifically for future educationists emphasized professionalization by claiming to be “‘scientific’ and efficient”

(Herbst 191). For the educationists emerged “the university departments of the new sciences of educational psychology and administration, the schools of education and the teachers colleges, and the growing establishment of public education officials throughout the country” (191). These programs further increased the stratification between classroom teachers and future administrators as they focused on the emerging sciences, research, and administrative work, instead of on classroom practices. Herbst describes these higher education programs as “systematic, hierarchic, and profoundly male-oriented withall” (119). If elementary education was associated with nurture, caring, and feminized domestic labor, than administration became associated with science, efficiency, and masculine hierarchy. It became inevitable that men would rise to the higher levels of education departments and school systems, earning more money, prestige, and social capital, while women were held in the lower-ranking positions. The rise of normal schools and university departments in education (which were eventually combined together) reinforced the feminization of child-rearing and elementary education as a task best suited to women, as long as it was under the supervision of credentialed, professional men (104). This development was echoed across multiple fields, as more professionals (re: upper-class white men) turned their attention to scientific methods of childrearing and education. As time passed, women in

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child-centered industries and mothers saw more intrusion and supervision from male professionals.

These gender divisions became especially stark in the years after World War II, when the United States government and major industries thanked women for their wartime service and asked them to return to their homes. Moreover, the post-war baby boom caused education to become an increasing concern for the nation. While the Nazi threat had been quelled in Europe, the Soviets of the U.S.S.R. still remained an ever- present threat. As a rival superpower, equipped with nuclear weapons and an increasing number of Soviet block countries behind the Iron Curtain, the U.S.S.R. was perceived as a dangerous enemy. Politicians, pundits, and newspaper headlines constantly reminded Americans of the growing power of the Soviets, catalyzed by the launch of Sputnik in 1957. Sputnik “dominated national headlines” as the media declared the launch of the satellite a defeat for America (Hartman 175).

Many believed that one of the strongest ways to combat the Soviet threat was through education. According to Mintz: “President Dwight Eisenhower and Congress responded [to Sputnik’s launch] by allocating the first $1 billion in direct federal aid to public education to recruit and train teachers and raise the standards of science, mathematics, and foreign-language instruction” (287). Sputnik spurred the improvement of schools and a reversal in anti-education arguments, such as the movement against students doing homework, in favor of building up the nation’s youth (Stearns 90).

According to Hartman in Education and the Cold War, the media regularly pointed to schools as the “weak link” in America’s competition with the Soviet Union, especially the

“life adjustment” curriculum (176). Educational experts like Bestor were more than

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happy to provide quotes for exposés and articles about “American educational failures”

(176). Bestor’s overall argument: “American students were lagging in disciplined knowledge - including math and science - because the schools had long been under the sway of progressive education, which de-emphasized intellectual values” (176). Bestor and other critics of progressive reforms emphasized how poorly American children performed in math, science, and discipline in comparison to other countries. Some accused Progressives of “coddling” students in a “carnival” type atmosphere, rather than educating them (173-177).

The U.S. government had an interest in ensuring the citizenry remained strong, intelligent, and literate after the new mechanized warfare of World War II had made the importance of a well-educated population clear to the military (Fass 31). The government claimed it was a civic duty to achieve high levels of education, in order to help the U.S. remain competitive with the rest of the world. In order to meet national needs, education rapidly became a top national priority: better educated children today meant a smarter generation of tomorrow, better prepared to take on the fascist and communist threats of tomorrow’s world (Marcus Minders, 210). Thousands of GIs used their military benefits to access higher education, swelling the ranks of college-educated middle-class adults (Stearns 98). According to Sommerville, this increased attention to education meant another revision in the American conception of childhood, shaped in large part by public forces. While some still sought to protect and save the child, others sought to make the child useful on a national level. “Political, military, and social necessity had spurred a public commitment to children. But whatever the motive, these societies were now in a position to shape all children more closely to their ideal of

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childhood” (Sommerville 196). In addition to the looming international threats, an increased focus on education meant a change in the way Americans practiced patriotism and achieved social and economic status at home.

Education became linked with the achievement of the middle-class “American dream.” If education were the key for entry into the middle class for adults, it would prove to be even more important for their children, or for the children of lower-class parents attempting to move upward in social standing.1

A growing class of middle managers and professionals with college degrees aspired to cultivate a middlebrow taste level, which their higher salary levels ensured could be reflected in their house in the suburbs, car in the driveway, and well-educated children (Radway Feeling 15). The rhetoric connected to the importance of schooling children, not just through the compulsory amount of elementary schooling, but through a college degree, became extremely important for middle and upper class families and increasingly influential on lower class families.2 Middle class families saw the schooling success of their children as yet another way in which they needed to compete with their neighbors, in the endless game of “keeping up with the Joneses.” This often manifested in a parental desire for children to fit in: “Rather than wanting their children to be

1 Stearns argues for the ubiquity of this dream. “During the 20th century, ever-larger segments of American society, nearly 85 percent of all citizens by the 1950s, claimed to be middle class. Consumerism, which played a considerable role in shaping both childhood and adult concerns, pervaded society, affecting the middle class and also centers of urban poverty” (7).

2 Paula Fass complicates this formula, noting that the rise of industrialized assembly lines also needed a large influx of unskilled workers. “Schooling to which a few Americans had always looked for avenues to success became more central to status and social skills required for economic success. And schooling also became a form of licensing as diplomas and degrees became requirements for placement or certification. At the same time, low-level industrial jobs, increasingly dependent on machines and machine process, remained hungry for brute labor, a hunger that made America a golden portal for immigration. Thus the period saw two related movements meeting at the schoolhouse door - the drive for more and better schooling, and the new millions of immigrant children brought to or born in America whom the schools needed to incorporate into the nation” (31).

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outstanding, they wanted their children to be normal and average - congenial and well adjusted. In an age when fitting in was the desired goal, parents were happy to have their children be like others rather than conspicuous” (Mintz 281). Child rearing experts often emphasized the importance of children attending school in order to be properly socialized so that they would fit in nicely with their peers, become well-adjusted members of society, and be prepared properly for a modern career.

The Baby Boom created a pressurized environment for this ongoing cultural conformity and struggle for cultural standing. The steadily increasing population meant that there were more children to educate: greater numbers of children than ever before enrolled in elementary schools, causing uncomfortable and difficult growing pains in the

American public education system. “In 1952, 50,000 new classrooms were built, and average daily attendance rose by two million. To meet the demand, school systems started double sessions and set up 78,000 makeshift classrooms in churches and vacant stores. Teachers had as many as forty-five students in a class” (Mintz and

Kellogg 287). These growing pains caused distrust and misgivings among parents and child experts, who worried that educators were underprepared and overtaxed. New standards in education based on advances in child psychology, neuroscience, and social theory altered the way educators, parents, and other experts thought about the actual educational process and the needs of children. Guidance counselors appeared in schools. As classrooms grew overcrowded and school buildings grew, teachers became important and highly visible characters in the American education drama. With the education of so many children in jeopardy, the popular media was eager to publish theories as to why America’s public schools were failing.

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I argue that public debate over the Reading Wars was possible and popular because the elementary school teacher lacked the authority and autonomy in Larson’s formula of professionalization. Meanwhile, the expertise of the relatively new educational professionals was easily challenged, as they had not yet amassed enough social credit or authority to weather what Hofstadter describes as the wave of anti- intellectualism of the 1950s. Rhetorically, professional educators researched and published on the generic child, but writers like Hersey and Flesch wrote about their own individual (grand) children, which made a far more appealing case to middle-class parents concerned with their children’s education. In service of their own claims to expertise, Hersey and Flesch claimed that education was too serious an issue to be left to these so-called professionals. They presented the case that the well-read middle- class parent was obligated (by national concerns and familial love) to supervise the classroom teacher in her work to ensure Johnny was taught properly how to read.

The Reading Wars

The Reading Wars debate exposed an internal division within the teaching profession and created a scapegoat on whom the failures of the educational system could be blamed: the educationist. According to popular media reports, experts at the university level attempted to reform reading instruction and other experts fought them.

Classroom teachers were caught in the middle of this battle between professionals with no real classroom experience. In less sensational terms, the Reading Wars centered around a choice between reading instruction methodology: phonics-style instruction that focused on the code-like structures in English and a whole word approach that focused

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on meaning, context-clues, and sight-reading.* This public debate often pitted the educationists (specifically pedagogy professors, district superintendents, and education researchers) against parents. The average classroom teacher was often portrayed in the media as a helpless, undertrained individual trapped in between.

Teachers in the United States have gone back and forth between extremes in these two methods for more than a century. In 1898, Nellie Dale, a teacher at

Wimbledon School for Girls published On the Teaching of English Reading, which is identified as the “first true classroom program based on a basic code and taught from sound to print” (McGuinness 76). However, in the 1920s, this and other phonics programs like it, began to disappear from classrooms, replaced by a whole-word or look-and-say program, accompanied by basal readers like the Dick and Jane primers

(77). Phonics began to make a comeback in the late 1950s and 1960s, in part due to a public outcry about public education and literacy in America. The Reading Wars continued and another fundamental shift back towards the look-and-say method occurred in the late 1980s, followed by a return of phonics around the turn of the 21st century.3

Many children’s literature scholars point to two texts in this public debate about the Reading Wars which would prove pivotal in the creation of early reader picture books.4 The first text was an article by John Hersey in Life Magazine in the 24 May

* Tuckner, Ellen. K-5 Literacy Coordinator, Ridgefield Public Schools. Phone interview. August 2012.

3 In fact, look for this debate to resurface in the Chapter 6 discussion about the role of paperbacks and YA fiction in classrooms, as a part of the return to the whole word method in the 1970s. According to Tuckner, most classroom teachers now use a mix of both methods, even as the debate continues.

4 Variations of this claim appear in Nel, Dr. Seuss: American Icon 29; Nel, The Annotated Cat: Under the Hats of Seuss and His Cats 24; Bader 309; Marcus, Minders of Make-Believe 208; Mintz 296

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1954 issue, titled “Why do students bog down on the first R?” The second was the 1955 book Why Johnny Can’t Read and What You Can Do About It by Rudolf Flesch.

Hersey’s article describes a two-year process in which the ‘Citizens’ School

Study Council of Fairfield, Conn assessed their relatively typical (white, middle-class,

New England suburban) school system. Hersey runs down the statistics of their school system, indicating that the children, facilities, and class size are certifiably “average.”5

The article identifies many issues that cause complications for the average public school student learning to read. These impediments include: class size, variable learning speeds of individual students, and constantly available distractions in the home

(like television and comic books).

However, Hersey made the claim that the biggest problem in teaching children to read were the “Schools’ ‘Pallid Primers.’” Hersey asserted that these primers were repetitive and featured surreally well-behaved children engaged in boring tasks. He claimed that the children reading the school primers could not relate to the children in the school primers. Hersey made a direct comparison between these Pallid Primers and the picture books available for purchase in the local bookstore. The front double-page spread of the article features images of the dull, black and white sketched primer pages over the left column compared to colorful, dynamic images from “Stores’ Jaunty

Juveniles” over the right column (136-137). Hersey claimed that children were not inspired to read by the primers’ dull content, but the jaunty illustrations and narratives of

The Animal Fair by Alice and Martin Provensons, The Story of Babar by Jean de

Brunhoff, and Madeline’s Rescue by Ludwig Bemelmans made children eager to work

5 This emphasis on the “average-ness” of Hearsey’s school district is a direct example of how white middle-class society was privileged and assumed to be the norm for all children.

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on decoding the words so they could discover the story (136-137). In an oft-quoted section from the article, Hersey asked: “Why should [children] not have pictures that widen rather than narrow the associative richness the children give to the words they illustrate – drawings like those of the wonderfully imaginative geniuses among children’s illustrators, Tenniel, Howard Pyle, ‘Dr. Seuss,’ Walt Disney?” (Hersey 149). Many historians view this quote as a direct challenge to publishers and children’s book authors, including Seuss, to write books to help children read in order to help ease the

“crisis” in education that Hersey had declared to exist.

While Hersey blamed the primers for failing to inspire and motivate children to learn to read, he also pointed at teachers and educationists as a part of the problem.

Hersey names the “famous battle of Grunt-and-Groan vs Look-and-Say” (or phonics versus whole word) as something parents should understand as an impediment to their children. He implies that this disagreement between professionals disrupts classroom learning in the same way that overcrowding does. He also accuses the educational establishment of overemphasizing fun and enjoyment in the classroom, rather than making learning the top priority (Hersey 144). He notes that the teaching manual for the first-grade reading program (composed by educationists, not the classroom teacher) lists 36 objectives, the first being “To create a feeling of pleasure and satisfaction from reading humorous, surprising, and interesting stories” (136). Listed as the 21st objective was: To develop the ability to read short sentences with understanding, both orally and silently” (136).

Hersey rhetorically questions this arrangement of objectives, wondering to the

Life reader: “Is not the point that pleasure in itself is not an objective of the school

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curriculum at all, that learning is the main objective, and that pleasure may be an aid, a motivation, a means toward the realization of the true objective and a wonderfully desirable by-product of its attainment?”(136). Hersey’s overall argument seems to be that it is the job of the author and illustrator to provide the fun, surprise, and interest through their art, while the teachers should focus on teaching skills and encouraging children to work. It is important to note, however, in many cases, school boards or superintendents, not the actual teacher, often choose and assign the primers for school districts. Likewise, the teacher was expected to follow the manuals written by the educationist with little actual classroom experience.

Hersey’s final piece of advice is directed towards the parents, who after reading this article were no doubt extremely anxious about their child slipping through these newly exposed cracks in the public school reading program. Hersey encourages these riled parents to get involved with the education of their children.6 Hersey evokes patriotic duty as well as the new, fragile nature of childhood in urging this kind of involvement: “These questions address themselves to every parent in the country, for teachers cannot answer them alone… In meeting them the schools need the support of an informed citizenry. Who can begrudge this support? It is, after all, for the benefit of our children” (Hersey 150). This rhetorical question emphasizes the new ways in which middle-class parents were expected to place their children’s needs and desires above their own. If middle-class parents simply trusted the public school system to educate their children, they were exposed by Hersey’s rhetoric as bad parents, bad middle-class

6 This advice is a reversal of earlier encouragements to trust the state run schools, as Progressive reformers pushed to relocate education from the purview of the family into the public sphere (Mintz and Kellogg xv).

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citizens, and bad Americans (Stearns 13-15). Hersey encourages his readers to become well-informed parents so that they might intercede and coach their children’s teacher on how best to approach reading instruction in her classroom.

Rudolf Flesch took a similar approach in his book Why Johnny Can’t Read and

What You Can Do About It. As the title implies, Flesch makes a pitch to American parents to study up on the current methods of reading education being used in

American classrooms and advocate for a return to the phonics method, for the good of their children and the nation. Flesch quotes an article from Educational Psychology, a peer-reviewed journal in the developing professional field of education, and then translates it for the average lay person.

This is the story, according to Dr. Cronback: ‘It once seemed completely obvious… that you have to read words before you can read sentences, and that the way to learn to read words is to learn letters first…This logic dominated the teaching of reading until the reading process was studied in the psychological laboratory. The psychologists who became interested in reading about fifty years ago set out to determine how people actually read. They found that good readers do not actually notice the letters or syllables that make up a word. The good reader takes in a whole word or phrase at a single glance, recognizing it by its outline…Now we teach pupils to recognize short words as units from the very beginning. Sentences and short stories are introduced as soon as the pupil knows just a few words. Spelling-out and analysis of syllables used to be the beginnings of instruction. Now they are taught later as reserve techniques, to be a “low gear” that the reader uses when he encounters a word that defies instant recognition.’

Sounds very clear and convincing. In the horse-and-buggy age they taught letters and sounds; then the men in white went to work in their laboratories and found something much superior; so now research has driven out the old-fashioned, prescientific procedure. (44 ellipses in original)

I quote this passage at length in order to demonstrate both his tone, rhetorical appeal to common sense, and simplistic narrative of educational research. Flesch’s attitude towards the researchers is clear: in the name of progress, they fixed a system that was

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not broken, and then defended their nonsensical “solution” with science and research.

Flesch’s juxtaposition of the specialized language of these researchers with his own common sense, old-fashioned approach is a direct appeal to non-professional parents.

Flesch further plays on the patriotic and nationalistic emotions of the average

Cold War American by referring to the look-and-say system as “foreign” and as the

“Chinese system.” He compares the memorization of the “outlines” of English words with the memorization of the roughly 20,000 distinct characters in the Chinese language

(4-5). Flesch even insinuates that American educational publishers advocate for the

“Look and Say” method, not because it actually helps children, but because they net a tidy profit from the “Pallid Primers” that require leveled vocabulary lists and employ stilted, redundant, and repetitive language in order to reinforce the memorization of those words (7). Pointing out an exploitative profit motivation undermines the educational publishers’ claims of altruistic intent and thereby reduces their social credit.

By insinuating that the publishers and educationists are working together for mutual financial benefit, Flesch tars both professions with the same market-motivated brush.

Flesch alerts parents that they must become more savvy consumers who understand that educational publishers are seeking to make a profit in the booming post-war economy at the expense of their children’s education.

Flesch further argues that these “Pallid Primers” deprive America’s children of the rich literary heritage of European and American authors: children spend their school years struggling through boring Dick and Jane primers instead of reading books that will improve their taste and culture levels. He claims that American children do not read the classics like “Andersen’s Fairy Tales any more or The Arabian Nights or Mark Twain or

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Louisa May Alcott or the Mary Poppins books or the Dr. Doolittle books or anything interesting and worthwhile, because they can’t” (7; emphasis original). Flesch continues:

“It so happens that the writers of these classic children’s books wrote without being aware of our Chinese system of teaching reading. So Little Women contains words like grieving and serene, and Tom Sawyer has ague and inwardly, and Bulfinch’s Age of

Fable has nymph and deity and incantations” (7; emphasis original). According to

Flesch, by relying on this system of whole word teaching, American educators are denying children access to the very canon that will help them to develop not only literacy, but cultural capital and taste.7 He asserts that not only are children deprived of the experience of reading the classics, but also that they are stuck with far inferior texts.

He laments:

So what does he get instead? He gets those series of horrible stupid, emasculated, pointless, tasteless little readers, the stuff and guff about Dick and Jane or Alice and Jerry visiting the farm and having birthday parties and seeing animals in the zoo and going through dozens and dozens of totally unexciting, middle-class, middle-income, middle-I.Q. children’s activities that offer opportunities for reading ‘Look, look’ or ‘Yes, yes’ or ‘Come, come’ or ‘See the funny, funny animal.’ (7)

No wonder the children can’t read, Flesch argues! The primers themselves are so terrible they make reading a chore instead of a joy! Flesch laments the endless middle- class scenarios in these primers while promoting an ideal of middlebrow taste and culture: he insists children should be reading the classics. Primers did not confer lowbrow status like comic books or dime-store novels, but neither did they reinforce an edubrow canon like the titles Flesch names. Ultimately, Flesch insinuates that the generic nature of these primers will emasculate America’s boys who are not reading

7 The titles that Flesch names in this section would be perfectly at home in the edubrow library canon discussed in Chapter 2.

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appropriate boys books, like Twain and Fennimore Cooper. It is possible that girls will be equally harmed by not reading girls books, but the child at the center of Flesch’s book (and crusade), Johnny, is male.

In an age of Book-of-the-Month clubs and what-to-read manuals selling American adults on the books they should be reading to improve their minds and class standing, this argument of taste and proper reading programs was a powerful one.8 Not only were children not learning to read the “American way,” but Flesch also argues that they are being deprived of instruction through the classics, endangering masculinity, taste, and the overall purpose of a middle-class education: class standing. Many middle-class adults feared that if children could not be enticed into enjoying the (edubrow) classics, their children would instead consume popular culture like comic books and television. In their opinion “popular culture - such as movies, radio, or dime novels - was produced for and by the very immigrants and working-class people who were supposed to assimilate into an older and more refined American culture” (Sammond 86). Popular culture was mere entertainment, without any redeeming qualities of morality, instruction, or manners. The elite and the aspiring elite worried “that children (poor or otherwise) who consumed popular culture might unwittingly absorb the very values that reformers and middle class parents were trying to erase or avoid” (86). The middle-class viewed education as a key to establishing appropriate middle-class tastes and to protecting children from unsuitable lower class forms of entertainment. Flesch attempts to complicate this picture by asserting a certain method of education, phonics, is superior for ensuring success in this endeavor for middle-class youth. I argue that the

8 For more on this argument see the Introduction of Rubin’s The Making of Middlebrow Culture.

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professional division between the educationist and classroom teacher helped Flesch to support this anxiety amongst middle-class parents.

While both Flesch and Hersey have professional credentials (Flesch has a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University; Hersey a Pulitzer Prize) they present their arguments to the American public as concerned parents. Flesch frames his book as a letter to his daughter, with the goal of teaching his grandson, Johnny, to read. Flesch opens the first chapter of the book with a direct address: “Dear Mary: I have decided to start this book with a letter to you. You know that the idea came to me when I offered to help Johnny with his reading” (1). Flesch’s book is a grandfatherly lecture made public.

Hersey likewise emphasizes that his inspiration came from his involvement with a citizens’ evaluation of the school in his children’s district; he was a parent first, a famed journalist second.

This framework creates a very strong “us versus them” appeal: it is we parents against those so-called professionals.9 Flesch and Hersey ultimately provided concerned parents with rhetoric and talking points with which to engage their children’s teachers, who they portrayed as unwitting pawns in the hands of educational professionals. There is little recognition from either Flesch or Hersey that the classroom teacher was herself a trained professional: by 1950, 21 of 48 states required all

9 Stearns would compare this “us versus them” approach to the unique love/hate relationship between Americans and educators. ““More generally still, Americans had already developed a love-hate relationship with education that was unusual, and that persists today. One the one hand, as children of the Enlightenment, Americans placed tremendous value on education. They were willing to spend a great deal of money on schools (though never enough, at least for my university). They viewed education as the great social obligation: if children had access to decent education, society provided them with the components of success, so that, if they later failed, it was their own fault . . . And Americans expected schools to do all sorts of things, providing lessons in driving and safety, hygiene, and temperance and sports experience that went beyond conventional education itself. Have a social problem? Install a class in the schools to teach children what to do. Training in chastity is but a recent example of a longstanding trend” (85).

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elementary school teachers to have a college degree; that number rose to 46 of 50 states by 1964 (Fraser 189). Instead, Flesch and Hersey encourage parents to exercise their patriotic and parental rights to supervise and advise these young, newly-trained, and often female teachers on how to do their jobs. The concern, of course, is that left in the educationist’s control, these young women will certainly do their jobs incorrectly.

This is only one way in which raising a child in the rapidly changing world exemplified a new vision of child and parenthood (Mintz and Kellogg 107-108). Child psychology, educational theory, and parenting instruction all reflected the growing influence of the sciences in American culture. Sammond argues that each of these new child-centric fields quickly found two distinct audiences: “Each of these discursive areas

- media effects, the nature of the child, and an ideal American culture - are here further divided into the professional and the popular” (14). The popular media grew increasingly comfortable to referring to these growing areas of science and social expertise in reporting or as background information in a story.10 Best-selling advice books flooded the market with baby care manuals, child psychological theory, pregnancy primers, and other texts on how best to shepherd children though life’s various milestones while avoiding any undue physical, mental, psychological, or educational harm. These emerging scientific fields were increasingly used to explicate and affirm the ideal

American culture and the child’s “natural” place in it (14). These books all dealt with the generic child, or the every-child, who represented the idealized concept of what an

American child should be like. Scientific studies often focused on white, male, able-

10 Sammond continues: “As the twentieth century progressed and the disciplinary outlines of the social sciences, particularly pediatrics, psychology, and sociology, became more clearly delineated, popular journalists and reformers turned with increasing frequency to professionals for support in arguments for social change” (14).

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bodied children of the upper and middle classes, again privileging this set of the population as “the norm” when it came to child behavior, rearing, and educational expectations.11 In addition to the very real fears of the Atomic age, parents were increasingly convinced by child rearing experts that they might be the single most damaging or destructive force in their children’s lives (Hulbert 209; Mintz and Kellogg

188). By the middle of the 20th century, child-rearing experts (who rarely agreed with one another) became common fixtures in the American middle-class home.

New parents in the 1950s could not rely on the parenting models they had been brought up under. This acceptance of “expertise” and a growing emphasis on scientific opinions meant family traditions or the advice of older family members were largely invalidated. “Cut off from wider kinship ties, the American family was able to change residences, status, occupations, and even childrearing techniques without excessive resistance” (Mintz and Kellogg 197).

According to these child-rearing experts, mothers, grandmothers, and older female community members were no longer appropriately credentialed to pass on information about feeding, toilet changing, or discipline. Hulbert describes the National

Congress of Mothers in 1899 at which Dr. L. Emmett Holt, one of America’s first pediatricians, claimed “it was time to dispense with those ‘female relatives and friends whose knowledge is very limited, but whose prejudices regarding these matters are very strong, and their conclusions… not entirely to be depended on’” (42). Holt and other experts advocated the idea that child-rearing advice now should come from upper-

11 These manuals often declared the middle-class suburban home to be that ideal and encouraged parents to raise their children in that model. “The emergence of the generic child, then, began from a specific location of class and race and proceeded outward from the scientific community and into popular understandings of the nature of the child, so that in a very real sense twentieth-century child-rearing manuals may also be read as manuals for entering the middle class” (Sammond 7).

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middle class, white men with doctorates or research grants. Child rearing, then, became yet another field in which women did the work of rearing and nurturing children while under the supervision of men.

While the extended family was increasingly shut out of the child-rearing process, both by emerging expert advice and the relocation of middle-class families to the suburbs, new parents were increasingly anxious about how to respond to the challenges of “new parenting.” The role of spouses had changed dramatically in the new century: the modern family was supposed to provide its adult members with “romance, sexual fulfillment, companionship, and emotional satisfaction” while “fulfilling the emotional and psychological needs of its members” and “providing economic security and a stable environment for children” (Mintz and Kellogg 108). To aid in all these goals, the American marketplace helpfully provided a host of new consumer products aimed at making life in the suburbs happier, healthier, and more fulfilling.

New groups of experts even involved themselves in the matters of children’s literature: the Child Study Association, a “consumer group” focused on products for children, formed parent committees to review books for children. Their first booklist was published in 1913, “a three-year compilation headed by books, ‘For Children of Nursery

Age’; and 1926 brought ‘The Child’s First Books,’ featuring ‘over four hundred selected books for the preschool child,’ a list blessed by Gesell which invokes the names of Bird

Baldwin and Lucy Sprague Mitchell as well” (Bader 74). This committee invoked established child-rearing experts like Dr. Gesell in order to establish its own methodology and legitimacy.

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Early Reader Picture Books

Flesch and Hersey raised the specter of a crisis in pubic education and child literacy with the help of the Reading War controversy. By raising the issue of the dullness of basal readers, the potential profit-motivations for educational publishers, and the lack of non-Dick and Jane readers available for children in the early stages of reading, both Flesch and Hersey created an opening for a new product: the early reader picture book. As Flesch, Hersey, and other public commentators undermined the public faith in the post-war public education system, they created an opportunity for competing groups of professionals to assert control over the situation. The American children’s literature publishing industry had started off the 20th century weak and dependent on

British imports. However, with the urging and encouragement of librarians and educators, publishers became robust participants the American children’s literature market. By the end of World War II, many publishing houses had children’s literature divisions or specialized imprints. It was the heads of these divisions who stepped in to assist parents with their concerns about properly teaching their children to read. Both

Harper Collins and Random House responded to the Reading Wars opportunity in different ways, but by 1957, both companies had launched a series of early reader picture books designed to appeal to parents with young children just starting to read.

For the purposes of this project, an early reader picture book will be defined in reference to these two initial series: the “I Can Read!” series from Harper Collins and the “Beginner Books” series from Random House. The evolution of the early reader picture book series, especially the creation of micro-niche categories under this rubric, will be discussed later in Chapter 3. Using these series as a template, an early reader picture book is a 64-page picture book, initially published in hardcover and sold for

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approximately $2.00. The books in the series tell stories through both words and images, creating a symbiotic relationship between these two elements, which assists a newly literate child attempting to sound out or guess a word. If the child struggles with the phonetics of the word “bear,” or has not yet encountered that word in their look-and- say curriculum, a picture of a bear on the same page acts as a clue for the child, helping them to correctly guess and associate the image with the corresponding word.* Further, an early reader picture book features language that is purposely simple: a book might include single syllable rhyming words, familiar two-syllable words, longer words easily represented with images, and words drawn from a pre-determined list of acceptable, early reader vocabulary, sometimes called “controlled vocabulary” (Bader 499). On top of the simple vocabulary, these books use short, easy to read sentences with few extra clauses or complicated structures.

Within this framework of limited vocabulary and basic sentence structure, both the “I Can Read!” series and “Beginner Books” series seek to reward children’s efforts at reading with fun and exciting texts, as Flesch and Hersey had requested. While contemporary parents may see the early reader picture book as an essential and inherent product of successful child rearing and education, Nathalie op de Beeck notes

“the picture book is not a preordained part of the child’s environment or a natural development in media, but a culturally constructed signifier of childhood to which readers adapt” (op de Beeck 11). As such, this section will examine both the motivations of publishers in inventing this new product and the marketing used to entice parents into purchasing a new “essential” product for their children.

* Tuckner, Ellen. K-5 Literacy Coordinator, Ridgefield Public Schools. Phone interview. August 2012.

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The Cat in the Hat

When Hersey pointed to the dullness of basal readers as the downfall for

American reading education, he mentioned Dr. Seuss by name. Largely in response to

Hersey’s challenge, Houghton Mifflin approached Seuss through his wartime friend,

William Spaulding, the head of Houghton’s Education department. According to legend,

Spaulding challenged Seuss to “Write me a story that first-graders can’t put down!”12

Philip Nel notes that Spaulding approached Seuss despite the fact that Seuss was under contract at Random House. Those two publishers were on opposite sides of the children’s literature market: Houghton Mifflin published books for the educational market

(schools and libraries) while Random House published books for the general public.

Nel notes that Seuss’s editor “Bennet Cerf agreed that Seuss ‘could write the reader’ as long as Random House retained ‘the rights to market the trade edition in bookstores. Houghton Mifflin would publish only the school edition’” (Nel, Annotated Cat

9). That meant that even before The Cat in the Hat existed, it crossed the boundary between textbook and general children’s literature, confusing a previously established boundary that placed useful texts, like primers and instructional books, outside of the same category as picture books, fairy tales, and other fiction aimed at children.13 A book designed to teach a child to read would historically have been assigned to the useful category. This blurred line reoccurs in the text of The Cat in the Hat too. For example,

Seuss mimics the traditional Dick and Jane primer vocabulary list that appeared at the

12 This story is also quoted in multiple places, including Marcus, Minders 207, Nel Icon 29 and Morgan and Morgan Dr. Seuss & Mr. Geisel: A Biography 154.

13 On the other hand, Bourdieu placed all of children’s literature in the useful category, lumped in with textbooks, assuming that all texts for children were used rather than enjoyed (320).

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end of each book: as a part of the Cat’s clean-up routine, he does a run-down of all the vocabulary words used throughout the rest of the text (Nel, Annotated Cat 88).

In addition to this boundary crossing, it is also clear from the negotiations between the two publishers that the book in question is a commodity: while Seuss may have had an altruistic sense of duty to educate the children of America, he and his publishers also had a very real financial incentive.14 Both Random House and Houghton

Mifflin intended for Seuss’s new reader to be a profitable enterprise. Seuss was also fully aware of the controversy he was about to enter. Nel writes:

On June 11, 1956, [Seuss] wrote to Random House: “Don’t ever show this letter to anyone, but I’ve got a hunch… (very immodest)… Namely, according to Houghton-Mifflin, who will be releasing my First Grade Reader to schools early in Jan. or Feb. we’ve got a possibility of making a tremendous noise in the noisy discussion of Why Johnny Can’t Read [sic]. The Random House trade edition won’t come out until later, and the big noise may never come off.” Seuss then talked about potential press coverage in Collier’s and the Saturday Review and the possibility of his making a television appearance to promote the book. He added, ‘Too early to tell yet, so you and I should just watch and wait. But if Houghton Mifflin is right, we’ll be plumb in the middle of a great educational controversy. (Annotated Cat 9; ellipses original)

This letter demonstrates Seuss’s awareness of the Reading Wars controversy and its ability to help propel sales of his book. He is also aware that his publishers intend to make use of the controversy in their marketing of The Cat in the Hat.

Spaulding’s challenge to Seuss included more than just the request for an irresistible story. Spaulding also challenged Seuss to write “a ‘whole word’ book appropriate for six- and seven-year-olds that children would find amusing, using no

14 This may seem like an obvious point, but as previously noted, Jacqueline Rose points out that we as a culture often like to pretend that the associations between children’s culture and commerce do not exist (87). Further to the point of this project, professionals are also supposed to appear above market forces, and so being too direct in the pursuit of profits when it comes to children’s products is likely to earn the ire of cultural critics. The quoted texts here were not made public until well after Seuss entered the canon.

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more than 225 words” from an approved vocabulary list (Mintz 296). Seuss, who admitted to struggling with the list, said he finally decided, “that the first two words on the list that rhymed would be the basis for the book’s title” and those two words were

“cat” and “hat” (296). That list of 225 words became a central part of the marketing campaign for The Cat in the Hat. Though the list of words was originally derived from a look-and-say program, the words available to Seuss would also be of great use to an instructor using phonics methods. The most common words used in the book, like “the,”

“and,” “I,” “so,” “but,” and “you,” are called “sight words” and would be the first words taught in early primers or basal learning tools. Children would be expected to recognize these words on sight, regardless of the method of instruction. In addition, the way that

Seuss structured his story, with metered verse and rhyme, would be extremely useful to a child learning to sound out words through phonics.*

As we will see below, the advertising and marketing for this book repeatedly referenced the concept of this pre-approved vocabulary list, referring to the idea that it was “drawn up by experts.” However, despite the visibility of the “Reading Wars,” these advertisements rarely, if ever, mentioned which side of the debate these “experts” endorsed. Since The Cat in the Hat could be used for either teaching method, Random

House was able to avoid taking a direct side in the debate, strategically reconciling the dispute without dispersing the controversy. Random House could successfully market the book to all concerned parents who wanted to improve their child’s reading. Many of the articles, ads, and reviews written about The Cat in the Hat paid close attention to the list of expertly compiled vocabulary words, while many also noted that these were books

* Tuckner, Ellen. K-5 Literacy Coordinator, Ridgefield Public Schools. Phone interview. August 2012.

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expressly designed for early readers to read on their own. Both of these ideas were unique hooks that Random House used in its marketing. Reviewers obsessed over the math of the book: nearly all of the contemporary reviews mention that Seuss only used

220 distinct words to write the book, choosing those words off a pre-selected list approved by unnamed and unidentified “experts.”

An article by Dorothy Barclay in The New York Times and a “Topic of the Times” feature from the same paper mention the grand total of words in the English language as a point of comparison. According to Barclay, “550,000 in Webster’s New International

Dictionary… in the third edition of the Oxford Universal Dictionary there are 2,515 whole pages of words and their definitions” (Barclay 26). The “Topics of the Times” article goes on to break down the origin of the 220 words that appear in The Cat in the Hat.

The article notes:

Dr. Seuss wrote his book using just two hundred and twenty different words – many of them appearing more than once, as 1,702 running words are used in the book. Where did the two hundred and twenty words come from? Enter now people who, from years of experience with beginning readers, know just what words these children can recognize without the need of phonetic clues. The experts gave Dr. Seuss a list of two hundred and twenty such words… from which Dr. Seuss used one hundred and twenty-three. A second two-hundred-and-twenty word list was supplied, containing words a beginner probably has not encountered in his primer, but which he may have used in phonetic exercises… The author used forty-five words from this list… To make things more interesting, a third list was provided, containing words children might never have seen before but within the average beginner’s ability to comprehend… of which Dr. Seuss used thirty-one. Total different words: one hundred and ninety-nine. Perhaps in desperation Dr. Seuss used twenty-one words on none of the lists…challenging adventures, to the beginner, but not too difficult. (“Topic of the Times”; ellipsis mine)

A few interesting things to note about this particular review: the reviewer tallies the lists of words and mentions how these lists relate to children learning to read based on a phonics method, despite the fact that Spaulding had asked Seuss to write a “whole

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word” reader. Note also that the reviewer describes experts as people with “years of experience with beginning readers.” This definition of the expert is both reassuring and confusing. Does the reviewer mean teachers, with years of experience working with young readers on the actual process of learning to read; or publishers, with years of experience dealing with beginning reading texts; or parents of multiple children; or researchers studying the brain and the process by which it absorbs and learns?

These invoked “experts” appear very familiar with the classroom process involved with teaching children, knowing what words they are likely to encounter in primers and phonics exercises based on a standardized educational process. Yet, the experts are curiously unnamed and are not assigned to a specific field. One explanation is the Flesch/Hersey “us versus them” formulation: Random House knew that parents wanted an educational product that was endorsed by experts, but refrained from listing credentials and degrees of their experts out of fear of intimidating parents.15 The concept and term “experts” is accepted here with only one major qualification: years spent with early readers.

In addition to the specific use of the list and expert advice in promotional materials and reviews, Random House also pushed the appeal of the early reader picture book as if announcing a new public service. These new Beginner Books were dedicated to improving child literacy and celebrating the accomplishments of reading children. Ads for The Cat in the Hat, such as one published in the New York Times on

May 16, 1957, touted the celebrity name of Dr. Seuss and the readability of the book.

15 This is in comparison to the Golden Books, which noted on each book that it was “prepared under the direction of Mary Reed, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Education, Teachers College” (Bader 279). For more on the Golden Books, see Marcus, Golden Legacy: How Golden Books Won Children’s Hearts, Changed Publishing Forever, and Became an American Icon Along the Way. See also: Cassidy, Golden Mean: Commercial Culture, Middle-Class Ideals, and the Little Golden Books.

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As shown in Figure 3-1, the headline above the ad, reads “The Runaway Juvenile

Bestseller that Beginning Readers Can Read By Themselves.” The emphasis on the words “by themselves” is repeated again just above the image of the book cover, reading “Best of all, first and second graders can read THE CAT IN THE HAT by themselves. In fact, more than 35,000 of them have read and enjoyed it already!”

(Harper and Brothers, “Display Ad 192 – No Title” emphasis original).

The ad emphasizes the scientific sounding hook of this particular product by repeatedly noting, in emphasized text, that this book is designed by experts to allow children in the early stages of reading to master a text on their own, by themselves. This aligns with the advice of child-rearing experts to encourage children to develop autonomous activities as a natural part of development.16 This emphasis on “by themselves” can also be read as a subtle dig at the public school system, implying that children might be on their own while professionals spent more time in-fighting than improving classroom instruction. If the child’s teacher is stuck in the wrong instruction method, Flesch advocates for parents teaching children on their own, rather than waiting for the bureaucratic system to fix itself. There is a double-standard being invoked here as well: parents are being urged to trust these unseen, unnamed “experts” while being encouraged to disregard the expertise of the classroom teacher.

The independence and accomplishment of reading “by themselves” is celebrated in bold and italicized font and with exclamation points, alluding to the excitement the

16 “Gesell stressed the importance of 'self-activity,' recommending tactics more intricate than Watson's dictates: the behaviorist's little 'problem solver' was simply shooed into the backyard and expected to keep busy. Gesell's child needed to be equipped with the right array of age-appropriate, non-people props to play with behind his closed bedroom door (which might be kept shut if necessary, the small print indicated). For Watson, conformity to externally imposed routine instilled autonomy in a child. Gesell envisaged the more daunting task of bolstering a child's sense of security by arranging a world that responded to his rhythms, without indulging his whims” (Hulbert 179).

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child and parents will experience when the child does indeed read the book on his or her own, without any assistance from parents or teachers. This impulse for children to celebrate being able to accomplish things on their own reflects a growing emphasis on independence for the suburban child, a microcosm of the increasingly independent and isolated suburban family (Mintz and Kellogg 197). The value of this product appeals not only to a parent’s desire for their child to be properly educated in good time, but also as a product that would provide a distraction for children while parents, specifically mothers, accomplish housework, prepare meals, or visit with other adults. The ad appeals to one of the other desirable effects of a child who can learn to read on their own: they will be able to entertain themselves by quietly reading books, rather than watching television or listening to the radio, two pastimes that were already gaining a negative reputation in parenting magazines and child-rearing advice books (Seiter 8-

50).

The Cat in the Hat appealed to the American middle-class parent in other ways, besides the simple usefulness as an instructional tool. In The Annotated Cat, Nel carefully notes the places in the drafts and published versions of The Cat in the Hat that indicate the middle-class standing of the children featured in the book and its sequels

(68). This ad, and others like it, emphasize the popularity and bestseller status of The

Cat in the Hat, additional selling points for middle-class readers. As I have argued elsewhere, the 1950s saw a rise in popularity for bestseller lists as tools to recommend new texts. These lists reflected what the population was reading rather than what literary experts or academics wanted them to be reading (Fitzsimmons 90). This ad mentions the bestseller status of the book in the headline and then quantifies the

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number of books already sold in the text below. The implication is that 35,000 children have successfully learned to read The Cat in the Hat all on their own, meaning 35,000 first and second graders’ parents have already given their children a valuable learning tool that will help to improve their child’s reading skills. In an era characterized by

“keeping up with the Joneses,” the fear of one’s child falling behind his or her peers was a powerful motivator for parents, making this appeal to popularity and wide-spread distribution a powerful one.

Little Bear

In addition to bestseller status, The Cat in the Hat had the distinction of being the first early reader picture book to reach the market. However, at Harper Collins, editor

Ursula Nordstrom had also been working on a similar project with similar goals. Her inspiration for the “I Can Read!” series reportedly came from Virginia Haviland, a readers’ advisor for children at the Boston Public Library. Haviland had reported a conversation with a young boy who had come into the library boasting, “I can read!

Where are the books for me?” (Nordstrom 96; Bader 312). In response to this anecdote and the ongoing controversy over reading education in America, Nordstrom wanted to produce a book appropriate to fill this niche. Unlike Seuss’s list-based composition process, Nordstrom selected texts for the series that she felt were appropriate and nurtured the authors through the creative process, shepherding them towards an early reader format. The first book in Nordstrom’s “I Can Read!” series was Little Bear by Else

Holmelund Minarik, illustrated by Maurice Sendak.

Nordstrom did not require her authors to rely on controlled vocabulary lists, but continued to encourage them to write high quality, imaginative stories. Then she helped them edit the language of those stories to fit an early reader standard. In an editorial

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letter to Syd Hoff, author of Danny and the Dinosaur, she encouraged him to adjust the text of his book in order to ensure an appropriate reading level for the intended audience of his book:

Page 8: you’ll have to simplify what he saw on this page. NOT THAT I WANT YOU TO GET SELFCONSCIOUS ABOUT ‘I CAN READ.’ I told you I wanted you to let me worry about that aspect and that’s all I’m doing now. You could just say ‘He saw Indians. He saw bears. He saw…’ I haven’t been to a museum in 150 years and can’t think of anything else, but you can. On page 9: ‘He saw horses and wagons. He saw mummies. He saw cavemen. And he saw…’ (OK? Roman chariot and Egyptian mummies look too hard for a child who has just learned to read and is excited about reading). (Nordstrom 104)

Her words of encouragement demonstrated a willingness and a desire to maintain the creative aspects of the book while limiting words that might prove unfamiliar or difficult for a child just learning to read on his or her own. However, nowhere in these notes does she refer to an approved reading list, a reading system, or the phonetic system.

Nordstrom relies on her own expertise to make these evaluations, claiming the legitimate right to do so based on her years of service in the children’s literature publishing industry (Marcus, Minders 159).17 Also, Nordstrom trusts the child to be able to use the illustrations to interpret some of the words in this text: the word ‘dinosaur’ was likely missing from Seuss’s approved vocabulary list, but children will likely be able to recognize the word and be excited about reading a book based on a boy and a dinosaur.

Like Danny and the Dinosaur, Little Bear has some larger vocabulary words that might not appear on early reader vocabulary lists, but words that first graders are likely

17 Like Moore and Jordan, Nordstrom herself had not attended college but had taken a standard secretarial course, then worked her way up through the publishing house. For more on the evolution of the children’s publishing industry see Marcus, Minders of Make Believe and Eddy Book Women.

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to be excited about. For instance, the second story or “chapter” in the Little Bear book is about Little Bear’s birthday. “Birthday” is a long word, one that was not included on

Seuss’s list of pre-approved words; however, it is a word that children would likely be excited to learn. The chapter, titled “Birthday Soup,” narrates how Little Bear cannot find his mother and fears she has forgotten his birthday, so he cooks up his own birthday soup for his friends. Little Bear makes soup by adding “carrots and potatoes, peas and tomatoes; I can make soup with carrots, potatoes, peas and tomatoes” (23). The repetition of these words helps to reinforce a child’s memory, as well as reward the child for figuring out the word the first time. A child using phonics will likely recognize that

“potatoes” and “tomatoes” rhyme because of their common ending. In order to help any child struggling with these more sophisticated words, Sendak has helpfully illustrated these very vegetables along the right margin of the page. In the top right corner are three tomatoes and below, three lumpy, brown potatoes. Below that are two long carrots and two long pea pods, opened to expose the peas inside. The decorative border that surrounds each page looks almost like a vine, suspending these vegetables in their vertical formation. At the very bottom of the page is the pot to which Little Bear is adding all of these ingredients: the pot interrupts the vine pattern on both the horizontal and vertical edge, drawing the eye to its big, round, black presence (23). The illustration simulates the dropping of these vegetables into the pot, even without showing Little

Bear engaged in the literal act of chopping or tossing them in.18

18 For more on close reading picture books see Nodelman’s Words About Pictures: The Narrative Art of Children’s Books which was instrumental in thinking through the following scenes. For close readings of The Cat in the Hat, I highly recommend Nel’s Annotated Cat, which does a far more thorough job than I could ever hope to accomplish here.

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Later, in the same story, Little Bear’s mother, who has been absent while her son cooks Birthday Soup and serves it to his friends, Hen, Duck, and Cat, appears bearing a surprise birthday cake for her son. In three successive pictures, Sendak’s illustrations build suspense for the readers: first, on the left side page, we see Little Bear and Cat eating soup with their spoons in the foreground, while behind them, part of Mother

Bear’s face peeks out from behind the kitchen door. In the second picture, on the right side page, Little Bear has put down his spoon and closed his eyes, as Mother Bear has instructed him to do in the text, while Cat has turned towards Mother Bear expectantly.

Finally, the child turns the page and on the right hand page Mother Bear is seen in full, carrying a birthday cake with six lit candles glowing warmly. The left page contains the text in which Little Bear exclaims “What a big beautiful Birthday Cake!” Mother replies

“This Birthday Cake is a surprise for you. I never did forget your birthday and I never will” (Minarik 34). While “surprise” might be a difficult word for a new reader, Sendak’s images do a wonderful job of implying the surprise, with Mother Bear’s slow appearance and Little Bear’s closed eyes, punctuated by the turning of the page. When it comes to context clues, a middle-class child of six or seven is likely to have experienced the concept of the birthday surprise and knows what to expect from a parent telling them to close their eyes and count to three, as Mother Bear instructs her son to do.

Like The Cat in the Hat, Little Bear was widely advertised and constantly linked with the “I Can Read” series title. An ad, as seen in Figure 3-2 appearing in the Chicago

Daily Tribune claims: “So many people are happy about the first I CAN READ Book

LITTLE BEAR” (Harper & Brothers “Display Ad 153 – No Title”). Successively smaller pictures of Little Bear in his snowcap illustrate the ad, with the author and illustrator’s

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names appearing on either side of the largest Little Bear’s feet. The copy of the ad continues “A boon for parents, teachers AND children, LITTLE BEAR is the first of a series of I CAN READ books for beginning readers, with large type, a small, easy vocabulary, and lots of illustrations.” This ad plays up the connection with education, with the teacher as an ally, but focuses on more than just the vocabulary of the book.

The ad copy also quotes an endorsement from Ruth Ersted, State Supervisor of School

Libraries in Minnesota: “This is what we have all been waiting for… a creative story for beginning readers, a story that would reveal the magic and the fun of reading. LITTLE

BEAR is magic” (emphasis original). Unlike the previously examined ad for The Cat in the Hat, math and science is missing: this ad is about warmth, magic, and the cooperation between parents, teachers, and children when it comes to introducing children to the power and beauty of books. The endorsement of librarians rather than teachers appears to be a conscious appeal to librarians’ professional standing at a time when teacher professionalization was up for debate.

In a letter to Haviland requesting an expert endorsement for the back cover of

Little Bear, Nordstrom wrote,

As you will notice on the jacket, we are calling this an ‘I Can Read’ book. We think that this book will fill a real need and we hope that you will like the words and pictures as much as we do. We believe that children who have finished the first grade will be able to read this book by themselves, and that many who are still in the first grade will be able to read most of it alone with very little help. (Nordstrom 96)

The first line of this quote is a subtle tip of the hat: the title for the series is derived from

Haviland’s own anecdote. Further, Nordstrom talks about feelings and beliefs rather than scientifically conjured lists and precise numbers, which is likely to appeal to the professional librarian’s ethos. There is still an emphasis here on the importance of

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children being able to tackle a book on their own, yet according to Bader, the I Can

Read books targeted a slightly more advanced reader than the Beginner Books.

Nordstrom avoided controlled vocabulary and proscribed reading levels and instead challenged the child with more advanced words and story structures.19 In order to ensure the book’s reading level, Nordstrom relied on her expertise in children’s literature publishing and her own understanding of children’s reading abilities. The “we” noted in her letter above stands for her staff in the children’s publishing department and herself.

Nordstrom does not reference the reading method that children would need to use in order to read the book: there is no allusion to phonics or whole word here.

However, Haviland’s reply to Nordstrom apparently criticizes the method by which

Seuss’s book was written: “VH responded to UN by writing in part: ‘The story of Little

Bear’s imaginative play feels far removed from controlled vocabulary; Maurice Sendak’s drawings give it special distinction’” (Nordstrom 96). From a marketing point of view, quotes from children’s librarians on book jackets and in advertisements demonstrate the approval and recommendation from those who work with children on a regular basis, just like Seuss’s “experts.” With all of the endorsements from credentialed experts accompanying reviews and ads for the series, it is interesting to note how rarely teachers or educators are quoted. Nordstrom and Harper’s rely heavily on the

19 Bader’s detailed analysis of these books highlights the differences between the two series and the intended audiences. “The Random House Beginner Books, initiated by The Cat in the Hat and edited by Geisel, were presented as supplementary readers with a controlled vocabulary - 'ONLY with words which young children are learning to read in the First Grade at school'; they'd be easy, reinforcing and fun, and so they proved to be. The Harper I Can Reads, which appeared later the same year, set their sights at a slightly more advanced reader, typically one who had just finished first grade, and did not have a controlled vocabulary; but beyond the mechanical differences - and the practical difference that children can, customarily read Beginner Books first - there was the underlying difference that I Can Reads were meant less as supplementary readers than as early reading: younger books. In the course of time they have been many things and not all of them have aspired to, no less attained, the status of a new basic literature; but some of them have - and there is always Little Bear to shoot at.” (Bader 499).

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endorsements of librarians, who could be viewed as neutral parties in the Reading Wars yet still experts in books for children. While Nordstrom did not always have the friendliest relationship with some of the influential children’s librarians (especially Moore, as we will see in Chapter 4), the use of librarian endorsements is also an acknowledgment of the established expertise and dominance in the field that librarians enjoyed for nearly half a century.

The selection of Haviland as an expert qualified to testify about the quality and appropriateness of a specific book for a specific age group might imply that Haviland had been involved with the crafting of the book at various stages. Nordstrom’s reliance on her editorial staff and personal knowledge of what would work for early readers starkly contrasts to Random House’s scientifically targeted word list and expert involvement in the creation of the book. Despite the differences in their approaches, both The Cat in the Hat and Little Bear launched with the testimony of various experts hailing these books as wonderful new tools to be used by parents with their children in an effort to improve what the teaching establishment could not.

Reading Between Blurred Lines: Instruction and Delight

While neither of these advertisements makes reference directly to the Reading

Wars, Flesch, or Hersey, reviewers and journalists readily made the connection. In another New York Times Book Review article titled “Authors With Stories to Tell,” David

Dempsey laments how difficult it must be to write books for children in the “age of ‘child guidance,’ in which a writer for juveniles is expected to educate as well as entertain”

(22). Dempsey also characterizes the role of the juvenile writer in relation to the

Reading Wars:

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To some extent, he is also looked upon as an ally in the frantic effort to teach Johnny to read. At their best, these authors bring a sense of novelty and fun to a traditionally lifeless situation. The popular ‘The Cat in the Hat’ by Dr. Seuss (see page 2) is limited to a 6-year-old vocabulary of 223 words – useful, indeed to the average pupil but presenting no challenge at all to the child who has acquired, say, 300 words. The entertaining ‘Little Bear,’ first of the ‘I Can Read’ by Else Holmelund Minarik, contains – to the delight of Rudolph Flesch – exactly 250 words. (The only part of it my first-grader could not read was the author’s name). (22, 57)

As you can see in this extended quote, Dempsy refers directly to Flesch and his grandson Johnny. While noting the increasing attention to education in children’s writing, Dempsy also increases his attention to these educational elements instead of reviewing just the literary quality of the text. The emphasis in this review is on use and educational development. Dempsey concludes his article with his concerns that with all of the restrictions and requirements being placed on the writers of juvenile books, they might just lose the ability to write books that capture the imagination.

I like to think that the best children’s books are those in which the writer conspires with his reader not only to improve his vocabulary and his factual knowledge, polish his good manners and increase his racial tolerance, but also to quicken his imagination, his esthetic response to what should be a literary experience. Yet in the atmosphere of pedagogical theory and commercial practice which surrounds publishing today, it is tempting for the author to travel a safe course. (57)

Dempsey’s critique here relies on the idea that children’s literature is above all meant to be literary, while the instructional portions should be secondary, pushing back against these hybrid useful/literary texts with a more traditional understanding of children’s literature. The standards set by early children’s librarians remain influential here and

Dempsy seems resentful of the Reading Wars’ influence over the children’s books being published in the era’s “atmosphere of pedagogical theory.”

Dempsey’s point, that the didactic nature of books for children should not outweigh the enjoyment and literary accomplishments of the book, is at its heart a point

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about the definition of true children’s literature. Stephen Kline summarizes how this definition has shaped children’s literature in his book, Out of the Garden. He notes that when historians exclude didactic and pedagogical texts from the definition of children’s literature, it presents a false image of the texts available prior to the 1950s. By relying on a definition of children’s literature that only includes “works produced ostensibly to give children spontaneous pleasure, and not primarily to teach them, nor solely to make them good, nor to keep them profitably quiet,” historians overlook “the many books that actually reached children - school books, texts, travelogues, pamphlets, spellers, nursery picture books and the high-minded didactic treatises” (90).

Further, the scholar or historian who disregards these useful texts “avoids the important debates about the role of books in children’s lives - debates that involved a rethinking of the cultural needs of children” (90). In this cultural understanding, books should still exhibit good moral character and pedagogical lessons, but should not sacrifice literary quality in the service of lessons. Librarians sought to uphold this balance between instruction and delight through the Newbery and Caldecott shadow canon and library collections. Other American literary mechanisms, like the adult- focused bestseller lists, preemptively eliminate useful texts like textbooks, handbooks, almanacs, reference texts, and behavior manuals when compiling data on bestselling books, meaning this division is not exclusive to children’s literature (Fitzsimmons 91-

92). However, with the introduction of The Cat in the Hat, Little Bear, and other early reader picture books, this boundary is intentionally and strategically blurred. These books were explicitly designed for use as a part of a larger program to help children learn to read autonomously. The marketing for these books, as well as reviews and

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professional endorsements, all point to these books as tools or useful texts in the struggle to teach “Johnny” to read. No wonder Dempsey is wary in his concern about how reintroducing usefulness as a requirement for good children’s literature might hamper the quality and creativity of new juvenile books.

Dempsey was not the only person to express concern about early reader picture books. Despite Seuss’s popularity with children and parents, some teachers and librarians claimed that Seuss’s illustrations were too vulgar, that they too closely resembled those of the non-literary comic book, and they encouraged children to develop a taste for lower quality, lowbrow literature. Others objected to the subversive nature of the main character, a Cat who encourages the two child characters to break rules, destroy things, disobey their caretaker (a fish), and lie to their mother (Andersen).

However, these opinions appear to have been in the minority: Anne Carroll Moore endorsed The Cat in the Hat readily, as did many other librarians with similarly exacting, high standards for children’s texts (Bader 302).

An Expanding Market: Dividing Early Readers into Micro-niche Categories

Soon after the inception of the early reader picture book niche came an effort to further divide this very specific genre into even more specific micro-niches. A 1960 ad for the I Can Read series, as seen in Figure 3-3, also notes a new category, the “Early I

Can Read Books.” This new sub-series was “created for children just halfway through the first grade who have begun reading but are not quite ready for the I CAN READ books.” The first two books in this micro-niche are Who Will be My Friends? By Sid Hoff and Cat and Dog by Else Holmelund Minarik. A note below the synopsis for each book further specifies “Ages 4-7, $1.50 each.” A similar note below the “Previously published

I CAN READ Books” list of titles explains that this set of titles is appropriate for “Ages 4-

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8. $1.95 each” (Harper & Brothers. “Display Ad 153 -- No Title”). Soon, other micro- niches appeared and other publishing houses rushed to add texts to this market.

As the early reader picture books gained popularity, other publishing houses began issuing their own series.20 For the next two decades, the four early reader picture book series (Dial, Macmillan, Harper, Random House) were only available in hardcover, making them cost prohibitive for many families to purchase more than just a few.21 In

1984, Janet Schulman, the editor-in-chief of the children’s division at Random House created a paperback line, called the “Step into Reading” program. Along with introducing more affordable paperback books into the early reader picture book niche,

Schulman also innovated grade/reading levels on the cover of each book (Maughan

40). This innovation was quickly adapted by competing lines of early reader picture books and soon became the industry norm.22 Publishers continued to expand their early reader picture book market by subdividing it into more and more specific categories, creating space for more and more books. Innovations in the packaging of these books, such as grade or reading levels noted on the book covers and spines, color-coded

20 In the late 1960s, Dial launched its “Easy-To-Read” series and Macmillan came out with a “Ready to Read” program.

21 This cost difference might help to explain the difference in regard for the early reader picture books and the Golden Books: the more expensive books were thought to be of a higher brow level than the less expensive Golden Books, which were also available in drug stores and department stores. The Cat in the Hat was sold exclusively through bookstores and academic publishers at first. For more on the Golden Books, see Marcus, Golden Legacy and Cassidy.

22 These innovations were adapted by the Grosset & Dunlap “All Aboard Reading” series in 1992 and Scholastic’s “Hello Reader” series a year later. Golden created a “Road to Reading” series in 1998 and a companion “Road to Writing” series a year later: the writing books contained “picture prompts, story starters and a loose, open look that doesn’t feel like homework” (Maughan 41). Candlewick introduced “Brand New Readers,” focusing specifically on the “transition between not reading and reading” in 2000 (41).

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reading levels, or other easy to recognize symbols helped parents to navigate the increasingly complex choices of books for their child.

The entire concept of this niche of books is predicated upon the usefulness of these books to the average middle-class parent and child. These micro-niches give the impression of carefully calibrated reading levels in line with school curriculums. In spite of this, many of the series’ editors admit that the levels are actually fairly arbitrary. Many of the editors admit to self-policing or using self-set standards, based on expertise editors feel they have developed, often intuitively, after years of working with children’s texts. According to Maughn: “Robert Warren, editor of Harper Collins I Can Read series in 2000 claimed editors of I Can Read books determine reading levels in-house and do not adhere to specific educational methods” (41). She quotes Warren as saying:

With I Can Read, leveling actually occurred long after the series had begun. Assigning the levels is somewhat arbitrary, but we self police, concentrating on creating a natural progression between levels based on the length and complexity of the stories. (Maughan 41)

Schulman at Random House agreed with Warren: “We created different specific criteria for each level, but we also included a note for parents saying that the range we provide is just a suggestion” (Maughan 41). On the one hand, an assertion of the expertise of children’s literature publishers as legitimate evaluators of children’s reading skills allows those publishers to establish their own power over the children’s market. On the other hand, these wavering assertions of expertise seem at odds with the packages on these books that imply a more scientific approach, with numbers or colors representing

“levels” or “grades” of reading. Advertisements connect books to specific age ranges or grade levels: as we saw in the ad above, Early I Can Read books were marketed explicitly for “children just halfway through the first grade” (Harper & Brothers. “Display

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Ad 153 -- No Title”). That level of specificity in marketing clashes with the editors’ assertion of arbitrary, self-determined criteria.23 Despite these precisely marketed categories, a large number of book titles are retroactively fitted into a category long after they are published. Further, publishers rely on their own in-house criteria for assigning grade levels to books; in effect, the editors are supplanting educators as the evaluators of reading levels and student preparation.

Publishers appear to want both: an appeal based on the reassuring cultural capital of educational science, statistics, grade levels, and developmental theory as well as an assertion of their own professional mastery over the children’s book market based on intuition and experience. The introductory blurb on the Harper Collins website recasts these clear levels slightly:

Take children step-by-step into the wonderful world of reading on their own with I Can Read! Widely recognized as the premier line of beginning readers I Can Read! books are organized into color-coded levels. With more than 200 titles featuring award-winning authors and illustrators, and the most beloved character friends in the history of children’s literature, you can find books at every stage to engage and excite your child. (“Welcome to I Can Read”; emphasis mine)

While the color-coded, step by step rhetoric implies a graduated and carefully assigned series, editors for these series make it clear that the actual purpose behind these devices are to better sell the product to parents. The organization will ensure that “you can find books” at every stage of the reading process, ensuring that parents can continue to consume products in this line regardless of their child’s reading level.

23 In an interview, Warren also asserts the value of literary quality in these texts, while undermining the premise by which the books are advertised and sold. He says: “As with any book, the strength ultimately lies in whether it’s a good book or not. We create the series on a book-by-book basis and we believe ours is the finest series out there. Our focus is to promote the pleasures and rewards of reading; we’re not here to teach reading” (Maughan 41). Editorial expertise here supports an edubrow standard of excellence.

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According to Neal Porter, publisher for Dorling Kindersley Readers in 2000, “Now more than ever, parents are taking an active interest in their child’s reading habits… however, choosing an appropriate book can be daunting, particularly in a pressured retail environment where assistance may not be forthcoming. Leveled readers can make the task easier since they can be easily matched to a child’s ability” (Maughan 41). The micro-niche in the early reader picture book genre is most importantly a clever marketing scheme: instead of feeling pressured to purchase just a few “early reader” books, parents now will feel the need to purchase a “first early reader” a “middle early reader” an “early reader” and an “advanced early reader.”

The early reader picture book series on the market today have on average 4-6 distinct micro-niche categories. Additionally, the more specific these categories become, the more disposable the books are: children may outgrow each category of book within a matter of months and thus require a whole new round of books on the next level.24

The hope of introducing young readers to these leveled series of readers is that they will develop brand loyalty to that particular publisher, the same as a child would develop loyalty to a television show or film franchise (Hade, Paul, Mason 4-5). Perhaps because of this strategy, the early reader picture books have remained a lucrative and successful genre for publishers. Maughan writes, “[Little Bear] is still in print today and has been joined over the years by more than 200 other titles in the line, including volumes starring beloved characters Frog and Toad and Amelia Bedelia” (40). Warren is quoted as saying, “the ‘I Can Read!’ line is ‘doing better than ever. We see an increase in revenue

24 “Because picture books are associated with an ephemeral period of life, these eminently modern commodities automatically suggest a bygone age. Eventually they are abandoned in favor of new texts, but they may be reencountered years later by their reader, now a literate subject who can reflect upon childhood and its playthings or objects. The picture book imitates, and one day may become, a repository for memory and dream”(op de Beeck 43).

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each year; it’s a $10 million brand for us” (40). Early reader picture books continue to sell well and there are so many series focused on this particular niche that many bookstores have a dedicated section for all of them.

In the half-century since the launch of the early reader picture books, the motivations for parents to purchase these books have remained mostly the same.

According to Bernette Ford, publisher of Scholastic’s Cartwheel Books, the umbrella imprint for their “Hello Reader” series in 2000: “There is a great deal of attention being paid to the fact that many kids are not learning to read in the classroom, which has led to a re-emphasis on basic skills” (Maughan 40). This implies that parents remained concerned with the education of their children over the past half-century. Due to their distrust of the American public school system, they turn to products, like early reader picture books recommended by “experts” for specific grade levels and reading ability, to ensure their child gets an appropriate start in literacy. This implies that publishers make better use of educational cultural capital than teachers do. These products also insure that children get an appropriate start on consumer culture; these books introduce them into the tasteful, middle-class forms of consumption that they will be expected to practice as they grow older (Stearns 170). All of this demonstrates how little the average

American parent trusts the professional educator or classroom teacher and her claims to authority in teaching children to read.

In addition to the financial benefits, publishers of these series gain social credit by releasing books designed to aid children with learning to read. Various publishing houses appear to have stepped forward to answer a call to solve the problems in public education and ensure that young children not only learn to read, but learn to love

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reading. In what appears to be a direct answer to Hersey’s call for colorful, creative, and entertaining illustrations to accompany smart, interesting, and educational texts, publishers released title after title at affordable prices. These texts, then, were not merely products to be sold for the profit of a corporation, but books that aimed to improve the children of the nation and therefore the nation itself. If a true professional exhibits altruism, then the early reader picture book offers publishers an opportunity to do just that. Early readers became a symbol of the national desire to improve all things associated with the American public education system, to the exclusion of the teachers who worked in that profession. While publishers invoked expert advice and scientific approaches in their marketing of the early reader picture books, they were able to avoid actually taking a side in the Reading Wars fought by educators. This strategic positioning allowed the publishers to profit financially and socially, at the expense of teachers.

It is also in the long-term interest of a publishing house to get involved with reading education. By encouraging literacy and joyful reading experiences among children, publishers are encouraging children to consume the books their parents purchase them, to associate that consumption with success and personal growth, and hopefully, to develop a lifelong interest in the literature produced by that publishing house long into the future. By encouraging children to learn to read early and often, publishers create future consumers for their adult products, who might also become parents. As adults, those early readers might to purchase their favorite picture books for their own children out of a sense of nostalgia.

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The authors associated with the early reader picture book genre were also viewed positively, due to their altruistic interest in education and literacy over profits or reputation. Seuss and Sendak, arguably two of the most famous and well-loved

American children’s authors of the time, were both involved with the inaugural early reader projects. Seuss especially is often memorialized and remembered as an individual actively engaged in the project of improving literacy as a national and patriotic undertaking. Nel describes the opening of the Seuss memorial in Springfield,

Massachusetts, at which the former First Lady Barbara Bush wrote to praise Seuss for doing “so much to promote children and parents reading together […] Through rhyme and wit and brilliant drawing, Dr. Seuss brought the beauty of language to life”

(American Icon 2; ellipsis original). An ordinary children’s book author or illustrator may not warrant a memorial of his own, no matter how many copies he has sold, but one who spent so much time encouraging the conservative family values of children and parents enjoying a book together while training the child to enter a literate society certainly deserves eulogizing.

As a celebrity, Seuss was not merely a cartoonist or a writer, but also a brilliant teacher whose books will continue to encourage literacy in the very young, even decades after Seuss’s death. This image of Seuss, the dual-sided teacher/author remains powerful today, a reminder of the legacy that Seuss established in 1957. Seuss is prominently featured on the Random House website for children, which allows the publisher to draw on Seuss’s professional image as a marketing device. Kids@Random

House now features a five-stage “Step into Reading” program and a separate series of phonics and grammar books; however, the header of the website features the Cat in the

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Hat’s smiling face, along with other famous book characters. Seuss is now a distinct brand. Kids can click to enter an entirely separate “Seussville” interactive “mini-site” where children can interact with all their favorite characters from Seuss’s books

(“Seussville”). Universal’s Islands of Adventure, located in Orlando, Florida, features

“Seuss Landing” which allows visitors to “step right into the pages of the children’s books of Dr. Seuss.” Seuss Landing is conveniently located right around the corner from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter (“Explore”).

As we have seen, the early reader picture book inhabits a specific niche, created by a perceived lack of coherent reading instruction in America’s public schools. Despite a long-standing definition of children’s literature that puts instructional and useful texts in a distinct category from fiction and literary texts, the early reader picture book now occupies a central place in the significant and sentimental children’s literature canon.

Children and adults alike identify these books as important elements of a child’s reading development. The intervention of publishers into reading instruction and the educational content of public schools also influenced the makeup of the children’s literature canon, while shifting the center of the children’s book market away from the educational market and towards a consumer-based mass market. In Chapter 4, we will explore how the emergence of that mass market challenged the power of the children’s literature librarians in the post-war era.

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Figure 3-1 “Ad for Cat in the Hat”

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Figure 3-2 “Ad for Little Bear”

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Figure 3-3 “Ad for Early I Can Read series”

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CHAPTER 4 ALL FALL DOWN: THE DECLINING INFLUENCE OF LIBRARIANS AGAINST EMERGING RIVALS

Studies like Anne Lundin’s Constructing the Canon of Children’s Literature and

Jacalyn Eddy’s Bookwomen focus on the period of professionalization of children’s librarians through what might be called the “Golden Age of the Children’s Librarian”; generally, this epoch lasts from the late 1880s through the late 1930s. This period was the height of the development of the standards that continue to inform the children’s literature canon, as well as a prolific period of public writing seen from librarians on the topic of children’s literature. Many of the most important and transformational figures in children’s librarianship, like Anne Carroll Moore, were at their peak of influence during this Golden Age.

This time period was also of central importance to the development of a strong tradition of American children’s literature. By the 1920s, children’s librarians had established themselves as the lead profession when it came to evaluating, promoting, and encouraging the growth of children’s literature. Marcus argues that they achieved this position while up against the American “publishing industry that historically had treated juveniles as formula literature” and began to make a case for literary standards for children’s texts (Minders 101). To that argument, I would add that those early pioneering librarians were wildly successful in convincing the American public that literature for children was important, valuable, and vital to bringing up the next generation of citizens.

However, this project will take up where these other projects have left off by examining the continued and evolving role of children’s librarians, especially in relation to other emerging professionalized groups like publishers, booksellers, and educators.

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After establishing the basic markers of professionalism discussed in Chapter 2, children’s librarians struggled to identify and claim what they saw as their rightful place within the field of children’s literature. At the height of their influence in the 1920s, publishers consulted librarians at multiple stages in the editorial and publishing process, teachers looked to librarians as partners in educating the next generation, and child- rearing experts trusted their word on the best books for children to read.

In a similar fashion, the ALA sought to find a place in a more general hierarchy of book industry and education professions. To do this, librarians had to both claim the common elements of a profession while distinguishing themselves from other, similar professions. Lundin writes that in general, the ALA “sought to create a niche apart from other professional jurisdictions and framed the profession around requisites of character, experience, and institution -- not of knowledge, not of determining value, which was relinquished to others” (18). General librarians were often viewed by intellectuals and cultural critics as mere middle-(wo)men or clerks to convey their great works and criticism to the masses, rather than intellectuals and professionals in their own right. Librarians in turn saw themselves as democratic empowering figures that were required to be experts in every subject and efficient distributors of a wealth of knowledge. “Librarians were expected to read the reviews in the periodical and scholarly publications to rely on their judgment; librarians were not expected to be themselves determinants of value” (18). As previously discussed, general librarians had outsourced the work of classifying literature into hierarchies to others: “these authorities were the scientists, intellectuals, culture critics, canonical authors, and scholarly elite” who determined which books were “the best” (18).

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However, children’s literature librarians maintained a distinct level of autonomy and power within the larger umbrella of the library profession. Lundin locates the source of this autonomy in the “gendered sensibilities” by which female librarians “would instinctively know the best books for children” (18). She argues that this distinction granted them the ability to determine the hierarchical placement, literary value, and cultural worth of the literature that fell within their purview, as we saw in Chapter 2. In

Chapter 4, we will examine the ways in which the next generation of librarians made a compelling case for those literary standards to be based on professionalism and newly defined standards, rather than feminine intuition or gentility. As their roles and hierarchical position in American culture shifted, librarians moved from a position of gatekeeping and censorship to one of free inquiry and anti-censorship. This shift allowed the mostly female ranks of librarians to emphasize their professional training and book selection processes based on literary quality, merit, and value to the community, in order to combat book challenges based on ideology. Chapter 4 will examine the ways in which children’s librarians worked to identify a niche for themselves and how rivalries with other “authorities” such as educators, publishers, and booksellers directed their specialization and focus while under the umbrella of the ALA.

The emergence of other competing groups of professionals created multiple pressures on children’s literature librarians. On the one hand, libraries constituted the largest purchasing block for children’s literature in the nation, which meant they had the power to enforce their literary judgments through the power of the purse. A children’s book published in 1920 that was ignored by the library market would find itself out of print very quickly. On the other hand, this power and the ALA sub-committee’s growing

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self-reliance when it came to reviewing, ranking, and canonizing children’s literature left children’s librarians isolated from the rest of the intellectual elite. Self-reliant and self- sustaining in their relationships with book authors, illustrators, publishers, and booksellers, children’s librarians staked out their own turf, but in doing so, made it too easy for the other intellectual professions, namely the academy, to leave them out (or alone). Some of that exclusion was based on a gendered division of culture: the near omnipresent association of children’s reading rooms and female librarians meant the mostly male academy need not take notice.1 Some of that exclusion is also based on canonical differences: as the 20th century progressed, “literary tastes veered more toward realism than romanticism” (Lundin 54). Unfortunately, the children’s literature librarians remained ensconced in the standards of romanticism that had been written into their canon by the pioneers of their profession. Therefore, university scholars and cultural critics found it easy to dismiss this burgeoning field of literature and its accompanying criticism for decades.

It is for these reasons that many children’s literature scholars identify the period of the 1930s through the 1960s as one of increasing isolation for children’s literature criticism and scholarship. The influential figures of children’s librarianship seemed content to be left alone, to carve out their territory within the ALA, and to exert their influence in the formation of a body of literature that they felt was vitally important to the nation. I argue that contemporary children’s literature scholars that claim children’s

1 This exclusion was a gendered judgment: the divisions championed by Henry James and other cultural critics had separated the concept of “serious literature” from the reading of women and children (Hughes). The resulting gendered dichotomy claimed that the literary and worthwhile belonged to men and the ephemeral, casual, and trashy belonged to women. Popular novels are still dismissed today as “chick lit” and romance novels are still excluded from most bestseller lists. For more on this, see Radway’s A Feeling For Books, “Part II: On the History of the Middlebrow” and Reading the Romance.

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literature was largely ignored by the intellectuals and the academics until late in the 20th century should at least acknowledge the retreat of the children’s librarians into their own secret garden of professional insularity.

These professional evolutions occurred against the backdrop of major social and political upheavals in the United States, namely the Great Depression, World War II, and the start of the Baby Boom. As children’s literature columns in popular newspapers, magazines, and professional periodicals, like Publisher’s Weekly, were cancelled during the Depression, children’s librarians lost touch with the public. As a result, they also lost some of their control over the children’s literature infrastructure that they had worked so hard to build. In the post-war boom of the late 1940s and 1950s, the American public no longer had to be convinced that children’s literature was a vital part of middle class childhood. With more American parents purchasing books for their children, librarians struggled to articulate a new representative message and professional goal; they were also hard pressed to find public, non-professional outlets in which to voice those developing ideas. Publishers and booksellers were faster to adapt to the new consumer-driven culture and so were able to establish themselves as the new influential powers within the children’s literature market, effectively wresting some control of the field away from the librarians. As we will see later in this project, the result of this shift in control leads to a more consumer-driven children’s literature market.

The publication history of Stuart Little encapsulates much of this shift in market control. The most powerful of children’s librarians, Anne Carroll Moore, attempted to stop E.B. White from publishing his first children’s novel in 1945. While other critics have presented this controversy as evidence of Moore’s authority and temper, I argue

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that it demonstrates an overall decline of power for her profession. Had White attempted to publish Stuart Little a decade earlier, Moore’s strident disapproval of his novel might have halted the presses, or forced alterations to the text. Moore allegedly retained enough influence to deny White a Newbery and to keep many libraries nationwide from purchasing Stuart Little. However, the controversy helped White and his publisher to attract widespread industry attention that produced high sales numbers in the commercial market. Stuart Little and White’s second children’s novel, Charlotte’s Web, are now considered by most experts to be a part of both the significant and sentimental children’s literature canon, despite the objections of early children’s librarian matriarchs like Moore.

The Librarians’ “Secret Garden” Enclave

The 1920s were a good time to be a professional in America. The roaring economy allowed increasing numbers of groups to establish markers of professionalism and to market their work as a necessary part of the American expereince. For the librarians who had begun the professionalization process prior to the turn of the century, the early 1930s brought “most of the conventional attributes of a profession: accredited schools in universities, a code of ethics, a doctoral program, a research journal” (Gellar

149). With the cooperation of publishers and booksellers, children’s librarians had begun to advocate for higher standards when it came to writing, illustrating, producing, and distributing books for children.

The first generation of children’s librarians advocated good taste in the books that already existed while demanding even higher standards in new books. Their efforts were rewarded: children flocked to libraries, putting their borrowing privileges to good use so that “by 1913, children’s books accounted for a third of all the volumes borrowed

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from New York’s branch libraries” (Lepore 2). According to Anne MacLeod, the first half of the 20th century was a “burgeoning season for children’s books” (178). She continues: “Publishers built on the successes of the late nineteenth century, adding luster to an already golden period in children’s book production. As the market for children’s books expanded, more and more publishing houses created separate children’s book divisions, presided over by editors who specialized in the genre” (178).

The output of those children’s publishing divisions, led largely by female editors, grew exponentially. According to Marcus, the number of new books for children published rose from 433 in 1919 to 931 in 1929. He continues: “The dramatic expansion of the field appeared even more impressive when measured in terms of the total number of books printed. Viewed that way, growth had been nearly threefold, from 12 million books in 1919 to more than 31 million less than a decade later” (Minders 105). As the output of children’s books increased, so did the quality, and the ability for librarians to select which of those texts were the very best and worthy of a place on library shelves.

Many of the studies that focus on this period of development in children’s literature describe it as a time of cooperation and community, as these professionals worked together to establish and promote children’s literature to a hostile or unwelcoming book industry.

However, the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression had a serious impact on children’s literature. With large numbers of American families plunged into abject poverty, struggling to feed themselves and keep a roof over their heads, what little money might have been set aside in a household budget for children’s books disappeared entirely. Despite this, the number of people borrowing books from libraries

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greatly increased. It seems the American public had heard the librarians’ message about the value of books as a tool for self-improvement (or at least improved employment odds).The number of people using the American public libraries grew dramatically during the Depression: public libraries “between 1929 and 1933 added some 4,000,000 new card holders to their rolls; the new and old patrons together increased withdrawals by nearly 40 per cent” (Hart 248-49). Despite this increase in patronage and borrowing, public library budgets were cut drastically. This often meant that libraries could not afford to replace worn out copies of books and had to be exceedingly selective when it came to purchasing new books. With fewer copies of books, the lending of the sole remaining popular titles was often restricted to use within the library reading room. Frances Clarke Sayers notes: “When book budgets were cut to the bone… a token copy of the new titles was available in reading-room collections. It was no uncommon sight in the thin days of the thirties to see varicolored pieces of paper o’ertopping the edges of books on the shelves, each with the name of a child on it, marking the places of itinerant readers” (69). Children’s librarians struggled to ensure that high-quality books remained available to children, even if it meant restricting their use to the library itself.

Since libraries were the primary market for children’s literature in the first half of the century, slashed book budgets meant a serious decline in profits for children’s book publishers and booksellers. Librarians reluctantly decreased their book purchases in the first two years of the Great Depression by an average of 25% (Marcus, Minders 110).

As a result, publishers reduced the number of new children’s books coming out. “In

1931, 873 new children’s books and 245 new editions of older titles were published in

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the United States. Three years later the numbers had dropped to 466 new titles and 135 new editions” (110). In addition to the decline in demand from children’s libraries, the consumer market for children’s books was also in sharp decline. Declining birth rates, along with the financial strain of the decade meant a reduced mass market for children’s books (110).

Declining book purchases also meant that publishers had to eliminate specialized divisions and imprints, or departments that were deemed superfluous or non-profitable.

Juvenile departments were still relatively new within publishing houses and so were often in the first round of departments to be cut or downsized (Marcus, Minders 110-

111). I emphasize this point because it highlights the fact that while children’s literature librarians had earned a significant position within the library profession, their fellow bookwomen in children’s publishing divisions did not have the same professional autonomy, value, or respect. Librarians did attempt to demonstrate their displeasure at these layoffs in solidarity with their fellow bookwomen: after May Massee was laid off from Doubleday Junior Books in 1932, Anne Carroll Moore made her the keynote speaker at that year’s Children’s Book Week celebration (118). Unfortunately, the financial situation of many publishers during the Depression meant setbacks for many children’s literature professionals.

While librarians retained a great deal of influence within the professional world of children’s literature, they were slowly losing touch with the public arena. In the 1920s, children’s librarians had taken to popular publications to write about children’s literature for a general American audience. These public demonstrations of expertise went a long way to establishing children’s literature librarians as the top profession in recognizing

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and promoting high quality literature for children. Their columns also helped to establish libraries as a place where education and taste met and were made available to everyone. However, during the Depression, the popular periodicals like the Bookman and the New York Herald-Tribune were forced to cut those same columns in order to save money (Marcus, Minders 127). The opinions of women about children’s reading habits did not rank high in the general cultural awareness, especially when compared with debilitating poverty and the looming threat of war. Children’s literature ranked low in the overall hierarchy of literary culture at the time and so, just like at the publishing houses, when discretionary budgets were slashed, children’s literature columns disappeared.

Following the cuts in librarians’ columns in adult-read periodicals, popular child- focused publications like St. Nicholas also folded during the sparse years of the

Depression and the following war years (Marcus, Minders 127-28). However, the demise of St. Nicholas was caused by more than just the Depression. In her 1971 book about children’s literature, Selma Lanes noted that changing audiences were to blame for the death of St. Nicholas. She argued that a magazine aimed at “children aged six to seventeen” was simply too broad for a society which increasingly “compartmentailized periods of specialized growth,” breaking childhood up into smaller and smaller categories (23). Lanes wrote:

Youngest children are the ages-two-to-four category for purposes of selecting their literary entertainment. If they are precocious, the bookseller will proffer something from the three-to-six-year-old literary garden plot; but, from infancy through mid-teenage, children’s books are seldom sold or reviewed except within narrow and often meaningless age groupings. St. Nicholas is almost incomprehensible in an era when a magazine called Seventeen has found an audience - 1,400,000 monthly - bigger than Mrs.

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Dodge’s entire readership (100,000 monthly) during the years her magazine was the country’s most popular juvenile publication. (23)

As Lanes indicates, the concept of the child was revised into more precise sub-groups. I highlight this fact because the subdivision of childhood into groups will become an increasingly important influence on children’s litreature and its associated professionals.

This process of dividing childhood into stages began when child rearing experts began using science (emerging fields like psychology, child studies, and sociology) to assess the workings of the childhood mind at the turn of the century. Experts like Dr. Arnold

Gesell, Dr. John B. Watson, and Dr. G. Stanely Hall had begun dividing childhood into more specific sub-categories like “infant” “pre-school child” and “adolescent” (Hulbert

77-80, 122-125). Children’s literature experts, then, had to adapt to this new, more specific vision of childhood. In some cases, as we saw with early reader picture books in Chapter 3, these subdivisions encouraged the development of more specific categories of books for specific age ranges. However, as is true in the case of St.

Nicholas, it also meant that reading materials for “the child” became even more starkly divided from reading materials for adults. While this meant a death for more general reading materials like St. Nicholas, (at least until the crossover books of the late 20th century discussed in Chapter 6), it did mean an increasing reliance on experts, like librairans, to help parents negotiate the new, complex subsets of reading materials.

The cancellation of the children’s literature columns in popular periodicals and the disappearance of periodicals aimed directly at children meant the librarains lost their access to the public’s ear when it came to championing middlebrow standards for children’s literature. As a result, many critics describe the Depression as an era of

“circling of the wagons”: children’s librarians increasingly published only in professional

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journals. For example, in 1936, Anne Carroll Moore began writing a feature column in

The Horn Book; her previous column in the New York Herald-Tribune was cancelled in

1930. The reappearance of “The Three Owls’ Notebook” was hailed by her colleagues and friends as “a timely and affirming development” (Marcus, Minders 127). However,

Moore had gone from commenting about children’s literature in a widely-read public newspaper to critiquing it in an increasingly trade-specific periodical, read largely by fellow professionals. While an active set of trade publications is in fact one of the hallmarks of a successful profession, this increase in activity within the professional librarian community was the silver lining to an unfortunate decrease of activity in the public eye.

Many narratives of the history of children’s literature or children’s librarianship describe this historical moment as one of isolationism. MacLeod describes post-1920s children’s literature as “an enclave” and “a garden, lovingly tended by those who cared about it but isolated as well as protected by the cultural walls that surrounded it” (125).

Kidd emphasizes: “the professionalization of children’s literature by the ALA effectively removed children’s literature from broader public ownership, despite (or rather through) those claims about fashioning a public” (“Prizing” 173). Lundin echoes this assertion, claiming that: “children’s books remained an enclave, a shelter for the literature and its shepherd.” Lundin further argues that this enclave mentality set librarians up for trouble in the future: “children’s literature held firm in their idealistic vision as proven cultural capital.” These firm idealistic convictions would be radically shaken by the “tumultuous cultural changes of the 1960s” which forced librarians to reevaluate their criteria, standards, and evaluation systems in an effort to maintain their cultural authority and

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their “grip on a canon” (54-55). As we will discuss in Chapter 5 and 6, the emergence of new kinds of children’s literature, new delivery systems for that literature (namely paperbacks), and new demographics for that literature caused cracks in the white walls of the librarians’ isolated ivory tower.

The enclave mentality also reached outside of the library walls to the larger children’s literature community. Marcus notes that many individuals involved in the children’s literature industry resided in Greenwich Village, which “by the 1930s [had] become a sort of picture-book bohemia” (Minders 160). He notes that in 1942

“Nordstrom, Margaret Wise Brown, Hans and Margret Rey, Leonard Weisgard,

Charlotte Zolotow, Robert McCloskey, Marc Simont, Munro Leaf, Marjorie Flack, Kurt

Wiese, Esther Averill, May Massee, William R. Scott, Vernon A. Ives, Anne Carroll

Moore, and Lucy Sprague Mitchell” all lived in that neighborhood and regularly met, dined with, and visited their colleagues (160). In the 1920s and 30s, individuals interested in producing or working with children’s literature were expected to visit common meeting points, like Anne Carroll Moore’s office in the NYPL, Room 105.

Sayers notes:

Editors, artists, and publishers and their kind might well be expected to find their way into Room 105, but many others came to check all points of the compass with ACM: trustees of libraries in search of librarians attuned to children and their books; architects asking for aid in planning children’s rooms at the drafting-board level; representatives of foreign governments seeking advice in the selection of books in the English language to serve as interpreters of American life. (215)

While Eddy and Marcus portray all of this as a cozy and mutually profitable set of friendships for librarians, publishers, authors, and booksellers, I argue that it also meant that the children’s literature industry was very insular and potentially hostile to outsiders.

From this perspective, it might be easy to see how some could come to resent the

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strong influence of librarians, especially individuals like Moore. By the end of the war years, some of those outsiders began questioning the validity of the children’s literature infrastructures established and run by librarians. Public controversy over events like

Moore’s disapproval of E. B. White’s first children’s book, Stuart Little, helped to bring this professional backlash into the public eye. The post-war shift in American culture and commerce ended the era of librarian dominance and increased the influence of the open market on children’s literature.

It was from behind garden walls that the established children’s literature professionals experienced the cultural, economic, and social upheavals following the

Second World War. In the post-war era, the rapid increase in the population of young people during the post-war years greatly increased the demand for books for young people and thereby gave children’s literature experts an expanded, attentive audience.

Money flowed from the local, state, and federal coffers into programs for youth and libraries were beneficiaries. “By 1958, nearly half of the average library’s operating costs went toward literature for young people (19 percent on children’s literature, 27 percent for adolescents)” (Grunzke 162). The ALA increasingly turned its attention to the newest scientifically identified category of childhood: the adolescent. Coined by G.

Stanley Hall, the term “adolescent” gained traction in child rearing literature in the

1920s, but became a massive new point of attention in the post-war era (Hulbert 78-81).

Teenagers quickly became big business in the post-war suburban-boom market, as the attention of many industries turned towards this new stage of childhood.

Luckily, librarians were prepared. Mabel Williams, librarian at the NYPL, had started a movement to include spaces for teens in libraries, much like the spaces

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provided for children. She also began the process of reviewing and recommending books specifically for an adolescent audience. “In 1930 Williams established the annual list Books for the Teen Age published by the New York Public Library. It was bought by libraries and teachers throughout the country, an annually revised, well-tested list which has continued to the present” (Batchelder 112). Further introducing this concept of YA literature into the professional sphere, “Mabel Williams was one of the founders of the

ALA Young People’s Reading Round Table in 1935-36 and was chairman for round table meetings at the 1936 Richmond conference of the ALA” (112). By the time the post-war era created an extensive demand for literature for the teenager, librarians were prepared with carefully cultivated lists and high evaluative standards by which to judge this newest sub-genre of children’s literature. We will return to the emergence of YA and its effects on the children’s literature market in Chapter 6.

Adolescents were not the only new demographic in need of increased librarian attention. Due to the post-war increase in child-bearing, higher levels of school attendance, and an abundance of veterans attending schools through the GI Bill, more and more groups outside of the upper-middle taste culture began demanding representation, both in children’s literature and on the general shelves of the library.

Publishers began to release books by and about African-American, Latino, Asian, and other under-represented minority cultures. Since the early canon (and the reputation of its founders) was built on a foundation of upper-middle class white Protestant values, librarians were often at a loss with how to properly evaluate the taste level and cultural capital of texts outside of their own experience. Critics like Nancy Larrick charged a wide range of professionals with maintaining an “all white world of children’s books”

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(Lundin 54; Marcus, Minders 235).2 For librarians especially, who had retreated to their own professional enclave, the increasingly diversified audience for children’s books meant re-evaluating the ways in which they critiqued and evaluated the literary quality of children’s books.3 They feared, “difference rather than tradition might prevail. The surety of a system based on jurisdiction of best books was shaken. If librarians were losing their grip on a canon, who would assert authority? Who would inherit the power to define cultural form and value?” (Lundin 54-55). This emergence of new kinds of children’s literature created a double-bind situation for librarians. In this new, more multi-cultural environment, those who stuck too closely to the previously established canon risked becoming out of touch with new political realities and the American reading public, thereby forfeiting the cultural capital the ALA had worked for decades to establish. Librarians who continued to conform to previously established measures of quality were seen as enforcing these cultural divides, at the expense of diverse cultures.4

2 Larrick wrote an article in the Saturday Review by that title in 1965, and “lambasted her colleagues in the publishing world for having at best engaged in tokenism rather than squarely addressing the urgent need for racial diversity in children’s literature” (Marcus, Minders 235). She wrote that of the 5,206 children’s books published between 1962 and 1964, less than seven percent contained “any reference in text or illustration to blacks. And 60 percent of that 6.7 percent were set either outside of the United States or in the period before World War II” (Cart, Young Adult 43-44).

3 This charge of an “all white world of children’s literature” built on dominant/high culture concepts of worth remains relevant today. “In a Twitter exchange on April 17th, 2014, Ellen Oh and Malinda Lo expressed their frustration with the lack of diversity in kidlit . . . in response to the all-white, all-male panel of children’s authors assembled for BookCon’s May 31st reader event. . . . Several other authors, bloggers, and industry folks piped up saying they would like to be involved” (“FAQ”). According to the mission statement on the We Need Diverse Books website: “we recognize all diverse experiences, including (but not limited to) LGBTQIA, people of color, gender diversity, people with disabilities, and ethnic, cultural, and religious minorities” (“Mission Statement”).

4 Gans would argue that this problem arises when a society assumes that the tastes of the upper-class minority should dictate what the majority reads. That assumption reinforces cultural structures and presumes that everyone in a society wants to engage with the highest taste culture and has the proper education to do so (Gans 116).

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However, librarians who were too quick to embrace change and allow popular and unvetted forms of literature into the stacks risked their professional status: according to Bledstein’s formulation, librarians were tasked with altruistically serving the eternal, timeless canon of highbrow literature and preserving it for future generations. If librarians became mere vendors of popular, faddish texts that held no lasting value to the preservation of American culture, they would compromise their hard earned cultural and professional capital. Therefore, in order to successfully address the shifting demographics of children’s literature consumers and library patrons, the ALA needed to shift their own priorities and policies just enough to address these concerns. It is my contention that while the ALA attempted to walk this fine line, other professions were able to make similar transitions more quickly, causing librarians to lose rank in the children’s literature hierarchy of professions. In contrast, commercial venues were able to provide the types of texts desired by consumers free from the library’s concern with professional standards or social credit

It is a common complaint, from both the political left and the right, that popular culture pollutes the minds of the masses and (hyperbolically) will lead to the downfall of society. Critics claim that mass culture, driven by the commodity market, is more concerned with selling culture than improving it or creating real, lasting art. As Ann

Haughland notes in her article “The Crack in the Old Canon,” the rift between booksellers and publishers who sell to the cultural gatekeepers, like librarians and teachers, versus those who sell directly to the consumer, via bookstores, widened dramatically in the second half of the 20th century. An escalation in placement of children’s books in department stores, drug stores, and supermarkets, in addition to the

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rise in shopping mall bookstores, made the direct appeal to consumers easier and more profitable for children’s publishers and marketers. Publishers began to specialize: some focused on “educational market” texts, which included textbooks, nonfiction, and potential Newbery winners, while others built their catalogues around series, early readers, and popular fiction.

In the 1950s, lots of money went to schools and libraries as a result of the baby boom: therefore, more publishers focused on the gatekeepers, who controlled an estimated 70-90% of the market for children’s texts.5 However, when public funding for those educational institutions declined in the 1970s (as a result of political shifts and an economic slowdown), more publishers began to focus on the direct-to-consumer market

(Haughland 49). More emphasis on the consumer market for children’s books meant that librarians influence over what books publishing houses acquired and put out declined significantly. We will see in Chapter 6 how the rise of super bookstores like

Waldenbooks, Borders, and Barnes & Noble in the 1980s meant that children’s books and YA literature became a highly lucrative market that valued librarians as advertising agents rather than instigators, evaluators, or critics.

Diversifying audiences and markets were not the only changes that forced the

ALA to adjust its professional positions. In the aftermath of the world wars and at the height of the red scares, it became common to challenge books based on their ideological views and for individuals and professionals alike to insist on censoring books that fell outside of an ill-defined set of American beliefs. For example, the Oz books again came under scrutiny, not for their poor quality or ties to commercialism, but for

5 See Lanes 147. Turrow, 8.

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their utopian vision of a socialist society. In 1939, just prior to the release of the MGM film The Wizard of Oz, “the leftist political periodical New Masses published a piece entitled ‘The “Red” Wizard of Oz’ which mused that Baum’s series had a strong communist subtext: ‘Good Heavens! The land of Oz is a fairyland run on

Communistic lines, and is perhaps the only Communistic fairyland in all of children’s literature’” (Grunzke 156). Grunzke’s project further details the attempts of Florida State

Librarian Dorothy Dodd to ban Baum’s works from all library shelves in the state because of its communist rhetoric. These new kinds of challenges were based on a different kind of evaluative criteria for children’s literature than those of literary quality established by the early librarians.

These kinds of Red Scare challenges caused children’s librarians to join the rest of their ALA counterparts in advocating for libraries “as places where a diversity of viewpoints would be protected and presented” (Grunzke 170). In many ways, this shift was an insistence on the hard-won professionalism of librarians and an assertion of a trained librarian’s ability to judge the fitness of books for inclusion within a public or institutional library. When angry parents or concerned citizens insisted that controversial books be censored “many librarians responded by using their new-found professional influence to guard their institutions against groups seeking to remove any perspective that disagreed with their own” (170-171). In response to outside pressures to remove certain books from library collections, the ALA publicly supported its members’ rights to rely on their professional training to evaluate and select texts.

It was in response to waves of book banning that both the ALA and the National

Education Association (NEA) began to reexamine their role as cultural gatekeepers in

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the 1930s. Both professional organizations were in favor of a more open-minded position that honored diversity of thought. Grunzke observes that the new anti- censorship policies of both the ALA and the NEA reflected a confirmation of both teachers and librarians as professionals, specially trained and highly qualified, and thus in the best position to decide which books should be available for children to check out of a library or to read in the classroom. “Both [the ALA and NEA] advocated the trained professional as the person most qualified to decide which books would be included in a given library collection or school classroom because the training made them better capable of making such a decision” (Grunzke 160). I highlight this in an effort to point out how carefully both groups needed to tread in the move away from their roles as gatekeeper and towards new roles as arbiters of free access to a diversity of opinions and even defenders of unpopular or controversial works.

The ALA asserted their professional influence in this matter through a new form of infrastructure: the library patron’s bill of rights. What began as a policy statement in the Des Moines Public Library, “was adopted [by the ALA] in 1939, and by the 1950s the ‘freedom to read’ was firmly entrenched as a core professional as well as cultural value” (Kidd, “Censorship” 200). The ALA’s Bill of Rights declared:

Today, indications in many parts of the world point to growing intolerance, suppression of free speech, and censorship affecting the rights of minorities and individuals. Mindful of this, the Council of the ALA publicly affirms its belief in the following basic policies which should govern the services of free public libraries. (Gellar 175)

These policies established that books and materials purchased with public funds

“should be chosen because of value and interest to people of the community, and in no case should the selection be influenced by the race or nationality or the political or religious views of the writers” (Gellar 175). It also established that “all sides of questions

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on which differences of opinion exist should be represented fairly and adequately” and that use of library meeting rooms “should be available on equal terms to all in the community regardless of their beliefs or affiliations” (175).6 By adopting this formal policy statement, the ALA established public libraries as a center of free speech and inclusiveness. The ALA amended the Library Bill of Rights in 1948 to make “an anti- censorship stance the policy of the professional librarian” (Grunzke 158). This expanded the role of the librarian to “the role of professional educators with increasing understanding of the vital importance of their function as impartial disseminators of information” (Berninghausen qtd Grunzke 158). No longer were librarians supposed to passively resist the limitations of free speech, but instead they were charged with the professional duty to “prevent censorship and encourage free inquiry” (158).

While the NEA and the ALA were in agreement in many ways over the anti- censorship ideals, tension between librarians and teachers remained. The NEA had adopted a similar policy statement against censorship, but their policy “granted more power to the teacher than the ALA granted to the librarian” (Grunzke 160). The phrasing of the NEA’s policy put the teacher in the active position, working against the pressures of outside forces to protect the classroom from being used as a political outlet (160). On the other hand, the ALA policy “advocated that the librarian be viewed as ‘an impartial disseminator of information’” and passively “stock books written from a variety of different perspectives on each subject” (160). In the NEA policy, “It was the teacher who was granted the right to ‘determine a canon’ and select works targeted at the intellectual

6 Gellar notes that the ALA policy left out the third clause of the Des Moines statement, which actively solicited various groups to gift propaganda to the public library since “the meager funds available for the purchase of books and reading matter” would make it impossible to purchase an equitable selection of these texts to make available to the community. She concludes: “The national organization chose to treat [the lack of funds] as a local issue, hence one it did not have to confront” (176).

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capabilities of the child.” (160). Further, it affirmed the right of the teacher as professional to overrule parents who might be actively advocating for the removal of a text they objected to (160). I argue that this maneuver towards establishing teachers as the true professionals capable of canon formation and an active defense of controversial texts would have left librarians to merely collect and organize all those texts that represented a diversity of opinion. According to the new NEA policy, teachers shaped and refined, while the personality and tastes of the librarian were rendered less vital. In spite of this competing policy and professional challenge to their authority, the

ALA was hesitant to develop a uniform national policy on collection, as that would result in the removal of power from the individual, professionally trained librarians (159).7

In response to challenges both for and against more diverse library collections, librarians came to rely on the term “selection” in the 1950s. Librarians asserted their ability, based on professional standards, to select the best possible books for a community within the library’s fiscal and physical limits (Kidd, “Censorship” 201). Lester

Asheim’s 1953 article “Not Censorship But Selection” published in The Wilson Library

Bulletin establishes a difference between the two practices:

Whereas the censor takes an ostensibly negative approach to the literary field, the librarian or ‘selector’ takes an ostensibly positive one. The selector ‘asks what the reaction of a rational intelligent adult would be to the content of the work; the censor fears for the results on the weak, the warped, and the irrational.’ The censor misses ‘the major theme, the total purpose, the effect of a work as a unified whole. Or rather, the censor prefers another context, that of ‘external rather than internal criteria.’(qtd Kidd, “Censorship” 201)

7 Avoiding a national policy on collections was the ALA’s attempt to avoid the loss of authority experienced by individual classroom teachers when curriculum decisions were placed in the hands of the educationists, as demonstrated in Chapter 3.

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As this quote demonstrates, librarians were eager to promote the concept of selection as a part of the positive, altruistic work that librarians did on behalf of the community.

Kidd argues this formulation asks the general public to trust librarians to do this work and mock or ignore the censor, who clearly has no rational or professional basis for his challenges. Kidd also argues that the transformation of the list of most challenged books into a sort of canon points to a preemptive defense on the part of the ALA “to defend literature against the scandal of censorship” (208). Kidd argues that in this setting, censorship acts much in the same way as literary prizes: with the introduction of lists of frequently banned and challenged books to the ALA website and publications “point toward a canon of banned books, individual titles of which gain importance through challenge” (215). In other words, the act of challenging a book by the foolish or irrational censor often catapults that book into the realm of literature, both as a defense mechanism and as an association with other challenged books. By celebrating censored books, librarians undermined and even mocked censors who attempted to usurp their authority within the realm of book selection.

The annual celebration of this canon of the banned began in 1982 at the

American Booksellers Association (ABA) Convention as a promotional, performative display of “books in padlocked cages” and posters that read “Caution! Some People

Think These Books are Dangerous” (Kidd, “Censorship” 210). The ALA and the National

Association of College Stores quickly became annual sponsors of “Banned Books

Week” and Kidd argues that the event acts as both a promotional activity and a preemptive strategy against the practice of challenging books. In this way, Banned

Books Week demonstrates key elements of literary freedom, while helping professionals

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like booksellers and publishers to sell more copies of books.8 Kidd claims: “by celebrating books that are ostensibly imperiled, ensuring their status as literature” bookstores are able to promote the sale of these books through a “literary-consumerist party” (211). Banned Books Week also gave librarians another public, annual event to celebrate in addition to Children’s Book Week: these events further helped reinforce their (evolving) professional standards and social capital. Thus, the act of challenging a book not only places that text into a specific literary category, but also makes the book more promotable. Many challenged books go on to become bestsellers, by virtue of the controversy and attention in the mass media. Through Banned Books Week, the ALA and the ABA argue that the best way to combat censorship and ensure free speech is through consumption of challenged texts. The power of the open market, in this case, helps to support the position of the experts and the professionals.

The influence of that same market thwarted librarians’ attempts to ban the Oz series both at the turn of the century based on quality and again in the 1930s over ideology. The popularity of the texts and the predisposition of readers to seek out

Baum’s works outside of the library stacks helped Oz remain a sentimental favorite.

However, it was the film version of Baum’s first novel that cemented Baum’s place in the canon of significance. In his lifetime, Baum attempted to stage his Oz books in theaters and on film, but was not successful, in large part due to the reticence of theaters and movie studios to invest in a product that was primarily targeted at children (Clark 147).

MGM produced The Wizard of Oz and released it in 1939: initially the film did not show

8 The ALA publishes an annual list of the most challenged books and sells a Banned Books Week kits to booksellers for $40 a year (Kidd 211). These kits advise booksellers how best to capitalize on the phenomenon of book banning: “Booksellers often display challenged books by the cash register or in store windows; in some instances, literary characters appear behind bars or in stocks” (211).

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a profit because it was targeted at children (Hearn lxxix). Critically, the film won an

Academy Award for Best Original Score and Best Song: “Over the Rainbow” and Judy

Garland “received a miniature statue for Best Performance of a Juvenile” (Hearn lxxix).

However, The Wizard of Oz did not become truly popular until the first telecast of the film in 1956. CBS first showcased it on television and the film has been re-shown annually ever since, usually on major holidays. It is often advertised as a family classic, appropriate for viewers of all ages (Hearn lxxix). From the 1980s on, new adaptations and revisions of the book have been published by Philip Jose Farmer, Geoff Ryman and

Gregory Maguire (Zipes xx). The appearance of The Wizard of Oz in the living rooms of millions of Americans every year, often tied to sentimental holiday memories, reawakened the love of Baum’s series in many adults who had read the books as children. The transfer of the stories to a different medium made the Land of Oz even more accessible and, in the terms Stevenson lays out, even more canonical. She writes:

“Eventually, a children’s literature classic masters being beloved without actually being read, with a sufficiently protective affection to keep the book enshrined in the sentimental canon despite its not being read.” (126). Salman Rushdie observes that the film is something that families can share, since the stark separation of adults and children in literature does not hold true for film:

The world of books has become a severely categorized and demarcated affair, in which children’s fiction is not only a kind of ghetto but one subdivided into writing for a number of different age groups. The cinema, however, has regularly risen above such categories. From Spielberg to Schwarzenegger, from Disney to Gilliam, it has come up with movies before which kids and adults sit side by side, united by what they are watching. (qtd in Clark 147)

Today, thousands of children encounter The Wizard of Oz film every year, without ever cracking the cover of the book. The MGM film version of The Wizard of Oz helped

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Baum cross out of this “ghetto” of children’s literature and into a more generalized category of American literature favorite.

Further, the popularity reawakened by this film has helped The Wonderful Wizard of Oz to rise a little in academic estimation. By the time academics turned their attention to the study of children’s literature, the film had helped to ensconce Dorothy, Toto, and the Wicked Witch of the West into the realm of American classics. Clark notes that Oz appears 8th on the Children’s Literature Association’s 1976 list of “Ten Best American

Children’s Books” based on a poll of CHLA members. By remaining popular with readers for over 75 years, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was able to make the transfer from the canon of sentiment into the canon of significance. As Stevenson concludes:

“Ultimately, popular judgments of sentimental regard, not academic lists of significance, create and control the canon of children’s literature” (114). Today, The Wizard of Oz is considered a classic of children’s literature and is easily found in children’s sections of thousands of libraries. The books are also readily available through a variety of versions in bookstores: publishers like Penguin issue their own editions, usually with an introduction and annotations, to sell as part of a set of standardized “classics.” Many of these editions include the first few books of the Oz series and make no attempt to hide the fact that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is only an introduction into a whole new world.

The concerns about series books, fantasy, and low quality literature have shifted over the past century, as has the influence of the librarians who attempted to keep the general reading public from consuming such dangerous texts. The failure of the librarians to completely eliminate these books from children’s entertainment choices speaks to the popularity of the books. However, Oz is the exception to the rule: the

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selections made by librarians throughout the first half of the century directed much of the shape of children’s literature as we know it today. Texts rejected by those children’s library establishment faced an uphill battle when it came to finding an audience. In this case, publishers and booksellers were able to successfully market Baum’s books so that children wanted to read them enough to pay for the pleasure. Oz and other books like it illustrate the ongoing contentious relationship between librarians and the broader children’s literature market.

While it would be easy to paint a binary rivalry between the educational market and the mass market, the matrix of children’s literature professionals is far more complex. Even within the educational market, librarians and teachers often had distinct points of departure from one another when it came to the types of books children should be reading and the criteria by which those texts should be evaluated. Further, the educational and mass market within the field of children’s literature originated from the same community of “bookwomen,” and those early relationships were often congenial and beneficial in both a cultural and profit-minded sense. By examining the web of the mid-century rivalries between publishers, booksellers, librarians, and educators, we can see the effects of professionalization of these groups since the start of the 20th century.

Further, an examination of this inter-related struggle for influence within the field of children’s literature will help to situate the addition of children’s literature academics into that same web, which we will discuss in Chapter 5.

Rivalries Among Edubrow Professionals

Professional culture in the 1940s and 1950s shifted dramatically, as new technologies were redirected away from war-making and into the general American culture. New sciences emerged. New approaches to old occupations, like engineering,

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manufacturing, and distribution changed almost overnight. New products and new attitudes towards consumption transformed American families and directed the middle- class towards new forms of taste, cultural markers, and concepts of the American dream. In this ever shifting hierarchy of taste cultures, the desire for authority, control, and influence within the field of children’s literature and literary culture at large created tensions between children’s librarians and other professionals in related fields: namely, children’s book publishers, booksellers, and teachers. At stake was the trust and confidence of the children’s literature consumer, specifically middle-class parents and their children.

To borrow Radway’s phrasing, librarians began professionalizing at the same time that other groups of “competing literary professionals” were engaged in defining their own “coordinate technical language” with which to discuss “highly specialized ways of writing” and the texts that resulted from those formal experiments (Feeling 360).

Since children’s literature as a distinct form of literature was in itself a new and experimental concept, librarians sought to establish themselves not only as experts but also as the most qualified judges of the texts. While the personal relationships between the founding “mothers” of children’s libraries and children’s imprints at major publishers had created a space for collaboration and consultation, by mid-century many of those women had left the professions. As a result, the existing partnerships between librarians and other book professionals grew less cooperative and more competitive. Overall, these relationships grew increasingly strained as the mass-market increased the demand and availability of children’s literature throughout the United States.

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The field of children’s literature was increasingly viewed as a feminized space, one ruled by the bookwomen that Eddy celebrates. As early as the 1930s, “some cantankerous male teachers, editors, and authors challenged the jurisdiction of women librarians over the [Newbery] Medal, accusing them of bias against boys and boy books”

(“Prizing” 174). When discussing the struggles for cultural authority and autonomy at mid-century, it is important to note that these struggles also took place within a gendered space, one that was increasingly challenged by male professionals in other fields.

Librarians Versus Teachers

In the minds of many, schools and libraries are two sides of the same coin; ideally, the lessons learned in the halls of the school are reinforced in the stacks of the library. Once a student graduates from the public school system, they should be empowered and propelled to continue their education at their own pace through the library system. Schools and libraries are both viewed as educational infrastructures and professionals who followed similar patterns in establishing professional organizations, credentials, and standards staff both institutions. Further, both teachers and librarians were vocal advocates of an improved market for high quality American children’s literature during the first half of the century. Schools and libraries are often grouped together to form the educational market for children’s books, a market that contributed up to ninety percent of the book sales in the children’s literature market during the first half of the century (Clark 73). Teachers and librarians were often close allies when it came to improving the quality and availability of children’s literature in the early years of the 20th century.

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However, it was the roles that each professional group intended to play in the field of children’s literature that often created tension between them. While most librarians and teachers were in agreement about the symbiotic nature of their two institutions, the question of authority and priority between those institutions remained up for debate. For example:

Edith Lathrop, a specialist in rural education working for the U.S. Bureau of Education, promoted the library as the second important institution of public education in the U.S.: ‘Many are unaware of the degree to which the school and the library supplement each other.… Since the library, to a greater degree than the school is an institution in which intellectual progress may be continued throughout life, the school should make certain that every child has instruction and practice in the use of libraries and books.’ (Grunzke 93; emphasis mine)

I highlight this specific passage because in it, Lathrop subordinates schools and charges teachers to prepare students to use libraries, the institution that “to a greater degree” supports lifelong intellectual pursuits. Others argued for a more equitable division of labor: “One librarian made the distinction that the job of the teacher was to teach how to read and the job of the librarian was to teach what to read” (94).

Elsewhere, teachers argued that libraries should function as a supplemental support to the formal education of the classroom. Even as educators and librarians worked together in the early 20th century, both groups sought distinctions between their professional aims. Eddy notes: “librarians insisted on a role distinct from, but strongly connected to, schools. Libraries would supply what the schools did not: good taste in literature. For their part, teachers resisted viewing librarians as educators and colleagues, and were inclined instead to view them as clerks” (40).

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Some of this competitive rivalry came out of the struggle both of these groups had to undertake in order to achieve professional recognition. Resentment built up where one group felt the other had achieved a similar status with less effort. Eddy says:

Librarians believed that teachers had easy hours; teachers believed that librarians had easy work. Librarians suspected that teachers regarded them as task-oriented subprofessionals and found evidence of this attitude in school libraries, poorly staffed by those ‘unqualified to teach any subject in high school, but doing police service over the assembly room [with] the dignified name of librarian.’ Insulted, librarians insisted that such poorly prepared individuals should not lay claim to the profession. Above all, librarians objected to having their profession denigrated as merely technical. (98)

At stake in this situation of the unqualified school librarian is not only a philosophical debate about professional roles, but also the exclusive nature of the library profession. If a failed teacher can function as a librarian, the thought goes, than library science is less complicated then educational science and librarianship a lesser profession than teaching. The insistence on credentials from accredited library science schools for all public librarians was in part to ensure the elite, exclusive status of the profession: not just anyone can mind the stacks. Credentialing also insisted that public money was well spent on increased salaries and benefits to ensure only proper experts were hired. It is important to remember that at stake in these rivalries was not only prestige and professional recognition but also public funds. During the Great Depression, there was very limited money for public education projects: libraries and schools often found themselves competing for funds.

It is perhaps their self-regulating distance from the classroom and commitment to self-education that spared the librarians from being as affected by the waves of anti- intellectualism in America as other professions. Red scares of the 1920s and 1950s often targeted teachers, as parents and conservatives feared the influence of unionized,

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liberal teachers in the classroom and the power those potential Communists held over the youth of America. In Education and the Cold War, Andrew Hartman argues that the red scare of the 1950s “shaped much more than the fate of a few thousand radical teachers and unionists” on a pedagogical and policy level (91). He continues:

“Opposition to ‘collectivism,’ a designation that lumped communism together with socialism, liberalism, and progressive education, fused the two most important, yet previously disparate, strains of conservatism: traditionalism and libertarianism” (91).

Teachers, by virtue of employing unions to ensure professional standards, were made easier targets of conservative crusaders looking to root out potential liberal or socialist influences on American children.

The rhetoric of the library, however, relied on an individualist mode: attendance in libraries was not mandated by the state and so could only benefit those individuals who were motivated enough to enter and make use of the resources within without government compulsion. Schools resembled huge bureaucratic institutions that

Americans eschewed, while libraries continued to promote the American values of self- sufficiency, equality, and free inquiry (Miller, Reluctant Capitalists 14). Many librarians were able to capitalize on this rhetoric in order to direct Red Scare inquiries away from their profession and onto individual books or authors. As previously discussed, the ALA adopted a policy of selection over censorship in 1939, but allowed individual librarians to make the decisions about what books to stock in a given branch. While librarians associated themselves loosely with the education system, the emphasis on self- education protected them from charges of inappropriate compulsory reading lists, homework, or excessive influence.

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From their founding, public libraries called up favorable American rhetorics in order to justify their existence and the use of public funds. Lundin notes these rhetorics were used to justify the founding of libraries: “Books were the panacea for ‘The People’s

University,’ as well as the ‘American Dream.’ And what possibilities! Books could be provided on agriculture, technology, geography and commerce, and literature of quality to raise tastes and to cultivate middlebrow culture in the pursuit of civic good” (15). By mid-century, libraries were a part of the democratic, “boot-straps” vision of the American

Dream, in contrast to a dictatorial, top-down American public school system.

In this oppressive vision of the school system, the liberal, intellectual

“professional educationists” that we met in Chapter 3 dictated the curriculum, teaching methods, and texts to the classroom teacher, who then dictated homework, reading assignments, and daily schoolwork to the students, who were required by new laws to be there. In contrast to the open shelves of the modern public library, a text chosen for the classroom came from a preapproved list of books, which was compiled and approved by committees of educationists. Whereas librarians were free to seek out the best books available in a year and purchase as many as possible, teachers choose one set of books and required all of their students to read the same ones. In the Red Scare eras, then, teachers and professional educationists became popular targets to accuse of sympathies with communism or fascism, while attacks on libraries were generally focused on specific books with questionable loyalties.

Outside of the Red Scare, another area of contention was school libraries and the role of the librarians who ran those institutions. As professional lines were drawn, it became increasingly unclear whether school librarians belonged to the growing

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assemblage of educationalists or to the ranks of librarians. Political struggles between professional organizations further complicated this issue: the NEA and the ALA ended up competing over the memberships of the individuals who staffed school libraries but were often classified as teaching faculty. To strengthen negotiating power, many school districts aimed for 100% NEA membership. NEA dues were automatically deducted from district paychecks, unless a teacher specifically opted out, and “total dues were submitted by the school” (Batchelder 74). This policy pulled school librarians in two opposite directions. “For school librarians the decision whether to join NEA or ALA presented a real quandary, for to join both was expensive. After 1924, however, there was no library department in NEA, so if one sought opportunities to lead in the school library field, the desirability of ALA membership was clear” (74). For school librarians who wished to meet other contacts in the library field, or to move from school librarianship to another related profession, ALA membership was superior (74).

However, choosing the ALA over the NEA meant going against the colleagues with whom a school librarian worked with on a daily basis and having to justify that choice to school administrators.

This division between professional organizations meant that the ALA and NEA were in direct competition for members, instead of allowing for over-lapping participation. Many school librarians ultimately chose to join the NEA. As a result, the

School Libraries Section of the ALA developed much more slowly than the Section for

Work with Children that attracted most of the children’s literature specialists. This led to a movement to professionalize the school librarians outside of the ALA. In 1915, eight school librarians founded the California School Library Association (CSLA) during a

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meeting of the NEA and by 1917 had helped pass a state certification system for school librarians in order to help them achieve salaries comparable to teachers (Batchelder

110). By the end of the 1930s, “the School Libraries Section of ALA was not only younger than the Section for Work with Children but also much weaker” (75). As both organizations continued to grow and expand, networking between the organizations declined and both groups grew more insular and position-specific in their content.

For both librarians and teachers, there were financial, professional, and even personal reasons for maintaining a competitive rivalry with each other. Both professions had significant amounts of social credit and cultural capital at stake in asserting their mastery and expertise over reading material for children. However, it was not uncommon for these two professions to unite behind certain causes, especially against the proliferation of bad reading material or the commercialization of the children’s literature market. Further, publishers had a tendency to lump teachers and librarians together under one “educational book market” label. An ongoing tension in this story of professionalization is the struggle of these two groups against the more market-driven forces of booksellers and publishers.

Librarians Versus Publishers

The rivalry between publishers and librarians is likewise based on concerns over influence and motivation. A similar evolution of professionalism in publishing, along with the rise in the American desire to establish taste through a good reading program, meant that publishers were able to find new, altruistic ways to market texts to the general public while improving their own social credit. By publishing books that recommended reading programs or even sets of books that the average man should read should he wish to appear well-read and well-bred, publishers were attempting to

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usurp the tastemaking territory that librarians believed should be within their exclusive purview.9

One of the major concerns Melville Dewey had when working to help form the

ALA in 1879 was the rising influence of books that proported to advise the upwardly mobile on books they should read in order to help them achieve their economic and social rise. “In 1880 Lyman Abbott had published Hints for Home Reading, a series of separately authored essays addressing ‘books and their use.’ Perkins wrote one chapter entitled ‘What to Read,’ while the book’s publisher, George Palmer Putnam, had included another chapter entitled ‘Suggestions for Libraries’ consisting of lists of ‘500,

1,000 and 2,000 volumes of the most desirable and important books’” (Wiegand 72).

Seeing the popularity and market appeal of these texts “[Dewey] worried that librarians would begin taking advice on ‘best reading’ from profit-driven publishers instead of professional librarians with more altruistic motives who looked to growing numbers of outside experts for guidance” (72). He believed that these lists of books, or any future lists composed by non-librarian experts, would be at least in part influenced by non- literary forces. A publisher might compose a list that heavily favored texts from his own publishing house. Dewey wanted to ensure that the power to recommend required or important texts on which to base a library collection remained within the control of the librarians. The ALA still remains concerned with how to best influence what the general public reads, especially in the face of these kinds of commercial projects, which remained popular throughout the 20th century, but surged in popularity in the post-WWII

9 For more on this see Radway A Feeling For Books Chapter 4 (127-153). Librarians saw these popular market books as suggesting an overly generalized canon for self-improvement, self-education, or improved breeding. In addition to usurping their authority and expertise, librarians felt the public should look to them for self-improvement recommendations, since a professional librarian could better tailor a reading program to individual needs.

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era. Librarians still insist that their professionalism keeps self-improvement-minded readers free of any particular publisher’s financial interest.

When it came to children’s literature, Eddy paints a warm picture of librarians and publishers as two groups of women initiating their own professional spaces and roles, working together on a joint project in which both benefited at the turn of the 20th century.

However, “In ‘The Reviewing of Children’s Books’ (1926), Moore notes that the librarian- publisher relation was originally more fraught: ‘It was before librarians and publishers really began to know each other, and to vision a public as yet unreached by either’” (qtd in Kidd, “Prizing” 172). The relationships between the pioneer librarians and the early children’s literature publishing heads like May Masse and Ursula Nordstrom have been covered in great detail by Eddy, Marcus, and Lundin, but all note that the personal relationships amongst these women were mutually beneficial, cordial, and cooperative in the early part of the century. Both groups of women were operating at a time when no real standards had been established for children’s literature and so they were able to work together to carve out those standards to their mutually constitutive benefit.

Librarians got the high standards and improved quality they desired and publishers got guidance and the guaranteed market they needed.

Despite these positive interactions, there were rifts between the professions, based on their larger goals. As the century progressed, “Librarians frequently accused publishers and booksellers of succumbing to a naked profit motive” (Eddy 11). However, the accusations were not all one sided: “publishers and booksellers accused librarians of idealistic (and unrealistic) attempts to remain disconnected from market concerns and overbearing self-righteousness in their attitude toward America’s publishing industry”

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(11-12). In the early part of the century, many of these arguments found their way into the literary magazines and newspapers where librarians reviewed books and made suggestions to parents on what texts they should buy or borrow for their children.

Librarians’ access to a public space in which to voice their concerns can be seen as directly proportional to the amount of influence they had in these public debates. By the end of the period covered by Eddy and Lundin, some personal relationships between individuals remained across the publisher/librarian divide, but increasingly, the market- driven goals of many children’s literature imprints placed these two professional groups in opposing corners. Librarians sought to distinguish themselves from children’s literature publishers, distancing themselves from the inevitable commercialism involved in the buying and selling of books.

As we saw in Chapter 3, children’s literature publishers attempted to protect their professional status from major concerns about financial incentives, as they strove to represent themselves as primarily concerned with the education and welfare of the

American child. Publishing texts aimed at improving literacy, for instance, could be advertised and leveraged as an altruistic and noble goal, despite its involvement with the consumer market. Further, publishers looked at schools and libraries as a single influential selling block and many publishing houses specialized in educational content directed towards the tastes and preferences of these education-minded professionals, sometimes termed the “educational market.”

According to Grunzke, editors and publishers in the children’s market had to be receptive to the tastes and concerns of librarians in a way that editors and publishers in other categories of literature did not. “Often this has meant that market forces have had

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to be responsive to the aesthetic tastes of the nation’s librarians, and it has meant that librarians have had a proportionally large part in shaping the literary landscape”

(Grunzke 127). In tailoring their publishing lists to what generally was known to please librarians and educationists, publishers ensured they would be able to sell a large quantity of books. It also meant that the “individual charisma” and stylistic preferences of influential librarians like Moore and Jordan had a lot to do with which books were published. Eddy notes that while building up the children’s literature publishing infrastructure, publishers of this era often consulted with these powerful individuals: this practice was seen as not only “good for business, but the editors genuinely regarded librarians as indispensable contributors to the process of making books for children”

(105). Librarians did a great deal to influence children’s literature, from manuscript selection through the production stage and finally the distribution of the finished product.

Despite this early assessment of librarians being helpful participants in the work of children’s literature publishing, at mid-century, many accounts of these relationships hint at discontent and resentment. Below, we will discuss how Ursula Nordstrom, editor of E. B. White’s children’s books, dutifully sent the galleys of Stuart Little and Charlotte’s

Web to Anne Carroll Moore, but disregarded (and even mocked) Moore’s response. By the time White’s novels for children came out in the late 1940s and early 1950s, publishers were less reliant on these influential librarians and more content to market books to the public. In Chapter 6, we will publishers turn to booksellers in the 1990s for the kind of selection and production advice that they once solicited from librarians.

Librarians Versus Booksellers

Just as librarians and teachers were not always on the same page when it came to children’s literature, the same principle applied to the business-minded professions in

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children’s literature: “even publishers and booksellers, who might be expected to be allies, frequently argued over books” (Eddy 12). As children’s literature began to emerge as a major market force and field of professional interest at the turn of the 20th century, publishers responded by increasing the number of new children’s books published. In

Minders of Make Believe, Marcus keeps a running tally of new children’s books published in each decade of the 20th century, a tally that is useful here in discussing the increase in publisher output and market outlets for children’s books. Marcus claims: “In

1919, 433 new books for children were published in the United States” (Minders 104). In

1929, “the annual output had more than doubled to 931” (104). By 1940, “the number published had not only recovered from Depression-era lows but risen to a record total of

852 new titles” (145). By the 1950s, “Just under three thousand children’s books were then being published annually, a figure equal to about 10 percent of the industry output”

(238).10 Readership in general in the U.S. rose after World War II, but it is clear from the statistics Marcus lists that children’s literature in particular grew at an enviable and profitable pace.

On the whole, Marcus’s tone when discussing the increase in children’s literature output by American publishers is one of triumph. For the “minders” of his book’s title, more books published meant more attention being paid to a form of literature that they found valuable. It also meant more high quality books to be placed in the hands of children, usually via an intermediary like librarians or teachers. However, an increase in

10 The numbers also increased dramatically if measuring by the total number of books printed or by sales. Marcus writes “growth had been nearly threefold, from 12 million books in 1919 to more than 31 million less than a decade later” (Minders 104). He continues, “By mid-decade, the children's book publishing industry as a whole had become a booming enterprise with growth potential to spare. In 1964 total sales of children's books reached $112 million - only slightly less than the figure of $117 million for adult trade hardcover sales” (238).

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book output and in potential profit to be made from children’s books also attracted the attention of sales outlets. The rise in books published for children also meant an increase in cheap, low quality books that helped booksellers to maximize profit margins.

As booksellers became increasingly divested from publishing houses at mid-century, booksellers were happy to stock a wide variety of materials, including dime novels, comic books, and paperbacks in order to attract and appease a variety of audiences within a variety of taste cultures.

The distinction between commercially successful books and high quality literature had been debated since the early 19th century. Radway chronicles the rise of the book club debates in her work, A Feeling For Books. She notes that much of the concern in literary circles over market-oriented operations like the Book-of-the-Month Club came from a fear that commercial enterprises would usurp the authority of literary professionals to determine what constituted highbrow literature, just as Melville Dewey feared a century prior. She notes that the judges of the Book-of-the-Month Club saw themselves as literary professionals who evaluated and reviewed books with the aim of connecting the right books with the right readers (269). The judges saw themselves less as literary critics and more as:

the modern, professional librarian… Trained to bring together inquiring readers with the appropriate forms of technical expertise capable of answering their questions, the modern librarian is primarily oriented to the needs and tastes of readers. Relying on the card catalog and the innovations of the Dewey system of classification, this individual approaches the world of print not as a single universe but rather as a world of differentiated knowledge-production where language is put to multiple and different uses, where it is deployed differently to describe and manipulate the world in highly specific, technically distinct ways. (274)

This is the vision of librarians from the point of view of booksellers, one that the Book-of- the-Month club literary experts aimed to emulate in order to ensure they were able to

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recommend the best (middlebrow) books to their subscribers month after month. Of course, the difference between the librarian and the Book-of-the-Month judges is that the librarian attempts to unite readers with appropriate texts without any direct financial exchange, while the Book-of-the-Month Club judges seek to recommend books that will please current paying subscribers, attract future subscribers, and ensure the profits of the club. Librarians may also rely on a canon established over generations, while the

Book-of-the-Month Club must choose from a smaller pool of recently published titles.

Further, Haughland argues that the distinction between what we perceive to be high quality literary texts and low quality mass-produced texts is dependent on the judgments of gatekeepers and tastemakers. She writes: “Good literature is considered good because it meets the aesthetic standards and reflects the values of the people— literary critics, educators, and librarians—who have the authority to make those decisions” (55). While children’s literature librarians began the century imbued with the authority to make those determinations, that power waned as the century progressed.

Haughland identifies one of the cracks in this authority: the experts’ opinions of what makes literature good does not always match the opinions of the actual intended audiences. She continues: “For many people—and probably for all of us sometimes— books provide pleasures that literary critics do not acknowledge as legitimate” (55). At the start of the century, librarians invoked a love of reading to appeal to a new audience. At mid-century, the gap between expert opinion and this user experience of love was increasingly exploited by professionals like booksellers and publishers in an attempt to skirt librarians’ gatekeeping authority.

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It is possible to argue that while librarians were not engaged in this task of literary management in order to ensure a financial profit, librarians were working to ensure their own professional cultural capital. Librarians had to live up to high standards: as professionals they needed to be knowledgeable and well-versed in a variety of taste levels, as well as immersed in the Progressive ideals of the library. Librarians were expected to forward education, improve the moral character of patrons, and encourage the improvement of the mind and the self through reading. They continued to hold themselves up as financially neutral arbiters of literature when it came to awarding prizes, stocking shelves, and rejecting certain types of books. However, they could not be truly neutral. Many adult librarians had agreed to relinquish the authority to arbitrate which texts would be the “best” books but as the book club wars over middlebrow literature continued to spread from the 1920s on into the culture wars of the 1970s and

80s, librarians had to ensure their own tastemaking position by choosing which authorities would be influential in book selection within the library. I also argue that a significant amount of the children’s literature librarians’ cultural capital was tied to the amount of funding libraries received and the percentage of the children’s book market they represented.

As the numbers of books published for children generally increased every year, more experts were needed to sift through all the texts, and read, review, and assesses them. When more children’s literature publishers began to focus on books for the mass- market sales outlets, educational experts worried about losing the ability to assert their tastemaking authority outside of their own institutions. Clearly, when only 400 books a year were being published, this task was easier to tackle than when the yearly output of

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books topped 3000 books. In some ways, publishers aided librarians by specializing or dividing the publishing pool into books aimed at the tastes and preferences of the educational gatekeepers and books aimed at a more general, mass-market public.

However, by virtually ignoring the books that went directly onto the bookstore shelves or department store racks, librarians unintentionally ceded authority to the bookseller. The expanding pool of booksellers and book outlets made it more difficult for librarians to remain involved in evaluating and reviewing mass-market texts. Growth in the mass- market appeal of children’s literature left librarians stranded on an edubrow island of their own creation.

This split in children’s literature markets had larger implications: it essentially split the children’s literature industry into two separate and competing halves. Haughland writes that experts on both sides of this divide “had very different conceptions of what a children’s book ought to be” based on concepts of literary standards and popularity (50).

Library-oriented publishers eschewed formulaic children’s literature in favor of texts that were “innovative, unusual, reflective of an author’s unique aesthetic vision,” while also believing that “popularity rarely coincided with quality” (51). The mass-market publishers preferred standardized categories and subjects, and “unabashedly worked to develop titles that would please their bookstore clients by selling in the largest numbers possible” (51). Books published for the mass-market often featured colorful covers, innovative sizes and formats, gimmicks (like pop-ups or unconventional materials), and recognizable characters, series titles, or logos.

Haughland summarizes the differences between these two publishing outlooks in terms of professional standards. She claims that the library-oriented publisher:

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puts its cultural responsibilities ahead of its economic interests, while the mass-market publisher belongs to the commercial side of publishing – its primary goal is to make money not to create lasting culture. This presumed conflict between culture (high culture) and commerce, a synonym for popular or mass culture, is ever present. (51)

This belief in a high culture, altruistic motivation on the part of library-oriented publishers may be linked to the professional altruism intentionally attached to library work. This sense of altruism is one of the common identifiers of an established profession, and it appears that the cultural capital that the librarians accrued through their own professionalization was significant enough to transfer onto similarly minded publishers.

Further, this framework places the mass-market booksellers and associated publishers lower in the cultural hierarchy than the more education-minded librarians and publishers. Gans notes that all taste structures are hierarchical and that the taste cultures of the wealthy and politically powerful tend to align with the taste cultures of the intellectual establishment.11 He writes: “The prestige of high culture derives from its historical alignment with the elite, its occasional alliance with High and Cafe Society in

America, as well as from the status of its own public and its claim to cultural expertise, which is legitimated by the many creators, critics, and scholars in its public” (116). In this case, Gans would likely argue that the codification of high culture standards within the children’s literature canons (focused on instruction and moral improvement) renders the tastes of high society synonymous with high-quality, academically valuable

11 As previously noted, Gans asserts that the high/low culture dichotomy assumes that everyone can or wants to engage in high culture but are prevented only by a lack of means or motivation. Gans, writing in 1974 explains that the high/low binary is actually far too simplistic and that in America: there are five distinct taste cultures: high, upper-middle, lower-middle, low, and quasi-folk (75-94). Gans notes that each of these taste publics identifies their own culture as superior, yet “high culture’s claim receives more deference. Equally important, high culture standards are explicit and to some extent even codified; they are constantly applied in the literary journals, discussed by scholars and critics, and taught in the most prestigious universities” while the standards of lower taste cultures often go unremarked (116).

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literature, and renders the tastes of mass culture synonymous with the popular, amusing, and ultimately disposable (116).

The professionalization of children’s literature sought to establish what Gans would describe as upper-middle cultural markers for children’s literature, so as to avoid being relegated to low or folk culture. In advocating for a set of standards by which children’s literature would be evaluated and by reviewing texts for suitability for children, librarians demonstrated characteristics of this upper-middle, user-oriented taste culture.

Members of this group “want to be cultured, [they] prefer a culture that is substantive, unconcerned with innovation in form and uninterested in making issues of method and form a part of culture” (81-82). While children’s librarians often pushed for innovations in production and form, they were interested in the effects of those innovations on the audience and the field, rather than in the formal experiment itself. Booksellers very often targeted the lower-middle taste culture (commonly referred to as “mass culture”) and so established practices and infrastructures that appealed to the average middle-class mother, rather than “America’s upper-middle class, the professionals, executives and managers and their wives who have attended the ‘better’ colleges and universities” (81).

This difference in audience further divided children’s literature into educational and mass markets.

In establishing a new taste-culture audience for children’s literature, booksellers

(and their associated publishers) undermined the edubrow project of the librarians. By appealing to the lower-middle culture, which Gans identifies as “America’s dominant taste culture and public,” booksellers forced a tacit acknowledgement from these educational gatekeepers that their tastes often differed wildly from what the general

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public actually liked to read. (84). Publishers assisted in this market division by sequestering the books librarians were likely to appreciate to a specific type of market; publishers essentially started going around the gates that the librarians and teachers guarded in order to reach the public directly through booksellers.

This debate was not just about librarians’ taste preferences, but also about the taste preferences that they could justify in a public forum. For example, as libraries expanded in the early part of the 20th century, many in the public sought to find fiction on the library shelves. However, librarians and administrators feared that adding fiction to library collections would transform public libraries from an educational institution into one of public entertainment for the masses. At that time, novels were still associated with lower forms of entertainment. Despite the fact that the majority of Americans, outside of school-aged children, read fiction in their spare time, librarians were hesitant to stray from the founding rhetoric of the public library as a place of education, self- improvement, and self-sufficiency. According to Grunzke: “Using public funds to buy works of fiction was not uniformly supported, with some dissenters doubting that

‘furnishing any sort of amusement and relaxation … is a proper function of the government.’” (103). While this attitude originated prior to World War I, many of the early librarians codified it into the librarians’ culture of professionalism. By mid-century, when taste cultures outside of the library had changed to accept fiction more generally, some librarians were still stuck with old attitudes (or were stereotyped by detractors in this way). In the eyes of the public, all librarians were opposed to popular, casual reading, bestsellers, and other types of lowbrow literature: they assumed bookstores,

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newsstands, and book displays in department stores were the only place to find these kinds of texts.

After World War II, the influence and prestige of children’s literature librarians began to recede, and publishers and booksellers began to see more control. In some respects, children’s literature publishers had simply taken up the torch that the children’s literature librarians had lit. Children’s librarians had been so successful in convincing the American public that books were a vital, necessary part of a middle-class

American childhood, that publishers had increased the number of books they published each year. Further bolstering the publishers’ efforts, more and more parents heard the message of early Book Week slogans about “More Books in the Home” and shifted to purchasing books for their children, rather than relying on the public library system to borrow them. However, it was not until the introduction of the mass-market paperback in the 1960s that the reading public was able to purchase books in larger numbers; owning hard-cover books was cost prohibitive for a majority of people in America. The causes and effects of the Paperback Revolution will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.

Rivalries in Action: Anne Carroll Moore Fails to Squash Stuart Little

In 1938, E. B. White wrote an essay for Harper’s in which he criticized the state of children’s literature for being too sunny and cheerful in a world looming on the edge of war. From the start of the essay, “One Man’s Meat,” White makes it clear that he is not an expert in juvenile literature: that is the purview of his wife, Katherine Agnell

White, who wrote “an annual and sometimes semi-annual roundup of children’s books” for the New Yorker starting in 1933 (Lepore 3). Marcus describes Katherine White’s column, “Children’s Shelf,” as one of “critical acumen and sophisticated sense of fun combined with her lack of allegiance to the close-knit library sisterhood” which made the

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column a unique voice in the growing field of children’s literature criticism (Minders 112).

Apparently both Katherine and E. B. White had a detached dislike for children’s librarians, even as Katherine actively admired the patriotic mission of the public library.12

In his tongue-in-cheek essay, White asserts his right to pass judgment on the current state of children’s literature: “I have naturally come to know something about children’s books from living so close to them and gazing hatefully at their jackets” (217).

Based on his “browsing hit and miss in a deep pile of books, opening them in the middle and reading a page or two,” White declares that “it must be a lot of fun to write for children – reasonably easy work, perhaps even important work” (218). While the tone of the piece generally tends towards comedy and hyperbole, White’s assertion of expertise through proximity does much to undermine the authority and carefully cultivated expertise professed by others, even critics like his wife.

White goes on to say his wife’s piles of books have “left me gibbering” over the overly naïve and dull material being presented to young people. White claims, “like toys, books for children reflect surely the temper of the period into which they are born” and so argues the focus of science, safety, and far away nations is natural in “this year of infinite terror” (219). However, White finds it disingenuous that the books being presented to children do not accurately represent the state of the world. White further challenges the child experts, claiming:

Educators and psychologists are full of theory about the young: they profess to know what a child should be taught and how he should be taught it, and they are often quite positive and surly about the matter. Yet the education of our young, in schools and in libraries, is a function of

12 Katherine White helped develop the Brooklyn library’s children’s literature collection by donating all of the review copies sent to her as a windfall of her “Children’s Shelf” column. (Lepore 5)

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home and state which gives every appearance of having brilliantly failed the world. (218)

White worries that adults with uneasy understandings of science, faith, and world politics are trying to give clear, direct instruction to children in fields like spirituality, citizenship, safety, and the state of the world. He deems these attempts failures.

If White can claim professional expertise in any area, it is in writing.13 His critique of the actual writing in the juvenile literature he has perused reflects this. “A large amount of the published material is dull, prosy stuff, by writers who mistake oddity for fantasy and whose wildly beating wings never get them an inch off the ground… some of the books are patronizing, some are mushy, some are grand. Almost all are beautifully illustrated” (220). He does delight in Seuss’s 500 Hats of Bartholomew

Cubbins as “being in the true spirit of nonsense” but seems to have declared the majority of texts sent to his wife for her holiday round up of 1938 to be a waste of time.

According to Lepore, Seuss pointed out the essay to Moore during one of his visits to Room 105. In response, Moore wrote White a letter encouraging him to take up the challenge that he himself implicitly set when writing his essay: “I wish to goodness you would do a real children’s book yourself” (qtd in Lepore 4). As Moore had done with other authors, she encouraged him to add his serious, literary voice to the growing field of children’s literature. “In his reply to Moore, White tactfully stepped back from the provocative suggestion that to do so might not be terribly hard thing to do” and admitted that he had been struggling with a children’s book of his own for the past two years

(Marcus, Minders 112-113). According to Lepore, Moore was “eager to take credit for

13 There is also an interesting argument to be made for the increasing professionalization of authors and intellectuals at this time, but alas, that argument will have to be made at a different time or in a future version of this project.

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the book” and continued to encourage White through their correspondence, often asking after him, his wife, his children, and his book. In November 1939, Katherine White took up a correspondence with Moore, in part to seek Moore’s help in improving the Brooklyn library, but also perhaps to intervene on her husband’s behalf. In reference to Stuart

Little, Katherine told Moore, “I’ve decided the less we say the sooner it will be done”

(Lepore 5).

White finished the manuscript for Stuart Little in early 1945 and sent it to Ursula

Nordstrom at Harper’s, (the same editor who would launch the Little Bear early reader series in 1957). Despite the fact that Moore had retired from the NYPL in 1941, she still held tremendous influence over the library, and still published reviews in her column

“The Three Owls’ Notebook” in the Horn Book. Nordstrom dutifully “ sent a set of page proofs to Anne Carroll Moore as a courtesy as well as in the hope, of course, of receiving the Owls’ blessing” (Marcus, Minders 176).

Unfortunately, Moore’s response was exactly the opposite of the endorsement

Nordstrom was hoping to receive. Moore declared “I never was so disappointed in a book in my life” and told Nordstrom that the book “mustn’t be published” (Lepore 6). She wrote a fourteen-page letter to the Whites, encouraging E.B. to withdraw the book

(Lepore 6).14 The letter indicated that Moore feared that Stuart Little might become a failure, but might also “become an embarrassment rather than the source of continuing pleasure and rewarding return” (Clark 71). Further, she was concerned that such a terrible children’s book might harm his reputation as a man of letters. Moore’s objection to Stuart Little has a lot to do with her own literary preferences: she felt the mixture of

14 The actual contents of the letter are highly disputed: only six incomplete copy pages remain in Moore’s archives and the Whites claim to have thrown theirs away (Lepore 6).

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fantasy and realism was too slippery and felt children would be confused by the combination in White’s work (Lepore 6). The very idea that a human couple might give birth to a mouse seemed to upset her and White claimed “she said something about its having been written by a sick mind” (6).15 However, White was not discouraged and felt it was unfair to assume that children could not negotiate the line between fantasy and reality: “Children can sail easily over the fence that separates reality from make-believe.

They go over it like little springboks. A fence that can throw a librarian is nothing to a child” (Lepore 6). Finally, Moore threatened “I fear ‘Stuart Little’ will be very difficult to place in libraries and schools over the country” (qtd in Lepore 6).

Indeed, Frances Clarke Sayers, Moore’s disciple, refused to order Stuart Little for the NYPL, which sent a signal to other libraries in the country that the book was unacceptable for purchase (Lepore 8). The controversy began to attract attention within the publishing world and “soon a well-known New York gossip columnist, the Post’s

Leonard Lyons, was predicting a ‘to-do’ over the library’s reluctance ‘to put Stuart Little on its shelves’” (Marcus, Minders 177). Once again, Moore had sent a clear message to librarians across the country: “Not recommended for purchase by expert” (Lepore 7).

This message was considered a heavy blow to the book’s potential sales. In the face of

Moore’s strenuous objections, Stuart Little was published and promoted heavily by

Harper’s to the mass market.

15 On the twenty year anniversary of Stuart Little’s publication, E.B. White did a number of interviews about this controversy. In a New York Times Book Review article about this controversy, he claimed “She said . . . that the book was non-affirmative, inconclusive, unfit for children and would harm the author if published . . . It is unnerving to be told you’re bad for children; but I detected in Miss Moore’s letter an assumption that there are rules governing the writing of juvenile literature – rules as inflexible as the rules for lawn tennis” (qtd Marcus, Minders 176). Moore passed away in 1961 and so could not respond.

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Despite Moore’s lingering influence on her successor, her power was not (nor was it ever) absolute: some libraries and schools added Stuart Little to their collections or taught it in classes. Louise Seaman Bechtel, a pioneering female editor of children’s literature for Macmillan, clearly sided with Nordstrom and the Whites. Bechtel used her own influence to encourage Franklin Hopper, the NYPL director, to read Stuart Little, overrule Sayers, and force her to place a copy of the book on the shelves of the

Children’s Reading Room (Lepore 8). According to Lepore, Hopper then invited Bechtel to deliver a lecture at the NYPL and Moore sat “in the front row, glaring. Undaunted,

Bechtel made a point of plugging ‘Stuart Little’: ‘I hope it gets all possible awards and medals’” (8). Notwithstanding this speech, reportedly Stuart Little was not even considered for the Newbery. Additionally, it did not appear on that year’s short list of runners-up. Lepore alleges that Moore used her influence to unfairly “shut ‘Stuart Little’ out of the Newbery Medal” (8). Even as the mass-market began to overtake the librarians’ influence, there was still value to the prizes awarded by the ALA, which

Moore was reportedly able to control and deny White and his publishers.

The success of Stuart Little had a lot to do with its timing and subject matter.

Marcus asserts that “Stuart Little took aim at two of the more widely shared preoccupations of post-war Americans: the wish for “perfect” babies and the fear of being judged “abnormal” and so it became “one of those rare crossover works that adults purchased as much for their own enjoyment as for their children’s” (Minders 176).

White’s name carried the mark of literary highbrow capital; he was regularly published in highbrow literary magazines like Harper’s and the New Yorker. Adults could rightfully claim to be interested in seeing what this literary man of letters had done for children’s

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literature. Further, the controversy about the book only fueled the literary elite’s interest in examining the book so they could make their own pronouncements.

It seems that Moore was correct that the field of children’s literature would greatly welcome a book by E. B. White. By December 1946, Stuart Little had sold 100,000 copies, despite the objections of Moore and likeminded librarians. White went on to write a second book for children, Charlotte’s Web, with Nordstrom as his editor. In a letter to E. B. White written on 23 October 1952, Nordstrom all but gloated:

Rumors have reached me that Miss Anne Carroll Moore has certain reservations about Charlotte’s Web. As her reservations about Stuart Little proceeded a wonderful success for that book, I am taking this all as good news for Charlotte’s Web. (I would not mention this but someone may quote Miss Moore to you.) Well, Eudora Welty said the book was perfect for anyone over eight or under eighty, and that leaves Miss Moore out as she is a girl of eighty-two. (Nordstrom 56)

The professional and perhaps even personal backlash against Moore’s extended influence can be seen here as Nordstrom dwells on how little effect Moore’s condemnation of Stuart Little had on the book’s eventual success. Seven years later,

Nordstrom’s letter makes it clear that Moore, as a synecdochic stand-in for librarians at large, could have little impact on the expected success of White’s new book, Charlotte’s

Web. By 1952, other forces, like critics, publishers, and a more purchase-driven book audience, had outmatched the librarian’s influence. In general, librarians were finding they could no longer function as gatekeepers because multiple sets of doors had been thrown open in the post-war era: in this instance, publishers had found ways to bypass librarians’ influence and go straight to the consumer.

Moore’s misgivings about a talking pig and his authorial spider friend were even less influential than her objections about the talking mouse-boy, Stuart. Charlotte’s Web was extremely popular, sold multitudes of copies, and appeared on many best-of lists in

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the 1960s. Charlotte’s Web was a Newbery Honor Book in 1953 and Peterson writes in her annotated bibliography of the award winners: “In the past thirty years since its publication, Charlotte’s Web has become one of the best-loved books of all time, with critics showing as much enthusiasm for it as children and their parents. Its merits are many” (123). As children’s literature academics found a foothold in university English departments, Charlotte’s Web emerged as a foundational text: White’s novel was added to the CHLA canon-making project Touchstones: Reflections on the Best in Children’s

Literature. Sonia Landes declared Charlotte’s Web a classic of children’s literature, discussing its “interweaving of natural reality and unnatural miracles” as one of the strengths of the writing (272). She further declared, “when brought to the touchstone,

Charlotte’s Web comes up gold. Charlotte catches bugs and people, in her web, and when the ‘good writer’ is E.B. White, the web he weaves is so earthly real and magically delicate, we are caught too” (280). The criteria and values by which Charlotte’s Web and other children’s literature texts had shifted away from the values Moore and her foundational colleagues had set. The canon, all but built by Moore, had added new tastemakers to shape it in a new era.

This decline in influence indicates a similar loss of respect and a slippage in the ranks of professional hierarchy: librarians had grown too insular and as a result were far less influential. This trend would only continue as the post-war economy led to a rapid increase in consumption of goods, including a move away from borrowing library books and towards the purchase and ostentatious display of books in the home.16 Not only would children have books to read in the home (just as the ABA had envisioned it at the

16 Radway describes the consumption of books in the post-war era as not only as an intellectual display of the content of the books, but also the display of home libraries as status symbols (Feeling 150-152).

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start of Book Week), but also some of those books were published specifically with display in mind. Series like the Golden Books, with beautiful golden spines, appeared just as the public was ready to purchase and display them in their new suburban playrooms and children’s bedrooms.

In the first half of the 20th century, libraries and schools consisted of 90% of the children’s book market, but in the post-WWII era, that percentage declined. Some celebrated this decrease in influence of the stereotyped stuffy, matronly, no-fun librarian while others worried that a decline in their influence might mean a decline in the standards for children’s literature more generally. Clark quotes a children’s literature editor as saying “‘As much as we all complained about the library market when we had it, those librarians were people who had standards and criteria and who had been educated and trained in book selection. What’s happening now is that there aren’t many standards except ‘big is better’ and ‘shiny and glitzy is good’” (72). As the concept of

“the child” shifted, expanded, and fractured to include pre-school, school-aged, and young adult categories, the librarians likewise shifted their focus and attempted to re- exert their influence in a children’s’ book market focused more and more on profit and bestseller. In the Chapter 5, we will see how the rise of academic programs, focused on the study and analysis of children’s literature, further complicated the web of children’s literature professionals. We will also see how the increasing appreciation for “big and shiny” will lead to a blockbuster culture in books, as well as in film and television, in

Chapter 6.

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CHAPTER 5 DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE: THE PAPERBACK REVOLUTION AND SHIFTING MARKETS IN THE GLOBAL CHILDREN’S LITERATURE FIELD

In previously established, the development of the children’s literature canon(s) generally took place outside of the traditional canon-making institutions, namely academia. In Chapter 5 we will examine the entrance of academics into the complex web of children’s literature professionals and the unique interests and goals related to teaching, researching, and criticizing children’s literature in the context of higher education. This examination will include a brief look at the Children’s Literature

Association’s (CHLA) canonical project, Touchstones, as a contrast to earlier librarian- authored lists. This new attention to subject matter previously outside of the academic curriculum was part of a larger cultural shift in the United States in the 1970s. Further, academic interest in children’s literature helped highlight shifts within the field away from education-driven markets and towards more consumer-driven markets.

Another part of that cultural shift that Chapter 5 will elucidate is the growing influence of consumer culture and bestseller status over the reading habits of

Americans. The next section of Chapter 5 will examine the Paperback Revolution of the

1960s, which occurred in parallel with the shifts in academia. The paperback format was originally associated with texts lacking in literary merit: the ephemeral quality of the binding was seen to be a reflection of the ephemeral quality of the text. However, as paperback binding technology improved, more publishers began to print paperback versions of literary books. As mainstream literary and academic culture began to accept paperbacks as a legitimate conveyance of middlebrow and sometimes even highbrow titles, like Penguin Classics, the book industry was forced to readjust how it thought about and marketed paperback books. For example, the price paid for the paperback

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rights of bestseller books could become a piece of that book’s marketing strategy. The reevaluation of children’s literature in academia marked a cultural shift in the traditional tastemaking institutions that is echoes by the admittance of the paperback into those same college classrooms.

One of the major steps towards mainstream acceptance of paperbacks came via the education system: during the 1970s, as education budgets were slashed, schools and libraries embraced the purchase of paperbacks as a means of putting more books in front of children despite decreased funds. Paperback classics also became associated with the college classroom. This cultural shift echoed through the children’s literature field as well. The popularity and affordability of high quality texts published in paperback book form changed the way many, including librarians and teachers, evaluated the suitability of texts. As children’s literature became more popular and more readily available to the public through bookstores, department stores, and newsstands, the public was presented with new types of texts for children. Those new texts echoed changing attitudes towards childhood, diversity, commodity culture, and outward demonstrations of taste cultures through material goods.

This discussion will take place against the backdrop of a shifting relationship between British and American literary cultures in the wake of World War II. While Great

Britain was arguably the birthplace of the western tradition of children’s literature and the nation of origin of a majority of Golden Age texts, the global events of World War II, specifically the bombing of London and the descimation of the young male population of

England, severely limited that nation’s ability to produce children’s literature in the late

1940s and 1950s. As a result, America took the lead in terms of writing, publishing, and

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distributing children’s literature for English speaking children. This shift in production capacity led to changes in the British publishing industry. Those changes would eventually echo thorugh the American industry as well. Chapter 5 will gesture towards some of the steps the British industry took to rebound from World War II, while a more in-depth discussion of the emergence of a British YA paperback industry will appear in

Chapter 6.

While these topics may seem a bit disparate, they all occurred at the same historical moment. Likewise, they are all indicative of shifts in the cultural landscape that will have long-felt effects on the publishing industry. These issues are also all relevant to the curious case of Watership Down by Richard Adams. This 1972 novel exemplified the high quality writing and classical allusions for which many children’s literature librarians had advocated at the start of the century. The book was first published in

Britain, where it won the Carnegie Medal (the British equivalent of the ALA Newbery

Medal). This honor should have attracted the attention of children’s literature scholars and librarians. However, when the book was imported to the United States, it reached the heights of popularity and bestsellerdom that had disqualified other texts (like The

Wizard of Oz series in the 1900s) from the children’s literature canon of significance.1 I argue that Watership Down was caught in the cross-currents of these cultural sea changes, which makes it an excellent lens through which to examine these shifting tides.

In order to achieve that popularity in the U.S., publishers relocated Watership

Down from its British marketing category of children’s literature into an American

1 The interplay between the British and American children’s book markets will also be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.

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marketing category of mass-market adult fiction. So, instead of winning a highly respected ALA award, the book won a place on the American bestseller list instead.

American publishers marketed Watership Down under an adult, mass-market imprint and promoted the book as a potential paperback bestseller, rather than attempting to sell the text within the highly specialized education book market, which was still largely controlled by librarians. This reclassification, I argue, demonstrates a shift in power from the educational market to the commercial market, especially when it comes to determining which books are classified as children’s literature. I also argue that

Watership Down has not received much critical attention from academics because of this reclassification. As a result, Watership Down serves as an example of a nearly impossible-to-classify text that causes many non-experts to question what actually qualifies as a children’s text. Watership Down will also serve as an introduction to the concept of the crossover book, which will be the central focus of Chapter 6. A crossover book exploits the intersection between popularity, quality, and marketing while straddling the line between adult and children’s literature. The concept of the crossover is often applied to the YA category of books and the label has become controversial, yet extremely successful, at the turn of the 21st century. I argue Watership Down was a successful crossover book before the term came into common use: it was successful in terms of sales, but less successful in terms of canonical staying power, as a result of its reclassification.

Academics Take Notice of Children’s Literature

At the turn of the 20th century, much of the literary establishment moved to professionalize their role in higher education. One of the methods by which the white male professoriate sought to establish standards was through alignment with high taste

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cultures. The literary establishment held up classical literature that had stood the test of time, but when it came to evaluating more contemporary literature, they sought to define serious literature worthy of study by what it was not; namely, not appropriate for women and children (Hughes). However, in the 1960s and 1970s, new literary theories and cultural movements pushed English departments to think about literature in new ways and to define quality and literariness against new sets of standards. Feminist theory, post-colonial theory, deconstruction, and new programs like Women’s Studies, African-

American Studies, and American Studies opened doors for groups previously marginalized in academia.

Clark argues that this revolution in the academy created a space in which academics could approach children’s literature seriously. “Thanks to literary criticism that has questioned the received canon, thanks to feminist and other criticism that has explored and celebrated the hitherto marginal, the academy may becoming more willing to take children’s literature seriously again” (76). The association of children’s literature with the traditional notions of femininity (i.e. mothering, care, teaching, moral didacticism) had kept it from being accepted by the overwhelmingly white male professoriate, but the cultural forces that opened the doors of the university to women and minorities also opened the canon of significance to new types of previously peripheral literatures (Clark 58-60).

One of the early pioneers in the academic study of children’s literature was

Francelia Butler from the University of Connecticut (UConn). Butler often told the story that when she was hired to teach there, she was told her field of Renaissance literature was best left to young men, and that she would be teaching the state-mandated

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children’s literature course that “the education department has dumped” on the English department (G. Adams 183). In her first editor’s note in Children’s Literature, Butler explained why humanists needed to study children’s literature instead of leaving it to the

“children’s experts” (meaning librarians and educators). She wrote:

First, simplicity is too readily equated with triteness. Many forget that the greatest literature—like the Psalms of David, Christ’s Parables, Blake’s Songs—possesses the same simplicity as children’s stories…Second, children’s literature usually lacks the verbal sophistication and complexity with which people in higher education have been traditionally trained to deal. As a result of this, children’s literature is difficult to teach…Third, children’s literature, good and bad, tends to be lumped together with no clear critical standards. Moreover, the generally unrecognized but pernicious influence of commercial interests and children’s “experts” upon both the writers and reviewers tends to discourage criticism of a quality comparable to that available for adult literature. (Of course, commercialism affects the criticism of adult literature, too, but not to such an extent.) (Butler, “Editor’s High Chair” 6)

In this lengthy passage, Butler evokes a tradition of simplicity, tying children’s literature to classical texts, much like Hewins did in her essay for The Atlantic Monthly in 1888.

Further, Butler brushes aside the decades of work that librarians and educators had done in criticizing, classifying, and promoting children’s literature, while insinuating that their work is heavily influenced by commercial interests. One might imagine just how strenuously Moore might object to this assessment of her life’s work. Throughout her editor’s note, many of Butler’s claims, which she directs towards “professors at a top Ivy

League University,” are intended to provoke the ire and defensiveness of other faculty members. She sought to provoke thought and potential academic interest also, by making statements like: “I believe children’s literature began as an exploitation of children—threatening them with death if they did not behave.…Perhaps many current books should not be considered ‘literature’ but rather, cleverly disguised propaganda for moral or economic purposes” (8).

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However, her provocative statements were also likely to stoke the ire of the professionals who had been evaluating and critiquing children’s literature for decades and who were at once brushed aside in her call for academics to take up the cause of studying children’s literature. Marcus writes of her propaganda assertion: “Here was an incendiary thought not likely to be met in The Horn Book’s pages, at least not as stated in such blunt terms. Butler for her part wrote as if The Horn Book either did not exist or else was beneath her mention” (Minders 253). This disregard of previously existing work in children’s literature, along with an assertion that children’s literature could not be left just to the “children’s experts” was certainly an antagonistic way to enter the complex web of children’s literature professionals.2 In entering a conversation already in progress, academics now turning to the study of children’s literature felt they had to define themselves against what was already being done and to establish their work as superior.

Unfortunately, children’s literature experienced its own antagonisms within the academy. Marcus describes Butler’s role as instructor of a course on children’s literature at UConn as one met with hostility and professional rivalries. However, he notes:

it was much to the chagrin of her colleagues that Butler’s…undergraduate lecture in children’s literature had quickly become the English Department’s most popular offering. Such was their resentment that her fellow professors – specialists in Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and other bankable mainstays of the canon – extracted a heavy price in intradepartmental backbiting over the years. (Minders 254)

2 G. Adams also noted that Butler “expressed no love for professional education experts and education schools, in spite of her acknowledgements in her works to the various individuals such as Rebecca Lukens who had helped her. Her scorn seems unfair to educationists and librarians, considering their long-standing efforts on behalf of children’s literature, including international and multicultural literature and the use of ‘real books’ in the classroom” (189).

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Children’s literature was viewed by many of the established members of academia as a pseudo-specialty, similar to the emerging fields of popular culture or film. Butler herself claimed: “The scorn for children’s literature and for those who study it is equivalent to the scorn that black studies and women’s literature encounter” (“Editor’s High Chair:

Humanities” 7). In order to gain respect within the academic profession, then, children’s literature scholars set out to establish professional markers of respectability consistent with other specialties: journals, conferences, professional organizations, and established positions within elite university English departments. In her article “Scorned but Not Defeated,” Butler identifies the status markers missing from children’s literature, as identified by her (unnamed) skeptical colleagues. These included children’s literature not being recognized by the Modern Language Association (MLA), not having a scholarly journal, not having a “humanities-oriented” professional organization, not having a textbook for use in the humanities classroom, and not having a National

Endowment for the Humanities’ sponsored institute in children’s literature (qtd in G.

Adams 183). Gillian Adams goes on to note how Butler set out to defeat each of those scorn-inducing deficiencies in an attempt to attach additional status to the academic study of children’s literature.

In an attempt to shore up support within the academy, scholars studying children’s literature set out to establish the marks of academic rigor and established infrastructure. Butler conducted the first MLA session on children’s literature in

December 1969 (G. Adams 183). In England, the 1969 Exeter conference on Recent

Children’s Fiction and Its Role in Education was open to academics, teachers, writers, and librarians and resulted in the formation of a new journal, Children’s Literature in

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Education (CLE) in 1970 (Pearson 26). Also, the British journal Signal published its first issue in January 1970 (G. Adams 184). Butler was the first editor of Children’s

Literature, which remains one of the central academic journals dedicated to the study of children’s literature today: its first issue was published in 1972 (Marcus, Minders 252).3

Anne Devereaux Jordan is credited with founding CHLA in Michigan in December 1972 and forming the first executive board with Butler and Bennett Brockman in June 1973

(G. Adams 184). The first annual conference was held March 15-17 at UConn, where

“Children’s Literature was declared the official publication of CHLA, but Jordan also sent out a newsletter to the initial membership of 200” (184). That newsletter would eventually grow into the CHLA Quarterly in the spring of 1979 (Volume 4, Issue 1) (Gay

8). Membership fees were initially set at $7.50 for students and $14.50 for regular memberships (Gay 5). By creating these infrastructures, these children’s literature academics echoed the professionalization process of other experts and other specialties within academia. Each of these professional markers was established expressly to meet the demands of professional legitimacy in order to win recognition within a hierarchical university culture.

The development of children’s literature as a literary specialty was aided by an increased cultural awareness of childhood and children’s literature in the general zeitgeist in the 1970s. For example, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and

Importance of Fairy Tales by Bruno Bettelheim was released in 1976. It won the 1977

National Book Award in “Contemporary Thought” and the National Book Critics Circle

3 According to G. Adams the first issue of Children’s Literature: The Great Excluded “was printed at [Butler’s] own expense by a local minister in 1972 (later reprinted by Temple University Press)” (183). Adams also notes that “Butler loved to tell stories” about this first issue and other dramatic incidents that arose during the early years of her work on children’s literature (183).

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Award. According to Marcus, “[Bettelheim’s] book in one stroke elevated the subject of children’s literature to the level of earnest cocktail party conversation” (Minders 274).

The popularity and critical acclaim for Bettelheim’s work helped account for some of the popularity of children’s literature in college classrooms and helped bolster the idea that children’s literature could be a legitimate literary specialty (277).

The CHLA also embarked on a project to establish a set canon of children’s texts that would be considered central to the literary study of the field. The Touchstones project comprises of three volumes. Volume 1 describes the most important novels of children’s literature. Volume 2 encompasses fairy tales, fables, myths, legends, and poetry. Volume 3 is dedicated to picture books.

In his introduction to the first Touchstones book, Perry Nodelman describes his own first encounters with children’s literature in preparing to teach a university course on the subject. He acknowledges that he had no background in the field and so sought out guides written by teachers, librarians, and child rearing experts. However, he found these guides to be lacking from a literary standpoint. He writes:

Some of the guides told me how the good books were the ones that reinforced healthy attitudes…Other guides told me that the good books were the ones children liked to read; the more children liked it, the better the book. But they all made judgments of excellence in terms of the effects of books on their audience – and that astonished me, for in the ivory tower of literary study I had hitherto inhabited, one certainly did not judge books by how they affected audiences. (“Introduction” 3-4)

In this personal reflective piece, Nodelman hits on one of the major differences between the educational study of children’s literature and other sub-fields in the English department: the role of the audience. He argues that in most other English specialties, professors tend to judge the student by their reaction to a text rather than the other way around. He writes: “for instance, anyone who wasn’t overwhelmed by Shakespeare was

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simply assumed to be an intransigent dummy” (4). He asserts that to approach children’s literature according to the training one would receive in an English department meant disregarding much about the actual intended audience for the text.

In deciding what to teach, Nodelman declares: “I made what struck me as a courageous decision…My course would be about literature, not child psychology; and in choosing what to teach, I would dismiss all considerations of what children like or need”

(4). Nodelman dismisses other courses of study, not as useless, but as irrelevant to his purposes. He continues: “I taught what struck me as being worth teaching, not what I thought would be fun for my students…and not what I thought would be good for them…I saw no reason why I should treat children’s literature any differently” (4). He asserts that his knowledge as a literary scholar and college-level instructor makes him qualified to establish a new set of criteria by which to evaluate and select children’s literature books for the (college) classroom. Thus, Nodelman reasserts the right to deny the child reader when reading and analyzing children’s literature. This dismissal of “the child” within children’s literature studies has caused a good deal of friction and tension within the field itself, and this debate continues to inform scholarship today.

While many college English departments were attempting to break down or undermine the traditional canon, the establishment of a formalized canon in children’s literature was viewed by some as an important way to ensure that academics in this new field had common ground from which to launch into scholarly research. Nodelman acknowledges the arrogance and difficulty in establishing a canon, while justifying that creating a list would help the field “separate the good from the likeable, and the great from the good” (“Introduction” 7). To do this, he described how the committee eliminated

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three types of children’s books: the worthwhile but unread, the widely popular but not worthwhile, and the excellent, widely read but not important. He further explains the distinction between categories by saying:

In considering such books, we realized what we were looking for: touchstones, books that are paradoxically both the most unconventional and the most representative of conventions. The history of any art is always the history of the innovations that worked – the Beethoven symphonies and Picasso paintings that challenged the old conventions and then became the basis of the new conventions. A touchstone has to be unconventional enough to draw attention to itself, to cause controversy, perhaps to encourage imitators; it cannot be merely another excellent book of a conventional sort, another good historical novel, another fine fantasy, another excellent picture book. (8)

This description of touchstones, as both conventional and innovative, is one that aptly describes the types of literature that the early children’s librarians and educators encouraged publishers to produce. In comparing children’s literature to other canonical art forms, like classical music or painting, Nodelman is attempting to argue a resemblance and establish children’s literature within the realm of great art. To work with children’s literature is to engage in literary analysis, theoretical critiques, and cultural comparisons, the same as any other specialty within children’s literature.

However, even while attempting to demonstrate superiority of method and concern about children’s literature, academic involvement with children’s literature is complicated by its remove from the use and audience for the literature: namely children.

Stevenson describes this remove in terms of influence, claiming that while Shakespeare is almost exclusively read by a community of scholars within which professors of

Shakespeare at top universities will have greatest influence, children’s literature is read by children, and administered by educators, librarians, parents, and other child rearing experts. The influence of children’s literature academics over this more diverse

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audience is necessarily less than that of more traditional areas of scholarship. She argues that scholarship in this field “sheds much light on literature as a whole as well as the genre it discusses. But its power to affect the literature it studies is slight compared to the effect of criticism on other contemporary genres, and its judgment over the literature is not supreme” (114). She argues that academic attempts to revive texts like

The Water-Babies is futile because it is “parents, teachers, librarians, ‘practitioners’…

[who] determine which books are passed on to children, and they hand down the familiar and beloved, not the merely historically significant or the forgotten” (114-115).

She concludes: “Ultimately, popular judgments of sentimental regard, not academic lists of significance, create and control the canon of children’s literature” (114). Academics have entered into an important and useful area of study in examining the historical origins of children’s literature, the literary and theoretical concepts encapsulated within children’s favorite texts, and the cultural importance of these texts to a wider understanding of literature and culture. However, it is important to recognize the complicated position those academics occupy in an already crowded field of professionals interested in the study and use of children’s literature.

It would certainly be reductive to claim an overarching evolution in the children’s literature field from simplicity to complexity, or to claim that the addition of academics has elevated the study of children’s literature beyond its study by librarians and educators. However, it does seem fair to claim that the admittance of children’s literature into (some) academic departments as a legitimate field of study has muddied the binary of “serious” literature as defined against “non-serious” literature for women and children. In acknowledging the seriousness of study possible within the field of

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children’s literature, the admittance of children’s literature scholars into the academy further complicated the field, and the complex web of inter-related rivalries amongst children’s literature experts. The emergence of children’s literature academics added yet another group of professionals competing for priority, influence, and authority over the field of books for children.

This increasing complexity spilled out into the public’s perception of children’s literature. As high quality, literary books were published for children and discussed in college classrooms and other highbrow settings, adults found themselves reading them with growing interest. The growing markets for young adults (specifically, the newly christened YA category) further blurred the binary between adult and child, opening up additional markets for publishers and additional opportunities for booksellers to target new audiences. This increasingly specific targeting meant that books no longer existed in the simple category of “fiction,” or even within the boundaries of “mass-market fiction” and “literary fiction.” As publishers and booksellers began to fragment the book market into ever more specific fields, books had to be relegated to a category and marketed specifically to that audience. We saw in Chapter 3 how certain books, like The Cat in the Hat, could create specialized niches that would endure for decades. As a result, books that blurred the boundaries between existing niches were often met with confusion and even hostility by critics. Below, we will see how Watership Down blurred the boundary between literary children’s literature and mass-market adult fiction in a way that complicated the book’s relationship to critics, academics, and the children’s literature establishment.

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The Paperback Revolution of the 1960s

While university English departments were restructuring their approach to literature and opening the doors to previously marginalized texts, a similar shift in values occurred in the publishing industry. Once considered a marker of low-quality, the paperback book was increasingly popular with publishers and booksellers as a way to make high quality literature available in a more affordable package. According to

Kenneth Davis in Two Bit Culture, the concept of the bestseller came to full fruition with the Paperback Revolution:

Before these inexpensive, widely distributed books came along, only the rarest of books sold more than a hundred thousand copies; a million-seller was a real phenomenon.…Suddenly, a book could reach not hundreds or thousands of readers but millions, many of whom had never owned a book before. (Davis xii)

As the popularity of paperbacks expanded the general book audience, changes in business practices, marketing techniques, and even physical shapes and locations of bookstores were tailored to this larger reading public. For example, the price for which the paperback rights of a book were sold could create pre-release buzz for a book: that buzz alone could launch books onto the bestseller lists (Whiteside 3).4

The Paperback Revolution was a major force in increasing the potential sales of a book: despite the fears that paperback sales would steal attention away from hardcover purchases, booksellers found that both versions of a book often had unique markets (Davis 42). Those unique audiences included readers who did not often shop at

4 According to Whiteside: “A payment of a million dollars for paperback rights to a single book has become commonplace, and in one instance more than three times that sum was realized for the rights to a work of popular fiction. Such transactions are front-page news” (3). Examples of these kinds of headline-making paperback rights auctions include: “In 1968, Putnam sold Fawcett the paperback rights to Mario Puzo's The Godfather for four hundred and ten thousand dollars. . . . In 1978, Fawcett paid Harper & Row $2,250,000 for the rights to Linda Goodman's Love Signs” (Whiteside 19). This phenomenon will be discussed more in Chapter 6 in reference to the concept of blockbuster books.

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bookstores: paperbacks could easily be sold on racks at train stations, in airports, in drug stores, or in other high-traffic areas not usually associated with reading. Pocket

Books determined this potential through tests: in 1941, they issued a twenty-five-cent paperback version of How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie while the hardcover edition was still selling well (approximately 800 copies a week). The test ran first in Texas, then nationwide. Pocket determined that sales of the $1.96 hardcover edition were not affected by the release of the paperback, and that the paperback sold

34,000 copies in two months (42). These kinds of tests reassured publishers and booksellers that a paperback reprint did not necessarily hinder the sales potential of a hardcover edition. The more visible and accessible high quality books in paperback format became, the more willing mainstream reading culture was to accept that format as a valid (and less expensive) alternative to the standard hardcover.

When it came to accepting paperbacks into mainstream book culture, the British, as with many other literary things, were ahead of the Americans. Paper-covered books had been popular in England, “going back as far as a series called British Poets, published by John Bell in the 1700s” (Davis 27). However, the first major publisher to put out paperback books, as we know them today, was Penguin Books in England.

Penguin debuted its first ten titles on 30 July 1935 and according to Davis: “Success was immediate. Booksellers soon found themselves in the unprecedented situation of having customers lined up outside their doors to buy the books” (27-28). The first major children’s book paperback imprint grew out of the Penguin line: Puffin books launched in 1939 (Pearson 15). According to Schick’s The Paperbound Book in America, by

1956:

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the complete catalog of Penguin Books contained nearly 2400 titles of which over one thousand were kept in print…Almost 250 titles for children appear in various series, like ‘Baby Puffin Books,’ ‘Puffin Story Books,’ the ‘Puffin Picture Books,’ the ‘Puffin Cut-Out Books’ and, for the very young, the ‘Porpoise Books.’ (16)

Penguin did not stay away from the American market for long, however, and opened a

New York office in 1940. Also in 1940, Red Arrow Books and Bacon & Weick began to publish paperbacks in America in competition with Penguin (Schick 80).

The shift towards acceptance of paperbacks in American book culture occurred slowly, but eventually, cultural institutions began to recognize the positives to having paperbound copies of books available for purchase. Schick argues that the first major customer for paperback books was the Council on Books in Wartime during World War

II. He writes:

Many Americans in the publishing industry, the library profession, and governmental agencies, along with the general public, felt that the Second World War was not merely a struggle for material goods or real estate but that it was also a war of ideas, and that books were necessary for the sustenance and entertainment of the men in the Armed Forces. (70)

To provide soldiers and support staff with appropriate books, agencies like the Red

Cross built on the wartime book distribution processes established during WWI and millions of books were donated to the cause (70). “John Jamieson estimates that some

25 million hardbound and 200 million paperbound books were purchased or donated for distribution to soldiers between the beginning of 1941 and the fall of 1946” (70). These books were donated in spite of the fact that paper shortages and other rationed products forced publishers to decrease the number of titles on offer and to reduce the quality of supplies used, such as thinner paper stock and smaller print (80).

Publishers and printers were able to demonstrate patriotism by creating books specially designed and intended for soldiers overseas: pocket-sized paperbacks that

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were easily carried and easily traded. This helped the publishers to remain in the government’s good graces: “Demands for books for the Army were satisfied in part by diverting a large percentage of the production to them and by establishment of the

‘Armed Services Editions’” (Schick 80). In her book, When Books Went to War: The

Stories That Helped Us Win World War II, Molly Guptill Manning essentially argues that the Council of Books in Wartime and the Armed Services Edition paperback books essentially recruited a generation of readers and opened a new market for the $0.25 paperback that followed the service men home from the war (Maloney).

The next major institution to give paperbacks a place in middlebrow reading culture was booksellers. In the post-war boom, booksellers saw new opportunities to sell books to a growing American population that was increasingly more educated than their parents’ generation. The growth of the suburbs and the shift towards new shopping habits meant the development of shopping center bookstores that were vastly different than the previous pretentious urban bookstores that made patrons nervous to enter

(Miller, Reluctant Capitalists 39). Further, the less elitist, more middlebrow mall bookstore did not balk at the idea of stocking paperback books. “Furthermore, the traditional attitude that cheap editions, such as the paperback, did not belong in the dignified setting of the bookshop was increasingly at odds with the views of not only low-income customers, but of more elite readers who had grown accustomed to paperbacks in school and college courses” (39). Miller also notes that the success of paperbacks in new, large discount stores meant, “contemporary book-buying audiences were not put off by mass-merchandising techniques or settings” (39). These paperback stores housed a more diverse mix of books than a traditional bookstore: “the eclectic

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mix of classics, scholarly works, potboilers, and everything in between to be found in paperback stores and in the paperback sections of regular bookshops invited an equally heterogeneous audience to peruse the shelves” (43).

Paperbacks became popular not only in dedicated bookstores, but also in non- bookstore outlets that had been unwilling to take on the sale of paperbacks when the form still indicated a lowbrow or low quality of literature. In fact, displays of paperbacks soon became a draw for customers: “Marboro in New York found that paperback racks displayed in the front of the store considerably increased the number of customers who came in to browse and eventually bought either soft or hard cover books” (Schick 91).

Soon, stores dedicated to selling paperback books exclusively opened in major cities across the U.S. “In Detroit, the J. L. Hudson Company’s large suburban shopping center

‘Northland’ welcomed to its many individual shops Marwil’s Paperback Bookstore, which offers these books exclusively” (91). Many companies discovered that paperback displays brought in particularly desirable customers, “such as younger people and professional groups with limited incomes” who often purchased higher quality paperbacks and even hardcover books (91). This draw of young customers also meant a rise in the use of movie tie-ins as a promotional tactic: the number increased from eight in 1954 to thirty in 1955 (91).5 The acceptance of high quality paperbacks into mainstream culture improved not only paperback sales, but also book sales in general.

Another major institution to give paperback books an entry into mainstream literary culture was the bestseller list. “In 1955, ‘Publishers’ Weekly’ complied for the first time the bestsellers of the year in paperback editions, an attention heretofore

5 Shick defines a movie-tie in as paperback books with covers that feature the movie poster or still frames from the film adaptation.

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accorded only to hardcover books” (Churchwell and Smith 52). The New York Times did not add a paperback list for another decade: it debuted 5 December 1965, and even then it only appeared as a monthly feature which included five “General” titles and five

“Fiction” titles (Justice 9). The paperback list was an inconsistent feature in the New

York Times until March 1974, when the Times re-titled the lists “Mass Market” and

“Trade” and made both lists a weekly feature (9). The difference between the two categories is based on marketing distinctions, but can be boiled down to brow level.

Elsa Dixler’s column in response to recent reader confusion over these two lists describes the difference using two paperback copies of Atonement by Ian McEwan as an example. She evokes the highbrow touchstones present on the trade paperback

(names of literary authors and magazines) as a contrast to the movie-tie in of the mass- market paperback. She writes: “The trade book’s cover is arty and evokes the atmosphere of the book; it even includes a quotation from John Updike’s review in The

New Yorker” while the mass-market paperback features “photographs of [Keira]

Knightley and [James] McAvoy looking passionate in their Oscar-nominated period costumes” (Dixler). She further notes the historical difference based on sales and marketing: “Mass-market books are designed to fit into the racks set near the checkout counter at supermarkets, drugstores, hospital gift shops and airport newsstands. They are priced affordably so they can be bought on impulse. “ She continues: “The format is often used for genre fiction, science fiction, romance, thrillers and mysteries.” These genres are traditionally associated with lower taste cultures and are located outside of the elite, Northeastern literary culture being evoked in her descriptions of the trade paperback.

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Her comments about those more expensive trade paperbacks make it clear that these are the books that critics and highbrow institutions are willing to accept. “A trade paperback, in short, is the book you’d want to be reading if you were sitting at Les Deux

Magots and Simone de Beauvoir was looking straight at you,” she writes. “These are the novels that reading groups choose and college professors teach.” She concludes by stating that the Times instituted the two separate lists because the difference between trade paperbacks and mass-market paperbacks (which “no surprise — tend to sell in larger numbers than trade”) is important. By separating these two kinds of paperbacks, the Times can point to a bestseller list that better reflects its own literary standards.

This grudging acceptance of paperbacks in the 1970s by arguably the most reputable bestseller list in the country was a true sign that paperbacks had not only been accepted by the mainstream readers, but also by enough individuals in the book industry to necessitate a change in one of its representative cultural institutions. Sarah

Garland also argues that reputable review papers prefer to focus on trade paperbacks because they are more respectable than the mass market version, thereby negating some of the lowerbrow connotations of listing or reviewing mass-market paperbacks

(53). Despite the mainstream acceptance of paperbacks, Garland notes that book type still carries with it specific class connotations. “Years ago, the hardback would have been the status symbol of choice, but in recent years, publishers have begun to produce less expensive trade paperback originals with the distinctive rough-cut edges and wraparound flyleaves of hardback books” (53). Regardless, these higher quality trade paperbacks still reflect a certain thriftiness.

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However, Garland also argues that with the advent of technology, like e-books and multi-book platforms like the Kindle or iPad, the distinction between cover type is becoming even less clear. She writes:

with the advent of lightweight digital readers, the medium is now perhaps the message - as regards status symbols, at least. As the class distinctions of the literary canon come under increased scrutiny, every year the stiff boards of the conventionally literary book come closer to resembling the loose leaves of the paperback bestseller. (Garland 53)

We will ponder the importance of the shift to digital media in the book industry and how it relates to children’s literature in Chapter 7. However, as this section demonstrates, by the late 1970s, professional evaluations of literature were changing as a result of cultural shifts and innovations in the production and marketing of books.

Paperbacks and the Children’s Literature Market

The children’s literature market was a large beneficiary of the Paperback

Revolution; with paperbacks, parents could afford to purchase a wider variety of texts and children old enough to have pocket money could afford to buy books of their very own. The inexpensive format also allowed publishers to put “books that addressed the issues of race and poverty into the hands of more of America’s young people” (Marcus,

Minders 244). Educational markets benefitted from the rise in paperbacks as acceptable transmitters of knowledge and highbrow literature. The Paperback Revolution occurred just before the post-war boost in educational funding ran out. Children’s librarians, who were regularly strapped for funds, turned to paperbacks as a means of filling shelves for less. According to Marcus, by 1969, “three quarters of the nation’s schools were now purchasing paperbacks for library or classroom use” (249). Paperbacks were less expensive, easier for students to read and transport, and more easily replaced if they were lost or worn out. The introduction of paperbacks into these educational markets

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helped to expand the profits of paperback publishers, helped further legitimize paperbacks within a middlebrow setting, and helped acculturate a generation of students into the regular use of paperback books in the classroom. Children who grew up and were educated in this era would go on to purchase paperbacks for their own personal use without the same stigma earlier generations assigned to the format.

As paperbacks were gradually accepted to be a legitimate form of transmission for quality literature, the number of titles available for purchase in paperback increased.

In the 1960s, the rise of the suburban shopping mall led to additional changes in the bookselling business as it attempted to appeal to the new suburban family unit.

According to Lizabeth Cohen’s A Consumers’ Republic:

As retail dollars moved out of major cities and away from established downtowns within suburban areas, regional shopping centers became the distinctive public space of the postwar landscape. Suburban populations increasingly looked to the mall for a new kind of community center - consumption-oriented, tightly controlled, and aimed at purchasers as citizens who preferably were white and middle class. (274)

As suburban bookstores began to centralize in large corporations, like B. Dalton,

Walden Books, Borders, and Barnes & Noble, it changed the center of power when it came to book ordering and display. Small independent book sellers could decide individually, based on taste and customer base, which books to stock; corporate stores often made deals with different publishing houses to purchase a certain number of books. Chain stores stocked many of the same titles throughout all their stores and received bulk-order discounts in return. These savings were often passed on to the customer, cutting retail prices in ways that independents could not compete with. Most stores featured bestselling and prize-winning titles on prominently placed tables or shelves at the front of the store, which helped to fuel the positive feedback effects of

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those literary accolades. As we will discuss in Chapter 6, these promotional efforts and purchasing decisions often had a great effect on the popularity of mass market fiction: these decisions are often made based on the professional knowledge of book buyers, rather than the expertise of librarians, educators, or cultural critics.

It should be noted that at the time of the Paperback Revolution and the expansion of shopping mall culture, the white, middle-class family was also the implied audience for the vast majority of children’s literature (as is arguably still true today). As bookstores relocated into the “community center” of the suburban mall, they established a new ethos and aesthetic (Cohen 274). Eschewing the dark, crowded shelves and elitist attitudes of the traditional bookstore, or the studious, imposing interior of the public library, bookstore chains created large spaces in which customers could browse, read, and linger. “Each of the major chains soon…emphasized a distinctly modern, casual look. They did this by using bright colors, contemporary materials for shelving and counters, bold signage, and above all, good lighting. Aisles were wide and shelves were low to create an open, uncluttered feel” (Miller, Reluctant Capitalists 93). These innovative designs, starting in the 1960s and continuing into the big box stores opening in the 1980s and 1990s, allowed the chains to divide each store into family friendly sections.

As sectioning a bookstore with each member of the family in mind became common industry practice, it provided opportunities for publishers to further tailor niche genres. Early reader picture books, for example, usually garnered their own specific display space within the children’s section. A growing section aimed at teenagers featured series fiction, issues books, and paperbacks by specialized imprints like Puffin

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Books, which will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. However, these specialized sections sometimes had the potential to limit or pre-select the audience for a given book. “While one title could conceivably be classified as either ‘self-help’ or ‘religion,’ the corresponding sections will be browsed by different groups of people (with some overlap, of course), and thus the simple act of classification may predetermine a book’s audience” (Miller, Reluctant Capitalists 97). This sectioning further entrenched the separation between children’s books and adult literature. By placing potential crossover texts within the children’s or teen section, these bookstores limited adult access to these texts. The visual rhetoric of the children’s section often reflects childishness in comparison to the rest of the store: bright colors, cartoon figures, and child-sized furniture. If adults venture into these sections, it is either with a child in tow, or with a child in mind.

From a consumer’s point of view, the introduction of paperback editions of children’s books meant that parents could now afford to purchase a wider variety of texts for children to read at home. Publishers realized that paperback editions meant they could make literature more affordable and therefore, reach more children

(Reynolds and Tucker 36). Early Readers were finally printed in paperback in 1984, starting with the Step Into Reading series of books published by Random House

(Maughan 40). Books aimed at high school students now appeared in formats inexpensive enough so that they could purchase decent quality literature with pocket money, rather than rely on comic books or other lowbrow mass-market texts.

The rise of the teenager opened up new consumer markets, including within the book industry. The inexpensive paperback format allowed publishers to take chances

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on new types of literature aimed at teens. For the first time, publishers put out books that addressed teen issues and put “books that addressed the issues of race and poverty into the hands of more of America’s young people” (Marcus, Minders 244).

Children’s literature prior to World War II was primarily focused on white upper and middle-class notions of childhood, based around a Christian set of morals, and the genre expectations of professional librarians. Following World War II and the shift away from a librarian-controlled canon, as discussed in Chapter 4, authors, editors, and publishers began to investigate the possibility of selling texts to demographic groups outside of that established children’s literature audience. The rise in paperback books allowed publishers to experiment with form and to address more controversial topics without as much of a financial risk. The shift to more diverse stories, characters and intended audiences echoes similar cultural shifts in education (including university

English departments) that began to address previously marginalized or ignored groups.

The didactic nature of children’s literature carried over into these new, less cheery books aimed at more diverse audiences. “The concept of literature as a tool for ’personal and moral growth’ was consonant with the attitudes of the 1950s and

1960s, but in the late 1960s and 1970s there was an increased emphasis on the socializing aspects of literature and its function within contemporary society”

(Pearson 47). Michael Cart characterizes the 1970s and 80s as the moment at which publishers began to introduce multiculturalism into their children’s and YA lists. He emphasizes that up to that point, children’s and YA literature had remained largely based on white experiences. In 1965, “educator-writer Nancy Larrick published a hugely influential - and, again, controversial - article in the Saturday Review. Titled ‘The All-

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White World of Children’s Books,’ the article excoriated American publishers for failing to give faces to the growing populations of children of color” (Young Adult 43-44).

According to the article, a survey of 5,206 books for young readers, published between

1962 and 1964, showed that “only 6.7 percent contained any reference in text or illustration to blacks. And 60 percent of that 6.7 percent were set either outside the

United States or in the period before World War II” (44). Further, even in that very slim margin of books that featured blacks, they were “too often presented as caricatures and stereotypes” including exaggerations in dialect and appearance that degraded blacks or showed them in an inferior light (44).

Children’s literature had been formulated by children’s literature librarians as a tool for highbrow taste formation, moral growth, and patriotic citizenship since the early

1900s (Kidd, “Prizing” 172). Now, as academic theories and public conversation turned towards analyzing the underlying power structures behind institutions that upheld mostly white, upper/middle class values, publishers attempted to address a wider variety of publics with new forms of children’s literature.

Characters of every class, color and conviction swarmed on to the page, sometimes talking a brand of English owing little to the rules of formal grammar. For younger readers, picture books began to blaze with color as never seen before, with contents often reaching into new dimensions of vigorous action and outspoken emotion. Social and gender issues, now well out into the open, were joined by newer concerns over the environment, health, and disability. Critics who once accused children’s literature of living in a cozy, unreal world could no longer find anything of this nature with which to take issue. (Reynolds and Tucker 155-156)

No longer were all children’s books required to model highbrow levels of culture, diction, and education: readers could now find books that attempted to capture inner-city dialects, teenager slang, and bilingual patterns of speech. Characters of color were no longer mere sidekicks, but central protagonists. These new books also featured a turn

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towards realism, sometimes even gritty, depressing, too-real depictions of poverty stricken lives, both in the inner-city and in rural areas (155).

According to Nicholas Tucker, “Arguments about social class and gender issues in fiction became more important in the 1960s, together with the whole topic of children’s access to literature. Were public libraries too middle-class in outlook? Were too many bookshops concentrated in too few areas?” (Reynolds and Tucker 155).

These arguments and concerns echoed similar political and social concerns in the U.S. and the U.K.; social activists brought concerns about race, class, gender, and cultural background into conversations about education, popular culture, and government. As a result of this new, public interest in social policy and cultural representation, publishers responded by flooding the children’s literature market with new types of texts. Many authors felt freed of “the literary conventions and taboos that had once kept children’s literature safe from most controversy and also occasionally more than a little dull” (155).

However, many of the conventions of children’s literature remained through this revolution in content and representation, upheld by institutions slow to change.

Authors and publishers sought to focus the power of political change on the younger generation, seeing the utopian potential of didactic fiction, much in the way the

Progressive reformers of the early 20th century had in reforming the education system.

“As a consequence, whereas the early 1960s had seen an emphasis on fantasy and imagination, by the mid-1960s there was an increasing focus on books as a means of social activism and a corresponding move towards more overtly didactic and ideologically focused texts” (Pearson 47). Post-war governmental funding was often directed at improving the lives of the young, through education and social programs,

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which meant librarians, teachers, and other child-centered professionals often had access to funds that were well spent on these new books.

Some critics worried about this new brand of children’s literature. Some critics objected to the “dumbing down” of literature by representing non-standard English or uneducated characters in writing. Others worried that this new realism in children’s literature had turned too far towards the dark, hopeless reality of life, uncovering too many of the negatives for young minds to handle. Parents and educators worried that this new genre of books, “far from telling its young readers too little about real life, now often told them rather too much. Many adults found the new litany of near-hopelessness in some children’s literature about subjects such as homelessness, unemployment, family break-up, bullying and dystopian visions of the future increasingly hard to take”

(Reynolds and Tucker 156). This criticism was often countered with the argument that children were buying these books in great numbers, reading them at libraries with a new voraciousness, and tuning in to similar television series in great numbers. According to

Steven Andrew, producer of Grange Hill, at a 1966 conference titled “What We Need to

Know About the Child Audience,” “it was child viewers who regularly suggested topics such as bullying or drug abuse for future inclusion. Far from gloomy adult producers foisting their pessimism on to a young audience, it seemed children themselves most wanted to hear about the darker side of life” despite what adults thought (155-56).

In addition to social and political agendas, authors of a newly emerging teenage literature focused on personal growth and development of teens. Part bildungsroman, part issue novel, these books helped children to cope with life’s milestones, many of which were still considered impolite to be discussed in public. Many of these texts dealt

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with issues of teen sexuality: most famously, the works of Judy Blume. “Blume tackled a range of contemporary issues, including puberty in Are You There, God? It’s Me,

Margaret (1970) and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (1971), bullying and body image in

Blubber (1974), and - most controversially - teenage sexuality in Forever (1975)”

(Pearson 55). Blume’s novels, along with those by David Rees and Aiden Chambers, described adolescent sexual feelings and desires as right and natural by “describing actual adolescent sexual encounters with sympathy rather than shock” (Reynolds and

Tucker 17). While these novels were not completely removed from the didacticism that marked other teen “issues” books, they did present a far more accepting picture of teen sexuality than previously published teen novels.

Predictably, books aimed at young adults on topics of sexuality, racial conflict, gang violence, and teen drug use were often challenged by adults. Parents and cultural conservatives sought to maintain the innocence and purity of children’s literature, in the hopes of maintaining a similar innocence in children. As librarians struggled to maintain their professional authority within the realm of children’s literature, they were pulled in two separate directions by this influx of a new, diverse literature for children and young adults. Many librarians were eager to expand their influence to new demographics and to serve communities and groups of children who had previously been shut out of the middle-class focused library. However, many of these new texts proved controversial with that very same middle-class audience. As Gellar emphasizes, “A profession is never totally autonomous and wins its prerogatives largely based on the basis of its legitimacy to laymen” (75). As librarians sought to embrace the new standards and genres of children’s literature, they had to redefine the standards on which they had

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previously based their profession. Laymen (generally parents and cultural critics concerned with maintaining the status quo), began to challenge the librarians’ ability to protect children from undesirable literature and their right to make those determinations.

Part of this battle saw a depiction of the librarian and teacher as informed professional and the censor as a fool (Kidd, “Censorship” 201). The censor is often depicted as someone who mistrusts the majority of readers, takes texts or even parts of texts out of context, and who cannot see beyond an oversimplified version of the child.

Kidd argues that the proliferation of prizes in part served as a counter-strategy to censorship. “Indeed, it’s likely that the so-called censorship wars of the 1960s and

1980s aided in the proliferation of prizes in those decades––and in the shift away from more formalist ideals about literary merit and toward liberal pluralist faith in the necessity of diversity in literary ‘representation’” (201). Librarians embraced the concept of selector, and began celebrating frequently challenged titles, effectively creating a cannon of banned books (209). Kidd quotes Norma Klein, one of the most challenged children’s authors in America, about her reaction to this attempted censorship: “She admits that she and Blume are censored not so much because they are literary giants but because they write honest, realistic stories for young readers that some adults find disturbing” (209). While literature for young children often must rely more on children’s literature professionals to mediate what those children need to learn and at what stages they are prepared to learn it, literature for teens is directed at an audience who is capable of expressing its own interests, desires, and needs. There are, of course, plenty of experts and interested parties who will argue that teens are still children; therefore, teens are incapable of actually knowing what they need or what subjects should be off

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limits to them. These experts then attempt to protect teens by censoring these new types of books, removing them from public library shelves, and banning them from school reading lists.

These concerns also spilled over into the steadily increasing paperback market, as teens now had financial access to books without much in the way of oversight.

Librarians and teachers could advise young people against literature that was too mature for them and through appropriate means of selection, keep “trash” literature out of their institutions. With the emergence of lower priced paperback versions of all kinds of books, concerns grew about the potential for children to purchase these inappropriate titles with their own money, outside of the parental gaze or the guidance of institutional gatekeepers. Concerned parents worried that profit-minded super bookstores would not restrict sales based on the best interest of the child. Individuals in favor of censoring popular literature argued that reprints of books aimed at the adult market could have undue influence on children (Schick 114). Concern about young people’s unfettered access to questionable literature meant that some critics of controversial literature were not content with simply challenging the placement of a book on school or library shelves, but wanted certain books banned from sale altogether.6 This battle boils down to the conflicting desires of broadening children’s literature to reflect a more diverse audience of children versus maintaining the innocence of “the child” reader.

6 According to Schick, the 1868 case of ‘Regina v. Hicklin’ in Victorian England established Hicklin rule, under which the test of obscenity was “whether the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influence, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall.” (115). Schick further argues that the Hicklin rule was refuted by the “Ulysses case” of 1933, which “rejected the concept of using isolated passages as proof of obscenity” (114). Schick details cases in which both of these versions of obscenity were used to successfully ban books from sales in bookstores as late as the 1950s (114-115).

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Watership Down: Canons at Cross Purposes

As we have already seen, the decline in power of the children’s librarian led to the occasional public display of professional discord. By the 1960s, librarians were challenged to accept new definitions of quality in children’s literature, even as the mass- market continued to assert more control over the types of books available to a growing children’s and young adult audience. Watership Down is an ideal text to look at in this moment because it embodies many of the highbrow tending qualities that American children’s librarians advocated for, as well as the kinds of classical allusions and literary themes academics were looking for. Watership Down does not fit easily into the child/adult binary: the text is complex, with multiple classical references and an epic style, yet it is about talking rabbits. Additionally, the novel was originally a story for the author’s young daughters. This blurring of the child/adult boundary allowed American publishers to usurp the canon-making authority of children’s literature librarians and defy their evaluative criteria, applying those rules at will in order to better market and sell a text. However, I argue that Watership Down did not receive appropriate critical reception and attention from children’s literature professionals because it was recategorized as an adult text when it was published in America.

The precipitating cause for the change in category was the potential bestseller qualities of the book in the paperback market: I argue this change embodies the usurpation of authority by the publisher and profit-minded executives over the cultural expertise of the librarian or academic. The recategorization of this text, despite its winning awards as a children’s book in Britain, and fitting squarely into a tradition of other children’s literature classics imported from Great Britain, has caused a long-lasting confusion about Watership Down’s proper category assignment. I argue this

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recategorization confusion has led to an overall lack of scholarly attention for Watership

Down. The confusion over what type of book it is has kept even children’s literature scholars from engaging with the text: any scholar engaging with it could be subject to the charge of misclassification.7 Further, I argue that by the time Watership Down was published in the United States in 1974, the allure of success in the adult mass-market paperback field was far more tempting to publishers than the approval of the cultural gatekeepers who were viewed by many as out of touch.

Watership Down: A British Prize Winner

Watership Down was written by Richard Adams, a British Civil Servant, and was first published in Britain in November of 1972 by Rex Collings Limited in England (Bear

129). The book is dedicated to Richard Adams’s daughters: “To Juliet and Rosamond, remembering the road to Stratford-on-Avon.” The book’s dedication is a reference to the road trips Adams took with his family, on which he would improvise stories to tell them.

According to an interview with Adams:

we were going to Stratford-upon-Avon to see Judi Dench in Twelfth Night. Before I said anything in particular my elder daughter, who was eight at the time, said ‘Now daddy we’re going on a long car journey, so we want you to while away the time by telling us a completely new story, one that we have never heard before and without any delay. Please start now! (R. Adams “Interview”)

Adams claimed that the idea of rabbits was the first thing to come up and so he told what was in essence the tale of Watership Down from there. This description of the origins of Watership Down places the story squarely in a Golden Age lineage. Many beloved and canonized titles such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, J. M. Barrie’s

7 For example, if a children’s literature scholar were to take up the text and write on the exceptional canonical references or epic style of the text, anyone could refute such claims by simply saying, “It isn’t a real children’s book.”

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Peter Pan, and A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh trace their origins to a very similar story.

For example, the genesis story of Alice goes like this:

On the afternoon of 4 July 1862, Lewis Carroll, his friend Robinson Duckworth… and Lorina, Alice and Edith Liddell, aged thirteen, ten and eight… crossed Christ Church meadow to Folly Bridge, picked a boat, rowed three miles upstream to Godstow, unpacked their picnic hamper and did not return to the deanery until nine o’clock. The story, Duckworth recounted, ‘was actually composed and spoken over my shoulder for the benefit of Alice Liddell, who was acting as ‘cox’ of our gig. I remember turning round and saying, ‘Dodgson, is this an extempore romance of yours?’ And he replied, ‘Yes, I’m inventing as we go along.’ (Wullschläger 41-42)

Thus, Watership Down is depicted, both by the author and those involved in the marketing of the text, as a story first told to Adams’s children aloud. This origin story places Watership Down directly within the classic Golden Age tradition, just like Alice, and grants the story an ethos as a children’s story first, before it was written down.

In addition to its ties to a Golden Age-like origin story, Watership Down drew upon elements of these same Golden Age texts: depictions of the natural world, the

British countryside, and anthropomorphized animals, namely rabbits. Adams claims he was inspired after having read The Private Life of the Rabbit: An Account of the Life

History and Social Behavior of the Wild Rabbit by Ronald Lockley, published in 1964.

Lockley, an established naturalist and prolific nature author of over 60 books, published the book after a four-year study of rabbits (Martin). Adams acknowledged the influence

Lockley had on his own writing in the Acknowledgment page of Watership Down:

I am indebted, for a knowledge of rabbits and their ways, to Mr. R. M. Lockley’s remarkable book, The Private Life of the Rabbit. Anyone who wishes to know more about the migrations of yearlings, about pressing chin glands, chewing pellets, the effects of overcrowding in warrens, the phenomenon of re-absorption of fertilized embryos, the capacity of buck rabbits to fight stoats, or any other features of Lapine life, should refer to that definitive work. (R. Adams vii)

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Lockley’s obituary in the New York Times notes that Lockley’s text was “a rigorously factual work” and that “The Times Literary Supplement said Mr. Lockley ‘shows the rabbit to be a more complex fellow than one had thought’” (Martin).8 Adams used the factual information from Lockley’s book to humanize and anthropomorphize the rabbits in order to tell his story (Martin). The Economist described Watership Down in relation to

Lockley’s work as “a kind of Disney story for adults, which became an immediate bestseller” and “a novel, a thriller set in the mean streets of the warren, requiring considerable suspension of belief” (“Obituary”). According to the same obituary, Adams and Lockley became friends and traveled together on an expedition to the Antarctic.

Anthropomorphic animals, especially rabbits, are extremely prevalent in the established classics of children’s literature, from the White Rabbit in Alice in

Wonderland to Beatrix Potter’s Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton Tail, Peter, and Benjamin Bunny, and Winnie the Pooh’s friend Rabbit. Classics like The Water-Babies, The Jungle Book,

The Call of the Wild, and The Wind in the Willows have all depicted talking animals as characters, to varying degrees of realism and fantasy. Watership Down’s subject matter, then, fits in well with the middlebrow expectation of what canonical children’s literature might look like.

After Adams had written the text of Watership Down, it was rejected at least seven times, though a BBC interview with Adams places the total number of rejections at thirteen (R. Adams “Interview”). According to another interview, “The manuscript was initially rejected by four publishers and three firms of agents who all said that the writing style was “too ordinary for adults” and that it was much too “grown up” to appeal to

8 Lockley actually wrote numerous books about nature, and while all of his books were highly factual, it was The Private Life of the Rabbit that was most famous because of its association with Adams.

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children” (Blezard). Adams then “approached Rex Collings, who had just reissued an animal fantasy book. Collings brought out a limited edition of 2,000” copies in England

(Bear 129). This narrative of multiple rejections foreshadows the popular stories of other, well-known children’s authors, such as J.K. Rowling, but also clearly acknowledges that Adams was not a bestselling author or even a known quantity when it came to publishing for children – many publishers considered his book a risk.

However, when it was finally published in England in 1972, the book was relatively successful. British newspapers did not start publishing bestseller lists until the 1970s, so it is difficult to compare the status of “bestsellerdom” from British markets to America

(Sutherland).9 However, the book’s first edition was successful enough to warrant a second printing in 1973 by Penguin.

Both editions of the book were published as juveniles in Britain. According to

Marcus, “Watership Down had first seen the light of day as a children’s book published in England, where it won two major literary prizes, including the 1972 Carnegie Medal,

Britain’s equivalent of the Newbery” (Minders 269). The Carnegie Medal is conferred by the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), which is the

British equivalent to the ALA. According to the CILIP website the “The UK’s oldest and most prestigious children’s book awards, the CILIP Carnegie & Kate Greenaway Medals are awarded annually by school librarians. Often described by authors and illustrators as ‘the one they want to win’ - they are the gold standard in children’s literature.”10

9 Britain also lags behind in publishing bestseller lists: the first one appeared 21 April 1974 in the Sunday Times Review. Editors of that first list noted it was a very “American” trade in terms of tracking a book’s popularity (Sutherland).

10 While England led the way in the children’s publishing market in many ways, it lagged behind in the awards category. The Newbery Medal was established in 1922 and the Caldecott in 1937 (Sutherland). “The Carnegie Medal is awarded annually to the writer of an outstanding book for children. It was

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Ironically, the British award is named after Andrew Carnegie, who made his fortune in steel in America, while the American award is named after Newbery, a famous British publisher. Carnegie was also a great philanthropist and much of his fortune went to establishing free public libraries in America at the turn of the 20th century.

So, while Watership Down was a popular text, it was also critically acclaimed.

British librarians had crowned it with their own version of the Newbery and deemed it worthy of their endorsement. Watership Down also won the Guardian Children’s Prize for Fiction in 1973: it was crowned a high quality text by both librarians and cultural critics alike (“Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize”). However, when the book crossed the

Atlantic to be republished in an American edition, much of this cultural capital was lost or misplaced. Bestsellerdom and a mass-market categorization placed Watership Down firmly on one side of the popular/edubrow cultural dichotomy.

Watership Down: An American Bestseller

On 10 February 1974, The New York Times Book Review published an item called “Rabbit Run” just below the Best Seller List: this brief article prepared the

American audience for the release of Watership Down. It read:

There are great expectations abuilding for ‘Watership Down’ by a British author named Richard Adams to be published by Macmillan in March. The novel, an animal fantasy with rabbits as characters, has been sold for one of those high paperback advances you’re always hearing about (said to be more than the record $800,000 paid for ‘Beulah Land’). Our readers here say that it is definitely not another ‘Jonathan Livingston Seagull’ but rather a literary work of uncommon merit. (345)

established by in 1936, in memory of the great Scottish-born philanthropist, Andrew Carnegie (1835- 1919). Carnegie was a self-made industrialist who made his fortune in steel in the USA. His experience of using a library as a child led him to resolve that ‘if ever wealth came to me that it should be used to establish free libraries.’ Previous winners include, Arthur Ransome, C.S. Lewis, Margaret Mahy, Terry Pratchett, Phil Pullman and Patrick Ness (“CILIP”).

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This brief blurb introduced the unknown Adams to readers and situated the novel as a literary text. In press pieces like this one, Watership Down was acquiring quite a bit of buzz, not only for being a solid work of literary importance, but also for the staggering amounts being paid for the American rights to the book. The Times clearly expected that Adams would achieve a similar bestsellerdom in the American markets.11

Bear’s book, a summary of interesting tidbits about #1 bestsellers, summarizes the transformation of Watership Down in a single sentence: “Penguin reprinted it as a juvenile book in England, but Macmillan brought it out as an adult book in America”

(129). The actual history of the publication of Watership Down in America is much less clear. First, the rights to the book were acquired by Susan Hirschman, editor of the juvenile division of Macmillian. According to Marcus, an American paperback publisher,

Avon, felt the book had major bestseller potential as a paperback book, and inquired with Hirschman about the paperback rights. At that time, only adult texts qualified for inclusion on the big bestseller lists of the day, namely the New York Times.12 Marcus notes: “Avon paid a substantial sum for paperback rights. In light of that development,

Hirschman had told Townsend ‘it seemed only fair to the author and everyone else concerned to have it published on the general trade list where it could be given the broadest possible exposure’” (Minders 279-70). In order for the author and “everyone”

(meaning Macmillan, Avon, and booksellers) to capitalize on the financial benefits of the bestseller lists, Hirschman acquiesced to having the book recategorized as an adult

11As I have noted in a previous article, “Testing the Tastemakers” the placement of this short piece, which basically advertises a highbrow literary text, is highly strategic. These literary blurbs, published on the same page as bestseller lists, counter-act the lower-brow popularity contest of the bestseller list with higherbrow commentary by critics (Fitzimmons 91).

12 For more on the historical interaction between children’s literature and bestseller lists, please see my article “Testing the Tastemakers” in Children’s Literature 40.

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trade text. Executives and editors within the publishing industry made this determination without the input of children’s literature librarians, who had been regular fixtures in these kinds of discussions half a century before.

According to a Times article about Macmillan’s subsequent financial troubles, however, Hirschman eventually paid dearly for this category switch. Apparently, she had acquired the publishing rights to Watership Down for $5000 and spent six figures on advertising the title. As of the article’s printing in December 1974, the book had sold

250,000 copies and had garnered a $805,000 price in paperback rights from Avon

(Bender 8). However, because it was marketed as an adult text, the profits from

Watership Down had not been credited to the juvenile department, though all of the expenses had (8). Hirschman resigned from Macmillan “after what she believed to be unreasonable orders to cut numbers of personnel rather than being given a budget within which to operate” (8). Raymond C. Hagel, chairman of Macmillan at the time, credited the success of Watership Down not to Hirschman’s or anyone else’s expertise, but to luck. He claimed: “Watership Down just dropped in our laps. We couldn’t do it again in 1000 years” (8). While there are clearly a number of corporate and political maneuvers happening in this one quote, a striking one is the undermining of the expertise of a female editor of a juvenile department by a male publishing executive.

Attributing the success of Watership Down to pure luck is to discount the work of the woman who actually brought the text to the American market and advertised it successfully, despite its cross-category characteristics.

Watership Down was not the only book to cross between the children’s and adult markets. Marcus notes that publishers were beginning to notice that the “ever less

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clearly delineated boundary line separating children’s books from literature in general” allowed them to reclassify books in order to better market them. He highlights a piece by John Rowe Townsend in the 50th anniversary issue of The Horn Book that noted a number of examples of books that “had found readers on both sides of the age divide”

(Minders 269). It appeared, however, that the boundary was “not equally permeable from either side. It seemed that a book stood a somewhat better chance of crossing over if it started out life as one published for adults” (269). That put Watership Down at a disadvantage as it attempted to cross in the opposite direction. As I have noted in a related essay, the publisher’s category does not necessarily affect who reads which books, and indeed, Watership Down remained popular with children and adults alike in both Britain and America (Fitzsimmons 95). However, the publishers made this alteration to the category of the book with an eye towards profits, marketing strategies, and “bestseller potential” but without much thought to what the actual category of children’s and adult fiction meant (Marcus, Minders 269). This shift is clearly a user- oriented one, one that allowed the publisher to access what they felt was a larger market.

It is important to note at this juncture that it is the publisher who is determining the category by which the book is to be published. Considering how many different groups have professional stakes in the boundary between children’s and adult literature, it seems worth noting that by the 1970s, publishers felt empowered to completely alter the category within which a text appeared without consulting other experts. Children’s librarians at the start of the 20th century worked hard to create and define a children’s literature canon that ensured that financial concerns were not at the center of classifying

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books for children. Then, publishers would have sought out the advice, approval, and attention of the librarians as a marketing tactic for a children’s text. This reappointment to a new category may have been profitable for “everyone” involved with publishing

Watership Down, but it led to public confusion about what could rightfully be considered children’s literature, which professionals were the most qualified to make that determination, and how much marketing categories matched the actual content and suitability for children.13

Much of the publicity and buzz about Watership Down in the U.S. focused on the price paid for the paperback rights and its bestseller status in Britain. However, the book also had a fair bit of critical acclaim and mentions in higherbrow literary circles. The

Times included Watership Down in its list of “A Selection of Noteworthy Titles” for 1974, giving it top billing on the front page of the Christmas Books edition of the Book Review as one of “Seven Significant Books of 1974.” According to this front page blurb:

Richard Adams’s ‘Watership Down (Macmillan, $6.95) is the Odyssey and Iliad [sic] of rabbits, for people of all ages – a splendidly written adventure story, a rather broad allegory, a meditation on bravery, a text on ecology, a lecture against totalitarianism and a passionate act of imaginative projection. Fiver, Hazel and Bigwig, in the English fantasy tradition of Tolkien’s ‘Lord of the Rings’ and C.S. Lewis’s ‘Chronicles of Narnia,’ are original and quite moving creations. (“Christmas Books” 401)

The other two fiction books that appear on the list of seven noteworthy texts are Joseph

Heller’s Something Happened and Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers. The appearance of

Watership Down in such a prominent place in one of the leading literary supplements in

13 This issue will reemerge in later decades, when debates over Harry Potter and darkly-themed YA texts cause parents, educators, and librarians to fear that children’s literature is not being appropriately labeled. This issue will also appear when adult authors, critics, and reviewers to worry that more mainstream literature is being dumbed down by an influx of texts more appropriate for teens and kids. See Chapter 6 for more on this idea.

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the country, with such a powerful reputation in literary culture, is a strong approbation for the literary merits of the text.

Reviews and marketing copy often make comparisons to the Odyssey, the Iliad, and the Aeneid; Watership is referred to often as an epic.14 The text of Watership Down is impressive. The paperback version is 474 pages long: this includes the story broken into 4 parts, a total of 50 chapters, and an epilogue. There are also maps and a “Lapine

Glossary” which lists all of the names and terms Adams invented in the language of the rabbits. In addition to the size and length of the book, many chapters contain stories within the overall narrative. These include “6: The Story of the Blessing of El-ahrairah”;

“15: The Story of the King’s Lettuce”; “22: The Story of the Trial of El-ahrairah”; “31: The

Story of El-ahrairah and the Black Rabbit of Inlé”; and “41: The Story of Rowsby Woof and the Fairy Wogdog” (ix). The concept of the story within a story lends itself to the epic form, like the tales Odysseus told in Books 9-12 of the Odyssey.

In addition, the start of each chapter has at least one epigraph drawn from classical texts, Romantic and Modernist poets, children’s literature classics, or historical figures. These epigraphs include quotes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Chapter 4), All’s

Well that Ends Well (Epilogue), Henry V (Chapter 29), and Julius Caesar (Chapters 38 and 45). There are also quotes from classical texts like Agamemnon (Chapter 1), The

Anabasis (Chapter 3), Le Morte d’Arthur (Chapter 11), The Epic of Gilgamesh (Chapter

20), Robin Hood and the Monk (Chapter 24), and Plato’s Euthyphro (Chapter 42).

Adams quotes famous figures like Napoleon Bonaparte (Chapter 7), The Earl of

14 Kenneth F. Kitchell Jr. starts his article “The Shrinking of the Epic Hero: From Homer to Richard Adams’s Watership Down” with an extensive list of reviews that classify the book as an epic as justification for his approach (13).

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Chesterfield (Chapter 14), and the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo (Chapter 46). Folk tales and popular songs also appear in the epigraphs, including Proverbs of Uncle

Remus (Chapter 37), and an “American Folk Song” (Chapter 39), as well as passages from the Bible (Chapters 8 and 41). Poem citations include W.B. Yeats ‘s A Woman

Young and Old (Chapter 6), W. H. Auden’s The Witnesses (Chapter 17), Tennyson’s

The Lotus-Eaters (Chapter 13), Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (Chapter 18), and Hardy’s Who’s In the Next Room (Chapter 19). Quotes from novels include

Pilgrim’s Progress (Chapter 10), The Brothers Karamzov (Chapter 21), The Wind in the

Willows (Chapter 33), Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (Chapter 50), and Lewis

Carroll‘s Through the Looking Glass (Epilogue). Nonfiction texts also appear, such as

Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Chapter 26); Lockley’s The

Private Life of the Rabbit appears twice (Chapters 5 and 12). The sources of the epigraphs are widely varied and are drawn from texts that most academics and well- read high culture aficionados would happily classify as canonical.

If, as Kelly Hager suggests, the listing of texts in a book forms a suggested canon to the reader, the reading list that Adams is suggesting is wide-reaching, literary, and indicative of an intensive Western liberal arts education. Anyone, adult or child, who made an effort to read each of the texts cited in the epigraphs would be embarking on an ambitious and impressive reading program that would be sure to improve his or her moral character and social standing. That list would grow even more impressive if it included all the classical texts to which Watership Down was compared in reviews, such as The Odyssey, The Iliad, and The Aeneid. However, even this “canon” of suggested texts straddles the line between adult and juvenile in an unconventional way. Adams

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invokes Lewis Carroll, Kenneth Grahame, and The Proverbs of Uncle Remus with the same authority and weight as Shakespeare, Plato, and the Bible. Proponents of a strict literary hierarchy might note that a well-read individual should be familiar with all of these texts, including the children’s literature, folk songs, and proverbs, but these texts should not be compared on the same level with many of the other classics listed here.

Awards Versus Bestsellers: Which Prize is Most Prized?

Despite all the references and connections to a highbrow literary canon and tradition, Watership Down did not attain the same literary status as other classics of children’s literature. The qualities and source materials of the book was often overshadowed by its category confusion. Some reviewers disliked the book and many of their disapproving comments can be tied to what they viewed as the childish nature of the book: it is about talking rabbits after all. According to Bear “Not everyone loved it.

The National Review critic wrote ‘Athos, Porthos and D’Artagnan on a diet of grass.

Watership Down is pleasant enough, but it has about the same intellectual firepower as

Dumbo” (129). Other critics note that the book has appeal for a variety of audiences, noting it is for children and adults alike or “for people of all ages” (“Christmas Books”

401). This qualification removes the concern about whether or not the book will be considered strictly for adults, but undermines the literary qualities of the text by allowing access to younger readers (Hughes 545-548).

As Clark notes, children’s literature was still considered to be a lesser form of literature than books published for (white male) adults in the 1970s. She claims “trade publishers happily turn to children’s books to bolster their revenues, yet contemporary critics have been slow to take children’s literature seriously and treat it canonically” (2).

Highbrow critics who would be aware of the strategic re-categorization of Watership

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Down in search of higher profits (strike one) would be quick, then, to belittle the book as juvenile (strike two) and therefore unworthy of the attention of serious adult readers.

Finally, those same critics would take offense at the audacity of a children’s fantasy attempting to borrow elements of highbrow culture, namely the epic, and thereby debasing the highbrow forms through its association with a lowbrow text (strike three)

(Gans 27-28). This problem finds some resolution at the turn of the 21st century, with the rise of the crossover book and the YA category. Crossover categories allowed books like the Harry Potter series to appeal directly to mature child readers and youthful adults with a taste for the fantastic, but that shift in the market came too late for Watership.15

In addition to its child/adult boundary blurring, a second part of the problem when it came to this accusation of taste culture borrowing was that Watership Down was a fantasy, a genre that has regularly been excluded from the higher taste cultures in

America.16 Highbrow literary critics could not object to the attempt to bring the epic form into contemporary literature, just like they could not outwardly object to the source material for the chapter epigraphs. However, they did object to these highbrow markers in service of a story about talking rabbits. As noted in Chapter 2, Clark argues that fantasy was not taken seriously by “custodians of high culture for adults or the custodians of children’s literature” in America (129). As a British import, Watership

Down fit into the strong tradition of fantasy novels imported from Britain, which often hold an important place in the children’s literature canon (and perhaps the adult canon of sentiment) but are often rejected by the highbrow academic canon makers.

15 While crossover books and children’s literature do find some footholds in the literary establishment, we will discuss in more detail the remaining voices who decry the rise of YA as nothing short of an embarrassment to American culture and the downfall of civilization in Chapter 6.

16 This is a revisiting of the argument about Oz that was discussed in Chapter 2.

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Rachel Falconer notes in her book The Crossover Novel: Contemporary

Children’s Fiction and Its Adult Readership, that Watership is a primary example of a crossover novel before the term existed. She claims:

Although somewhat dwarfed by the enduring success of The Lord of the Rings, Richard Adams’s Watership Down (1972) should not be overlooked as an important example of twentieth-century crossover fiction avant la letter. Like Carroll’s tales of Alice underground and Tolkien’s tales of hobbits and goblins, Watership Down grew out of stories told to children, but the finished novel is an epic work that draws richly on Biblical and classical myth and literature (Exodus; Aeschylus; Virgil’s Aeneid; and Joseph Campbell’s study of myth, The Hero with a Thousand Faces) as well as the author’s own military experiences in the Second World War. While published as a children’s book, it was also read by millions of adults, and reputedly influenced George Lucas in developing the storyline of that colossus of crossover films, Star Wars. (14)

Falconer connects Watership to canonical favorites and popular texts, arguing that it is representative of high quality literature within the category of crossover texts. Similarly, I would argue that Watership would be marketed as a YA text if it were published today.

However, its publication during an era of shifting literary landscapes and taste profiles accounts a great deal for the lack of critical and sentimental attention for the book.

Gans notes that highbrow literary critics often lament at the lower taste cultures borrowing and thus debasing their cultural objects: Falconer likewise notes that highbrow critics in America and Great Britain complain that this borrowing from children’s literature and other “childish” genres like fantasy leads to the “dumbing down” of mainstream literary culture. She argues that for British critics “of the crossover phenomenon, it was not just fiction that was the problem: it was the extension of youth culture into middle age in general. Thus one Times Literary Supplement contributor, in a fit of anticrossover pique, railed against ‘the juvenilization of everything’” (4). Falconer traces this concern back to texts like Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and Watership Down,

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citing them as early crossover texts that set the trend of complex fantasy novels being marketed for adults despite the critical association of that genre with childhood. Just like

British cultural critics, American critics were reluctant to link fantasy novels to high culture.

Natalie Babbitt, an American writer and illustrator of children’s books, wrote a review of Watership Down for the New York Times Book Review on 27 April 1975, coinciding with the book’s appearance in paperback. In it, she notes: “we’ve had a year or so to regain a normal pulse…the time seems right for Americans to give this rabbit chronicle a second, steadier look” (289). While Babbitt readily admits that the book is, “a genuine phenomenon” she says, “it’s hard to describe what else it is without long strings of qualifications” (289). The book is long, she notes, too long for children.17 The book is both fantasy and adventure story, “thoroughly readable, suspenseful and engrossing” but she finds the “increasingly tiresome theme of man-as-blight” as the book’s largest weakness. She argues that this “single serious flaw” stands between Watership Down and the list of comparable classics, for which she suggests Alice in Wonderland, Wind in the Willows, and Charlotte’s Web (289). Babbitt ultimately concludes that Watership is unlikely to become a classic because of its inability to conform to standard definitions of children’s literature or adult highbrow literature. She writes: “though some children will certainly enjoy it, it is not a children’s book if by that you mean a book readily accessible to the average young reader’s sensibilities” (289). She continues:

It is certainly not a book for adults, for whatever else it may be, it is still a fantasy-adventure about rabbits and large numbers of adults will doubtless, like my professor spouse, find this fact synonymous with

17 We will discuss how the exact same charge will be leveled against the later Harry Potter novels in Chapter 6.

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triviality and never read it. Probably ‘WD’ will come home in the end to the same kind of small and loyal group, primarily young adults, for whom Tolkien’s novels are classics no matter what anyone says…Having said all this, one must add: so what? ‘WD’ is a pleasure to read…It’s a very good story and that’s a phenomenon enough. (289)

This review is filled with key touchstones of literary hierarchy, marking out all of the concepts we have discussed up until now. The disinterest and dismissal of Babbitt’s

“professor spouse” of a book that deals with the trivial, or things associated with childhood, emphasizes the ways in which much of the academy still, in 1975, was unwilling to consider children’s literature as anything other than unserious.

Babbitt’s assumption that the only place that Watership Down could possibly become a classic is within the realm of children’s literature is likewise an internalized dismissal: her criticisms of the book as too long, too complex, and too preachy for children hides an assumption that children’s books are all simple, short, and unchallenging. These criticisms also make significant assumptions about “the child.”

These assumptions go against much of what children’s librarians had hoped to establish for the field (and likely what she intended with her own work for children).

Babbitt also dismisses the groups of young adults for whom critical opinion of texts like Tolkien’s do not matter. Babbitt’s disdain for this group seems rooted in their failure to put away childish things like fantasy at the urging of their elders. Gans argues the rebellion of youth culture away from traditional taste hierarchies reflects “the ambiguous position which adolescent and young adults are forced to occupy in a society which still often treats them like children” (98). This dismissal of the tastes and preferences of youth can be seen here in Babbitt’s disregard of those young people who find value in fantasy texts that the high taste culture has dismissed out of hand.

Ironically, this youthful repudiation of established taste cultures will help to make the

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young adult demographic one of the most profitable book buying groups of the late 20th and early 21st century.

Finally, Babbitt wraps up her article by questioning her very place as critic, considering that Watership Down has sold well and will conceivably continue to do so, as the new paperback edition has just been released. Her question of “so what?” places her position as high culture critic commenting on popular culture in tension. As Gans would note, the entire article is a rejection of the upper-middle/lower-middle taste cultures by a high culture arbiter in an attempt to protect her own aesthetic values and her right to enforce those values on other taste cultures. Gans contends:

high culture needs to attack popular culture, and especially its borrowing of high culture content, because borrowing transforms that content into a user-oriented form. Moreover, high culture needs to think of popular culture as of low quality, of its creators as hacks, and its audience as culturally oppressed people without aesthetic standards.… and that for these reasons it has a right to maintain its cultural status and power. (63)

Thus, even in her permissive sounding closing paragraph, Babbitt dismisses Watership, granting it only status as a work that a reader will enjoy, as opposed to one of a literary work. Babbitt labels Watership as entertainment, and a popular one at that, two designations that assure that it will never enter the realm of the canon at an adult level.

Labeling Watership as popular entertainment allows her “professor spouse” to ignore the text despite its bestseller status.

Regardless of its critical reception, Watership Down did sell well and appeared on various bestseller lists. It first appeared at #1 on New York Times Fiction list on 5

May 1974 and remained there for 11 weeks (Bear 129). It spent 13 weeks total on that same list (Justice 16). It also spent 15 weeks at number one on the Publishers Weekly bestseller list, starting 15 April 1974 (16). It is clear from its placement on the list that

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the book had broad appeal, despite the “childish” subject matter and fantasy genre.

Watership Down was listed at #2 on the yearly Publishers Weekly Fiction list indicating that it had steady sales for the rest of the year (Korda 157).

Adams went on to serve as a writer in residence at both the University of Florida and Hollins University. Still alive as of this writing, he is a well-respected writer: he wrote a number of other books to good reviews, but Watership Down is his best selling and most well-known title. While Watership Down may have fallen uneasily into child/adult categories, it fell easily into the category of bestseller. The book has never been out of print since its first edition, is touted as one of Penguin’s bestselling titles of all time, and has reportedly sold over 50 million copies (Serck).

I argue that as a result of its widespread commercial success and uneasy straddling of the adult/child binary, Watership Down has received little academic attention, either in the field of post-war British literature or in children’s literature. A search of the MLA International Bibliography database lists 26 scholarly works that deal directly with Watership Down as a subject, though the majority of them were published in 1980s and 1990s and only one, “Ecofantasy and Animal Dystopia in Richard Adams’

Watership Down” was published in the 21st century (2012).18 Additionally, seven of those MLA articles are a part of a special issue of The Journal of the Fantastic in the

Arts (6:1) which focused specifically on Richard Adams (1993). For comparison, the

MLA International Bibliography lists 956 works on the subject of The Lord of the Rings,

405 for Alice in Wonderland, 66 for Wind in the Willows and 31 for Charlotte’s Web. I

18 That essay appears as a chapter in Environmentalism in the Realm of Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature published by Cambridge.

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contend that the recategorization of Watership Down has led to an uneasy placement in terms of scholarship and has led to this specific text slipping through the critical cracks.

Watership Down appeared (first, by virtue of the author’s last name) on “A

Tentative List of Books Everyone Interested in Children’s Literature Should Know” published by Perry Nodelman in the Summer 1980 issue of the Children’s Literature

Quarterly.19 In the essay that accompanied the list, Nodelman noted that both literary merit and continued popularity were pivotal factors in deciding what texts to put on the list. “Those attending the [“Developing a Canon”] session [at the last CHLA annual meeting] felt that literary merit and popularity with children are both significant, but that they do need to be distinguished. A list of popular books would certainly be useful to librarians and teachers, and of great interest to anyone studying children’s literature”

(“Grand Canon Suite” 5). According to this criteria of both sentiment and significance,

Watership Down made the list.

Just as it did in the American culture generally, World War II caused dramatic shifts in the American book industry. In response, the book industry professionals we have been studying began to adapt to the changing cultural norms and economic climates. Within the field of children’s literature, these adaptations and revaluations of the professions caused shifts in the balance of power that had previously been established during the first half of the century. The success and rapid expansion of children’s literature after the war meant that professions based on the promotion of

19 The list was a part of the ongoing discussion by children’s literature scholars to define or “re-define” the canon of texts that should be held centrally to the study of children’s literature. According to Nodelman: “The list that follows is my own combination of the results of the Quarterly survey; the lists compiled by Jon Stott and Alethea Helbig; various other books mentioned by Ake, Shafer, and Bingham; and some other books that seem to have got lost in the shuffle, but that I know many people admire or consider significant, and that I have added myself” (“Grand Canon Suite” 6).

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children’s literature as a vital part of American culture, like children’s librarians, needed to reorient themselves in the wake of their own success. The rise of children’s literature in the general cultural awareness also spurred new professionals, like academics, to develop a new, more significant interest in the field. Additionally, the emergence of new distinct stages of childhood, specifically the teenager, helped to propel the popularity of youth culture into multiple industries.

Against this backdrop of change and reevaluation, Watership Down was unmoored from its original category of children’s literature when publishers sought to increase their potential profits by recategorizing it into an adult text. While Watership

Down is not the first text to contain crossover appeal between child and adult audiences, it is one of the first major instances of publishers actively seeking to market to this crossover appeal in an attempt to expand the potential market. At around the same time, Young Adult fiction began to emerge as an established sub-group within the larger field of children’s literature. Librarians, teachers, publishers, and booksellers looked to this new category of books to further expand into this new youth market. As we will see in Chapter 6, the commercial success of Watership Down foreshadows the enormous success of the YA category in general, as well as some of the disdain this new category will meet from critics, academics, and other adults.

Further, by allowing Penguin and MacMillan to recategorize Watership Down from children’s literature to adult literature, the publishing industry indicated that the category of children’s literature was essentially subjective and could change based on what was convenient or potentially profitable for the publishing house who owned the rights. Further, it brought into question who was permitted to assign the category of

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children’s literature to a text. As the field was beginning to emerge and standardize at the turn of the 20th century, it had been children’s literature librarians who had determined which of the texts published prior to the emergence of children’s literature would be absorbed into the canon.20 However, by deciding to reclassify Watership

Down based on the exigencies of the publishing industry, Penguin and MacMillan essentially declared that it was the format of the text and marketing campaign that surrounded the text that determined its category. Watership was published as a mass- market paperback and marketed towards the traditional bestseller book reader, so it was an adult book in the United States, regardless of its classification in Britain. This reclassification made it clear that book categories are not static, but can shift over time based on cultural assumptions, or in a particular moment because of market forces.

This blurring of definitional boundaries will continue at the end of the 20th century and into the 21st. With the advent of blockbuster book marketing strategies and highly visible children’s literature series like Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, this blurring will cause great confusion among American critics, book lovers, and academics. These new, extremely popular series will publicize a new category of book, Young Adult, that attempts to negotiate the boundary between children’s and adult literature while capitalizing on the potential for crossover between both audiences. Just as Watership

Down struggled to balance literary quality against popular appeal, these YA texts will be challenged by critics and academics as being too popular to be worthwhile, despite the category being innovative and industry-altering.

20 There is also an argument to be made for late 19th and early 20th century authors as key figures in the placement of their work and their intentions in taking up writing for children. However, the professionalization of children’s literature authors is a topic outside scope of this version of this project.

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CHAPTER 6 CHILDREN’S LITERATURE COMES OF AGE: BLOCKBUSTER BOOKS AND THE YOUNG ADULT REVOLUTION

As the 20th century came to a close, the field of children’s literature looked drastically different than it had a century before. The post-war boom had shifted resources and upset the hierarchy of existing children’s literature experts, heightening rivalries while introducing new genres and formats. The 1960s and 1970s marked a significant period of transition for these experts, as various professional organizations reorganized priorities and rewrote policies in an attempt to adapt to the changing times.

Chapter 6 will describe the changes in the book industry during the 1960s and 70s, at both a publishing and bookselling level, which in turn created changes in children’s literature. Resulting changes in the consumer book market allowed for children’s literature texts to enter into blockbuster culture in the 1990s the way adult literature did in 1980s. In turn, these market-driven changes affected the roles of professionals, especially publishers, booksellers, and librarians.

The first major change we will examine is the growth of the “blockbuster strategy” in nearly all forms of entertainment: movies, television, music, books, and even sports.

As more and more entertainment companies began to rely on blockbusters to bring in a majority of profits each year, they turned to formulas that would help them create marketing events and massive advertising campaigns in support of those blockbusters.

In the film industry, this meant relying on franchises of films, rebooting old favorites, or mining successful stories from other mediums, including comics and bestselling books.

In the book industry, this meant heavily promoting proven authors, like Steven King, and supporting series titles. “Breakout hits,” (a book or film that becomes without the initial backing of a publisher’s massive marketing machine) can still become successful within

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a blockbuster strategy: word of mouth or auspicious timing catapults many books to the top of bestseller lists. The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown and Harry Potter and the

Sorcerer’s Stone are major examples of breakout hits. When texts become popular in this way, they are usually then given a boost in advertising and marketing assistance.

The author or director is branded a hit: all future titles associated with that individual will highlight their previous success. New titles coming out the following year will be marketed as the next version of that breakout: the next DaVinci Code written by the next

Dan Brown.

The second major change we will examine is the combination of book publishers into larger publishing conglomerates, which in turn were often combined with other entertainment industries to form massive conglomerates. This combination often brought hardcover and paperback imprints together under one roof, and also forced the combination of existing imprints or departments. Likewise, bookstores combined into larger corporations: competition with the resulting super bookstores often put smaller, independent bookstores out of business.1 These new stores changed the way books were sold and changed the place of reading in our contemporary culture. Oprah helped, but these large, luxurious bookstores fueled the rise in book clubs and the image of reading as a part of the middle class lifestyle.2

All of these changes meant the book industry looked different from the post-war era and drastically different from the turn of the 20th century. The relationship between

1 This process was even dramatized in the film You’ve Got Mail starring Meg Ryan as the independent book store owner and Tom Hanks as the son of the CEO of a Barnes & Noble type chain bookstore who fall in love despite Hanks putting Ryan’s store out of business.

2 For more on how Oprah’s Book Club and bookstores like Barnes & Noble changed reading culture in the U.S. at this time, see Collins, Bring on the Books for Everybody.

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British and American publishers will continue to be a point of discussion, especially when it comes to the emerging trend of paperbacks. These changes in the book industry also created rippling effects on the children’s literature field. One of these effects was the rise in the young adult (YA) category of books. YA books emerged during the paperback revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, but began a powerful resurgence at the turn of the 21st century.

The other major effect was the growth of the blockbuster book within children’s literature, like Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games. This phenomenon is not isolated to only series titles: recent blockbuster YA titles like The Fault in Our Stars of If

I Stay serve to demonstrate the success of a franchise based around an author like

John Green or Gayle Forman. Many of these novels serve as “crossover books” which are enjoyed by both teens and adults. At the current moment, the YA marketing category has harnessed an enormous amount of this potential crossover market and more publishers are opening and expanding their YA imprints than ever before.

Blockbuster culture has helped children’s literature experts by exposing more people to children’s/YA lit, but has hindered those same experts by undermining their judgments and making popularity a new type of prize. Blockbuster culture has, in effect, created a hyper-canon of non-representative texts that most people assume comprise children’s literature as a whole.

This emergence of YA was significant enough to warrant divisions in long established children’s literature professions that had spent nearly a century formally working with children’s literature. The ALA children’s group split into YALSA and children’s services (Fine). These two separate divisions created new awards, including

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the Printz, to further legitimize YA as a division of literature in its own right. Publishers created separate imprints for young adult books, taking large shares of profits with them. Booksellers made room in their new stores for a YA section, separate from the children’s section. Even the new experts on the block, the academics, began to specialize in sub-fields, such as picture books, children’s books, or young adult books.

This meant that a marketing category invented by publishers had the ability to shift the entire children’s literature infrastructure.

The other major effect on the children’s literature field was the incorporation of successful children’s literature into multi-media franchises. These include not only blockbuster films, like those made from the Harry Potter books, but also games, interactive Internet sites, and even theme parks. The conglomeration of entertainment industries allowed for these franchises to grow in house, or in the case of Harry Potter

World at Universal Studios, to build bridges between two massive entertainment corporations in a way that was profitable for everyone involved (“Explore”).

These franchises proved to be somewhat challenging for some of the children’s literature professionals. Academics who were already battling against the impression that studying children’s literature was not a serious enough field now had to contend with charges that they were studying only blockbuster hits, which had its own downmarket connotation. Librarians worried that, while these huge blockbuster series were bringing a new generation of teen readers into the library, the films might lure them away again. And, while teachers were pleased about the increase in reading among young people, they also worried that students would read the popular, potentially easier to read blockbusters, while neglecting the classics and more challenging texts.

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Harry Potter is arguably one of the best-known blockbuster series of the 21st century: it instigated a number of the changes to the children’s literature market that I discuss in Chapter 6. However, the publishing history of Harry Potter has been covered extensively by children’s literature scholars elsewhere, and so I plan instead to examine the publication history of The Hunger Games in order to contextualize the emergence of the blockbuster series in 21st century children’s literature. The Hunger Games, published in 2008, was the first book in a planned trilogy by Suzanne Collins. Collins had previously published another set of books, The Underland Chronicles between

2003 and 2007, which was reviewed positively and sold modestly. However, in contrast to Harry Potter, The Hunger Games was early on singled out for the blockbuster treatment. By examining the ways in which publishing and marketing experts made The

Hunger Games into a massive blockbuster we will be able to examine the changing way professionals within the children’s book business relate to one another and to the titles published for children at the turn of the 21st century.

Bestsellerdom Births the Blockbuster Strategy

The bestseller list is an American invention; Harry Thurston Peck, editor of the monthly literary magazine The Bookman, introduced a list of books that had sold best in a number of regions in 1895 (Hackett 2; Mott 6). According to Alice Payne Hackett, author of 70 Years of Best Sellers: 1895-1965: “The term ‘best seller’ was coined and came into common use because it filled a need. A term was needed to describe what were not necessarily the best books but the books that people liked best” (ix). While this new feature reported “New books, in order of demand, as sold between January 1 and

February 1, 1895” it wasn’t long before the term “bestseller” entered the common vernacular (Hackett 2). Robert Escarpit makes a distinction between “fast sellers” which

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sell lots of copies rapidly, then disappear, the “steady seller” which may never appear on a bestseller list but maintains a strong level of sales over an extended period of time, and the “bestseller” which combines the best of both categories, selling a great many copies immediately after its release, then maintaining steady sales after (qtd in Miller,

“Best-Seller List” 288).

Bestseller lists became a popular feature in book-minded publications at the turn of the 20th century. Two of the most significant include The New York Times Book

Review, which debuted in 1896, and Publisher’s Weekly, which created a monthly feature in 1912 (Korda xxvii). Today, newspapers like The New York Times and USA

Today, magazines like Time, and booksellers like Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com maintain their own bestseller lists, each based on distinct systems of measuring which books are popular.3 The New York Times uses a distinct formula which weighs sales weekly from chain booksellers, independent booksellers, Internet venues, and other book sale sites, like box stores and wholesalers, but refuses to disclose that formula

“because the Times considers its formula proprietary information” (Miller, “Best-Seller

List” 290). Moreover, many booksellers maintain a dedicated shelf or display case for bestsellers, whether based on their own internal bestselling figures, or a popular published list. According to its website, “Amazon’s Best Sellers” list contains, “our most popular products based on sales. Updated hourly” and is an excellent starting point to

“find, discover, and buy” (“Amazon Best Sellers”). Bestseller lists, then, are not only a record of sales, but also an inducement to purchase bestselling books.

3 Each bestseller list eliminates specific types of books from consideration, such as genre books, romance novels, religious texts, almanacs, cookbooks, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and game books. It takes very special circumstances for these types of books to make it onto one of these bestseller lists. For more see Mott (9) and Hackett (11).

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In the American cultural imagination, the term “bestseller” operates within an economy of prestige and carries with it financial and cultural rewards to those titles, authors, and publishers who are associated with it. Culturally powerful institutions, like the Times Book Review, carry a great deal of cultural capital and tastemaker status, and so books that appear on their bestseller lists will proudly acclaim this as an accomplishment, or even as a prize. Stickers are placed on the front cover of the next book printing, declaring it “#1 New York Times bestseller!” and once an author has achieved this status, they can be referred to as a “New York Times best-selling author” in press releases and biographies in perpetuity. The rhetoric of the bestseller greatly resembles that of literary prizes and creates a cross-genre category.

James English argues in The Economy of Prestige that literary prizes are a significant metric for transferring cultural prestige onto artistic products, and of converting economic capital into cultural capital. I assert in my essay on bestseller lists that the bestseller operates as a form of prize, which awards its winner a specific kind of cultural capital within a mass-market economy of prestige, while acting as evidence of significant financial success (Fitzsimmons). However, most mainstream bestseller lists preempt many of the genres of literature considered too lowbrow for even this measure of popularity. Guillory notes the tension between popular and high forms of modernism: mass culture tends to dominate the “culture industry” and blur “the cultural capital embodied by literature and by the artifacts of mass culture” (171). In other words, the bestseller acts as a canon maker for the “majority” culture, what Gans describes as mass culture, and confuses the standards of literary culture with those of popular appeal.

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English explains how prizes proliferate: “each new prize that fills a gap or void in the system of awards defines at the same time a lack that will justify and indeed produce another prize” (67). If we can accept the concept of bestsellerdom as a type of cultural prize, then this concept of proliferation can also be applied to the bestseller list.

When the New York Times first removed children’s literature to its own separate category in 2001, the total number of categories was 8.4 A decade later, in 2010, that list had grown to 13 categories.5 As of this writing in November 2014, the list contains

18 weekly categories and 19 monthly categories.6 On the one hand, the more categories there are, the more books that can acquire exposure as a “New York Times

Best Seller.” On the other hand, the proliferation of categories that began with the removal of children’s literature to its own list has diluted the authority and cultural capital of that prize. Each week, at least 18 titles can claim #1 New York Times Bestseller status. Some have argued that the new categories show a renewed engagement with children’s and YA literature, which had been lacking in the New York Times since 1973 when its bi-annual ‘Children’s Best Sellers’ feature was discontinued (Justice 10).

Others saw the move as an attempt to cheat Harry Potter out of the bestseller title and make more room for “real” bestsellers (Marcus, Minders 313). Similar arguments can be

4 January 2001 New York Times Bestseller categories included: Hardcover Fiction, Nonfiction, Advice and Business; Paperback Trade Fiction, Popular Fiction, Advice, Nonfiction; and Children’s Literature

5 2010 New York Times Bestseller categories included: Hardcover Fiction, Nonfiction, Advice, Business; Paperback Trade Fiction, Popular Fiction, Advice, Nonfiction; Children’s Picture, Chapter, Series, Paperback; and Graphic Books

6 November 2014 New York Times Bestseller categories: WEEKLY LISTS: PRINT & E-BOOKS (Fiction, Nonfiction); HARDCOVER (Fiction, Nonfiction), PAPERBACK (Trade Fiction, Mass-Market Fiction, Nonfiction); E-BOOKS (Fiction, Nonfiction); ADVICE & MISC. (Hardcover, Paperback); CHILDREN'S (Picture Books, Middle Grade, Young Adult, Series), GRAPHIC BOOKS (Hardcover, Paperback, Manga); COMBINED PRINT (Fiction, Nonfiction); MONTHLY LISTS: Hardcover Business, Paperback Business, Political Books, Science, Food and Fitness, Sports, Humor, Education, Travel, Family, Health, Fashion, Relationships, Culture, Religion, Celebrities, Animals, Crime, and Games.

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made about the other previously marginalized categories. Of all of these categories, the fiction and nonfiction lists still garner the most respect: the New York Times features these two lists in every printed Book Review (whereas many of the other lists only appear on occasion) and in primary placement on the Times website.

The term “bestseller” is often applied by literary critics as a denigrating term, meaning that the book has mass-market appeal and as such must be uncomplicated, unserious, and unliterary. The very nature of its popularity means that a book is eliminated from the elite; there are many who believe that if a book is popular, it cannot possibly be any good and if a book is truly of high quality, it will never find mass appeal.

The tension between the popular and the critically acclaimed is common in American culture. However, the American intellectual elite is also uncomfortable with the growing consumer influence in American entertainment, including book culture.

While the bestseller list attempts to balance popularity against highbrow notions of quality, the blockbuster explodes that balance. Blockbuster books have established new standards for popularity, since the term “bestseller” has become somewhat ubiquitous. When it comes to prestige and financial success, the blockbuster book reaches well beyond a mere bestseller in terms of sales, publicity, and cultural status. In our contemporary book culture, the blockbuster explodes the taste management apparatus of institutions like bestseller lists and literary critics by eroding the boundary between popular and literary in a way that bestsellers were never able to do.

Blockbusters, by the very nature of their widespread popularity, demand the attention of prizing committees, critics, academics, and reviewers. Those high culture critics who fail to at least acknowledge blockbuster titles risk losing touch with their audience and thus

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their tastemaker status. In this way, blockbuster books become almost hyper-canonical, forcing individuals who usually avoid discussing “non-literary” texts to recognize, engage with, and debate the merits of these highly proliferate texts. Even though the vast majority of cultural critics dismiss books like The DaVinci Code, Harry Potter, or 50

Shades of Gray as “trash,” the fact that they feel compelled to comment on these texts at all speaks to the ways in which the blockbuster exceeds bestsellers. This interaction is increasingly prevalent in children’s literature, as blockbuster YA titles are highly visible in mainstream culture.

The term blockbuster was first used in the 1940s to describe “the powerful bombs that the British Royal Air Force used to decimate German cities during World

War II, the so-called blockbusters” (Dargis). It was appropriated by the media towards the end of the war to describe anything that had a strong impact on the public, such as the headline in the Chicago Tribune from 20 February 1945 which read “Midnight Edict is Blockbuster to Manhattan: Expect Curfew to Kill Supper Clubs.” After the war, “the term was taken up and used by Hollywood from the early 1950s on to refer on the one hand to large-scale productions and on the other to large-scale box-office hits” (Neale

47). According to New York Times critic Manohla Dargis, “[Blockbuster] soon entered the vernacular, appearing in advertisements before the end of the war, and as a clue in a 1950 crossword puzzle in this paper (46 across).… and the word blockbuster routinely appeared in articles about the Hollywood vogue for super-size entertainments.” Some claim the phrase was also applied to successful theater productions, which caused lines to form around the block (Brier 114). Finally, the term shifted to mean “products sold in enormous quantities, like movies, but also theater productions, museum shows, hit

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songs, books, and even pharmaceuticals” (Dargis) and is thought to describe a specific type of product within each specific marketplace. Critics often use the term as a pejorative, or “shorthand for overinflated production[s] that rely more on special effects than words and characters” (Dargis). For example, stereotypically, a blockbuster movie is an action/adventure film with a high budget for special effects and a low focus on artistic expression. A blockbuster song has a 3-chord progression, a catchy hook, and little else to recommend itself to critics. The concept of a blockbuster is over a half- century old but its effects on the children’s literature market are taking on new levels of importance in the 21st century.

Anita Elberse argues in her book Blockbusters: Hit-Making, Risk-Taking, and the

Big Business of Entertainment that virtually every entertainment industry now relies on the “blockbuster strategy” or a strategy that focuses the majority of an entertainment company’s marketing and promotional budgets on a select few products in the hopes that those few will become huge hits. Elberse argues that this strategy started in the film industry with “the event-film,” but it soon spread to the worlds of television, music, book publishing, sports, and other sectors (6). According to Elberse, “a movie studio following a blockbuster strategy allocates a disproportionately large share of its production and marketing dollars to a small subset of products in the hope that they will bring in the lion’s share of revenues and profits” (19). By doing this, the movie studio (or publisher, television production company, or video game producer) is essentially betting on its most likely hits: each company will choose a select number of products most likely to acquire a mass audience (19). Since most of these products, like books, films, and albums, take years to develop, producers often have to choose which products to slate

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as blockbusters long before they are complete (19). A movie studio then invests a large percentage of its budget towards production and marketing of this “event-film:” think huge special effects budgets, high-caliber talent, hype built up through teaser trailers, marketing, and publicity for the actual film release, and another marketing push for the

DVD release (19-20).

If studio executives have made successful “blockbuster bets” on films that find a mass audience, those top few films are often responsible for a majority of the profits for a company each year. The example Elberse uses is Warner Brothers: she notes that in the year 2010, “Warner spent a third of its 2010 production budget on its three biggest titles - $250 million on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, $175 million on

Inception, and $125 million on Clash of the Titans” (19). In this particular year, Warner

Brothers made successful blockbuster bets: those three films “were responsible for over

40 percent of the domestic and 50 percent of the worldwide box-office revenues generated that year. If we calculate the difference between production expenditures and box-office revenues, it becomes clear that over 60 percent of the year’s total surplus came from the studio’s top three investments” (20). For Warner Brothers, 2010 was a successful example of how well the blockbuster strategy could work.

Elberse notes these companies often see the majority of their income (80%) come from a small number of their products (20%) and those few products achieve high levels of success. She acknowledges that this 80/20 strategy seems extremely risky, given how fickle consumers can be: “Even amid considerable uncertainty, the studio bets heavily on the most likely hits. It makes ‘blockbuster bets’: big-budget productions aimed at mass audiences” (19). Additionally, it is easier to ensure that this relatively

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small number of potential hits appears in as many venues as possible: for example, an average movie theater only has ten screens. If every movie studio were to attempt to push twenty or thirty potential hits a year, competition for screen space on holiday weekends would greatly increase and the chances of a film appearing in every potential movie theater would drastically decrease. However, if every major movie studio selects two or three films a year to be their big earners, there is a much greater chance that every theater in the country will have space to run all of those films. In the same way, bookstores only have so much space and can only prominently display so many potential blockbuster books. Further, smaller book outlets, like newsstands or book sections in larger retailers like Target and Wal-Mart, will be even more selective about the titles they stock because of a limited amount of physical space.7 These venues will typically only stock proven, high-volume books, often selecting titles currently on the bestseller list or recently made into hit films. It is this kind of competition that helped push nearly all major entertainment companies into blockbuster strategies.

There are a number of reasons why this strategy works. First, Elberse argues that products like films, albums, books, and television shows are so expensive to make and market that a number of mid-range successes would not generate enough money to keep an entertainment company in the black. She uses the examples of NBC and

Paramount as entertainment companies that attempted to adopt “a philosophy of sticking to mid-range budgets and lesser-known stars” but after a few years, both

7 The alternative to this marketing theory is the “Long Tail” theory, published in Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More in 2006. He argues digital technology and new companies like Amazon.com will eventually undermine the blockbuster because these same shortages of space and time are no longer relevant. He argues that cultural niches are emerging and that Amazon.com, online digital music distributors like iTunes, and film distributors like Netflix will ensure that individuals can continue to purchase books within their own extremely specific taste cultures years, or even decades, after those products are released. He argues that a business could build a financial model around this concept of “the long tail” of retail rather than relying only on blockbusters.

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companies had lost significant amounts of money and had not produced any hits (27).

Second, companies that produce hits have the potential to create some kind of brand loyalty: a television show with huge ratings can help raise the ratings of other shows that lead into or directly follow that hit. Blockbuster hits that are enjoyed by millions can inspire an audience to seek out additional films by the lead actor or the films previewed at the beginning of that movie. A huge blockbuster novel might inspire readers to pick up other titles by that author or those advertised as the “next” iteration of that genre.

Third, as previously mentioned, blockbusters are easier to sell based on existing markets. Based on extensive market research and demographic surveys, entertainment producers have become adept at marketing different kinds of music, films, books, and television shows to particular groups of people (Cohen 402). By limiting the number of titles or films a company is attempting to promote in a given year, marketing campaigns can further saturate the entertainment market.

Fourth, people like to be entertained by the best: very often in American culture,

“the best” means the most popular. Americans often flock to the top box office hits or purchase bestseller books. While some companies have made bad bets and suffered for it, Elberse argues that this blockbuster bet strategy is necessary because “it mirrors the way consumers make choices among a wealth of competing entertainment offerings. Because people are inherently social, they generally find value in reading the same books and watching the same television shows and movies that others do” (41).

This echoes the logic of the bestseller list behaving like a prize or an advertisement, since people are more likely to buy books that appear to be popular with others. By capitalizing on the likelihood of people to purchase a book they heard about on a

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morning talk show or mentioned by a friend, companies are able to direct a potential audience towards a blockbuster-in-the-making. Elberse continues: “Compounding this tendency is the fact that media products are what economists call ‘experience goods,’ that is, audiences have trouble evaluating them before having consumed or experienced them. Unable to judge a book by its cover, readers look for cues as to its suitability for them” (41). Those cues might be well-placed advertising, but in the case of books, it might also be placement in the bookstore or an appearance on a bestseller list.

In fact, bestseller lists are an early precursor to the blockbuster strategy and one of the institutional devices that helped create a cultural environment within which a blockbuster strategy would work. Publishing bestseller lists influences the books that will sell well, creating what Elberse describes as “‘path dependencies’ or ‘positive feedback effects’” (130). A bookseller might read a list of books selling well in his area and decide to stock a few extra copies of each of the top sellers. Similarly, a casual reader might see a large pile of bestselling books in the store and decide to read what everyone else already has. The books that appear on the bestseller list, then, receive free publicity and a boost in sales, creating Elberse’s positive feedback effects. In other words, the books on the bestseller list this week are the most likely to appear on the list next week.

There are a few potential downsides to the blockbuster strategy. First, no amount of money dedicated to marketing and publicity can overcome a poor product. Elberse cites the example of Disney’s John Carter as a recent example of a major flop (17). The film cost an estimated $250 million to produce and despite years of investment in production, marketing, and promotion, the film was declared a massive failure less than two days into its release. When that film “generated a disappointing $30 million in

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revenues in its first weekend, trade magazines called it a ‘fiasco’ – a full two days into its run – and audiences fled. Within a week, Disney had issued a report stating it would take a $200 million write-down” (66). While the blockbuster strategy is designed to take advantage of positive word of mouth, bad reviews of a film or book early on in a release can undermine or even destroy the effect of years of planning and marketing.

Second, the blockbuster strategy has a tendency to limit the types of films, books, or television shows that appear over time, as each studio or production company looks to find a “winning formula” and then to stick with it. This leads to an increase in the numbers of sequels, spin-offs, franchise series, or products with remarkably similar formulas. Elberse uses the example of Sex and the City: when the HBO show ended in

2004, two shows rushed to fill that gap. Lipstick Jungle and Cashmere Mafia both wanted to be “the next Sex and the City” (33). Neither of those shows was particularly successful, but the Sex and the City franchise did produce two blockbuster films in following years. “Many movie lovers lament the offerings available to them in theaters and speak disapprovingly of a market in which nine of the top ten selling movies in 2011 were sequels of major franchises, and the tenth, Thor, was based on a comic book character” (35).8 This statistic is particular relevant to this project because those bestselling films included the following youth-oriented films: Harry Potter and the

Deathly Hallows: Part 2, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn- Part 1, Pirates of the

8 Thor (2011), in addition to being based on a comic book character, was the fourth film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe franchise. While not directly connected, Iron Man (2008), The Incredible Hulk (2008), and Iron Man 2 (2010) all occur within the same fictional universe/time frame as Thor and with the addition of Captain America (2011), served as prequel films to The Avengers (2012). The Marvel Cinematic Universe has proved to be an extremely profitable and successful franchise and so should count towards Elberse’s overall thesis here, making the top ten a clean sweep of franchise films.

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Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Cars 2, and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows

(269-270).

In the realm of young adult books, the incredible blockbuster success of the

Harry Potter series led to a rediscovery of fantasy in American children’s literature and spawned series of books like A Series of Unfortunate Events (1999), and Percy Jackson and the Olympians (2005). The emergence of Twilight (2005) as a hit sparked a string of paranormal romances such as The Vampire Academy (2007) and The Mortal

Instruments (2007). The success of The Hunger Games (2008) sparked a massive upsurge in the popularity of YA dystopian trilogies, such as Uglies (2005), Maze Runner

(2009), Divergent (2011), and Legend (2011).9 Libraries and bookstores used these key texts as marketing touchstones for other texts: graphics and displays labeled “What to

Read after The Hunger Games” or “If You Liked Harry Potter” allowed book distributors to recommend additional titles to audiences, as if marketing a brand name.

Conglomerates Become the Book Industry Norm

The entertainment industry’s shift to the blockbuster strategy also reflected the changing economic landscape of show business. Starting in the post-war era, book publishers began acquiring smaller or financially unstable competitors, thus acquiring their backlists and copyrights. These companies also began merging with other similar sized companies, forming larger publishing houses with subsidiaries and specialized imprints all housed under one corporate umbrella. Then, in the 1980s, those large publishing houses were acquired by or merged with other entertainment companies.

“The traditional model of the private, often family-owned, small company had morphed,

9 Many of these book series also sparked film adaptations (successful and not). The dates in this paragraph refer to the release date of the first novel in the series.

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through relentless mergers and acquisitions, into a new model: the multinational, publicly held, infotainment conglomerate” (Cart, Young Adult 61). These large conglomerates looked for methods, like the blockbuster strategy, to reduce risk, to increase profits, to streamline marketing, and to improve relations with the booksellers, including the rapidly increasing super bookstore companies like Barnes & Noble and

Borders. The publishing arm of these entertainment conglomerates had to quickly adapt to new ways of doing things and the profits of the book sector of each conglomerate was often compared to the profits of other divisions of the corporation, like the television and motion picture divisions (61). This also led to a decrease in the number of potential publishing outlets: “According to a 1997 special issue of the Nation, one of eight such behemoths (Hearst, News Corporation, Pearson, Viacom, Advance Publications,

Bertelsmann, Time Warner, and Holtzbrinck) owned virtually every publisher in

America” (61). Critics worried that this kind of standardization of the industry would stifle creativity and originality in literary (and other media) outputs.

In this section, we will examine how this era of consolidation and corporatization of the book and entertainment industries affected the publishing industry in general, and the children’s literature market in particular. Some of these changes, including the rise of television-ready authors, the increasing presence of agents, and the increasingly competitive market for paperback publishing rights, drove book publishers to seek out the relative financial safety and influence of larger corporations. Many of these developments, in addition to the increasingly symbiotic relationships between these conglomerates and the book superstores, opened a space in American culture for the rise of YA books in the 1970s and 1980s. The creation and subsequent success of the

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YA category caused significant shifts in children’s literature infrastructures, including professional organizations, prizes, marketing, and academic scholarship. However, I argue that market forces, rather than experts, generated many of these changes, leaving children’s literature experts to respond and adapt.

Changes at the Publishing Level

The history of publishing in America has always included the rise and fall of publishing houses: book publishing is a high-risk business with narrow profit margins.

Stories of buy-outs, bankruptcies, mergers, and closings are not unusual in this business. However, in the 1970s, there was a significant uptick in mergers and acquisitions. Whiteside notes that this trend centralized the book market:

By 1977 the ten largest publishing companies were accounting for sixty percent of all trade-book sales in this country is matched, as an indicator of concentration in the book business, by the fact that in the same year the eight largest mass-market-paperback houses (all of them conglomerate- owned) were accounting for eighty-four per cent of all mass-market- paperback sales. (49)

A concentrated publishing industry was one that ran on significantly reduced overhead costs in comparison to a more disparate set of smaller, independent publishing houses.

This trend affected children’s literature as well:

By the mid-1980s, Macmillan, the dominant juvenile publisher during the 1920s, was once again the industry behemoth. In 1983 the company acquired the Bradbury Press. A year later – the same year Macmillan acquired the whole of Scribner Book Companies… Macmillan added Four Winds Press, the trade imprint of Scholastic, to its quiver. (Marcus, Minders 295)

This concentration in publishers also led to more of a standardization in practices and strategies. For example, the large conglomerate publishing houses were more likely to put additional pressure on paperback houses to devote more time, attention, and money to producing higher sales (Radway Reading the Romance 37). This caused paperback

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houses to rely more on genre formulas, to stick with proven authors, or to publish debut novels that easily fit into a pre-existing category or resembled other bestsellers (37).

While profitable, these texts were of the sort often eschewed by librarians and the educational children’s market.

Other developments in the industry helped to drive the shift towards larger publishing houses. First was the increasing presence of literary agents representing book authors. Originally, the primary purpose of agents was to make sure the publisher negotiated with the author in good faith and that the author received fair treatment (Brier

23). However, “as the business grew more profitable and more complicated, the relationship between publishers and authors became more impersonal” (23). Therefore, the role of the agent transformed from impartial arbiter to a more business-minded protector against corporate greed: “Authors, according to the agents’ pitch, as artists and not businesspeople, needed representatives to ensure that publishers did not exploit them” (23). The growth of increasingly profit-minded publishers necessitated a literary agent as a go-between, to ensure the author was not taken advantage of by a bad contract or bad faith negotiations. Brier argues that some critics fault the presence of agents as an example of the increased commodifcation of cultural fields like the book industry. They view the agent as a figure who “corrupts the previously pure process of book production by interfering in what was a gentlemanly and nurturing publisher-author relationship” (23). As we have seen throughout this study, however, the publishing industry has always been involved with multiple forms of capital, including economic and cultural: the presence of the agent simply removed the professional sheen of

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disinterest from the publisher and author. Literary agents are now commonplace throughout the publishing industry.

The presence of agents within the industry is cited by many scholars as a mitigating cause for the rise in advances and paperback rights. The involvement of literary agents drove up opening bids on the author’s side of negotiations and provided authors with an ally who could demand financial remuneration for art in a way they, as an artist, often could not. This meant that bestselling authors now had a professional in their corner who could help to drive up their own individual profits, through increases in advances, percentages of royalties, and percentages of paperback rights sales. Agents and publishers used the results of these negotiations as fodder for advertising and the manufacturing of industry “buzz”: stories would often appear in industry publications like

Publishers Weekly about the size of an advance paid for a debut author’s first novel, or the amount of money the paperback rights for a bestseller sold for. Whiteside uses these marketing tactics to demonstrate how quickly prices rose across the industry:

In 1968, Putnam sold Fawcett the paperback rights to Mario Puzo’s The Godfather for four hundred and ten thousand dollars.… In 1978, Fawcett paid Harper & Row $2,250,000 for the rights to Linda Goodman’s Love Signs, and in the same year New American Library paid Putnam $2,550,000 for the rights to Mario Puzo’s Fool’s Die - a sum that included the conversion of the reprint rights to The Godfather, which had by then sold thirteen million paperback copies in the Fawcett edition. (19-20)

Thus, the successful negotiating tactics by this new breed of literary agent not only helped individual authors make fortunes and sell millions of books, but also helped to raise the industry standards for acquiring the rights to a bestseller or to securing the next few books from an in-demand writer. These increasing costs helped further drive the consolidation of book publishers into larger and larger corporate entities, as

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publishers needed increasingly large amounts of capital to be able to keep up with the demands of potential blockbuster authors and their agents.

Whiteside also points to the rise in popularity of the television talk show as being responsible for the rise of the celebrity author (those authors most likely to be able to command such huge asking prices for contracts).10 Eager to fill airtime, networks relied on the inexpensive talk show format. Further, book publishers were willing participants in this culture: an author could make one trip to New York, appear on three or four separate talk shows, and reach thousands, if not millions of viewers. This process could be repeated again in LA or Chicago, helping the author to make an impression nationwide. Whiteside points out that this advertising model was far more efficient and much less costly then sending an author on a national tour, which required the author to spend more time away from home (and from producing their next bestseller) and required far more coordination, support, and expense on the part of the author (17-38).

Authors like Jacqueline Susann, author of Valley of the Dolls, set a precedent for how an author tour of television talk shows could improve sales. Authors were coached to be confident, charming, to bring their own copy of their book, and to expect the host not to have read it. TV talk shows tended to prefer non-fiction authors because it was easier to brief the host about the content of the book. However, many hosts were happy to interview fiction writers, especially when their book was controversial or extremely popular. The ability to appear on TV and advertise one’s own book became a positive quality for an author and increased their chances of bestsellerdom. This trend began in the mainstream mass market, but it rapidly spread to the children’s literature market as

10 An examination of the professionalization of authors, particularly in the age of social media, would make an interesting addition to this discussion, but is unfortunately outside of the scope of this project.

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well. The advent of social media in the 21st century further increased opportunities (and obligations) for authors to promote their own books directly to audiences.

Super Bookstores

The 1970s also saw a shift towards what Jim Collins terms “the new infrastructure of reading”: larger bookstores were located both inside suburban malls and increasingly as the anchor stores in strip malls. Stores like Walden and Crown

Books used heavily discounted bestsellers as a marketing device, a draw to get foot traffic to enter the store in the hopes they would continue to browse and purchase other titles. This marketing technique also worked with paperbacks – racks of popular, bestselling, or even classic texts in paperback had been shown to draw shoppers into a bookstore (Miller, Reluctant Capitalists 39). Additionally, media corporations liked working with larger bookstore chains because it helped standardize some of their expenses.

One of the ways to decrease expenditures for the publisher was to offer discounts to booksellers who purchased books in large quantities and helped to streamline deliveries. Large corporate publishers were more likely to be in favor of distributing books, especially paperbacks, at a wholesale level. Distribution companies had also gone through a process of consolidation and by the 1970s, there were nine major national distribution companies (Whiteside 49). Both the publishers and the distributors actively sought out ways to increase profits by decreasing expenditures, overhead, and waste. Working with larger bookstore corporations did just that. In the

1990s, bookstores continued to grow, changing the scope of the market:

Crown Books had already transformed the business with a chain of discount stores, spurring record sales and triggering a wave of similar discounting. Then Barnes & Noble and Borders took it one step further by

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introducing massive superstores. Sometimes built in converted movie theaters or bowling alleys, these megastores carried as many as 100,000 titles, an inventory five times that of the average local bookstore. (Anderson 47-48)

These massive stores made book buying into a visible, social event that was most often located at the center of a town’s retail and social corridors. Collins recounts Hollywood movies like You’ve Got Mail and Notting Hill, which present bookstores as central locations to the romantic plot. “That two such high-profile films should make bookstores their primary locations for falling in love suggests that bookstores now fulfill different cultural functions for a mass audience” (41).

One of the major innovations of these stores was to change the impression of bookstores from dark, musty, and elitist to warm, welcoming, and friendly. Collins describes the ways in which these bookstores aligned themselves with book clubs and institutions of higher learning in an attempt to connect with various reading communities who do not always identify with the highbrow literary lifestyle. By folding elements of library and highbrow literary culture into a retail store, Collins claims that these stores dress up popular bookstores in a literary disguise and offer “the successful hybridization of aesthetic and consumer pleasures” (46). This allows Barnes & Noble et al to distinguish themselves from empty consumerism:

By introducing a library factor within the marketplace – the impression that popular curators, and even the bookstore chains, are determined to deliver the goods of genuine culture (goods in terms of items themselves, as well as the benefits they contain) as a kind of public service, either without vested interests or with the most admirable vested interests, which serve that public good. (Collins 46-47)

Collins further analyzes the presence of a Starbucks in his local Barnes & Noble, which features a mural, featuring a tableau in “an imaginary literary café, [where] a host of great authors sit at their tables… here the great writers form a ‘scene’ and the literary

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experience is envisioned as profoundly social” (59). He does much to present the case for how these superstores helped to reawaken and re-imagine reading culture as a social, community based activity, all in the service of selling more books.

In addition to the attractive design and social aspects of these superstores,

Borders and Barnes & Noble also offered an incredible amount of choice. As previously mentioned, these stores stocked thousands of titles, far beyond what could possibly fit into an independent store. Further, through networked computer systems and detailed inventory programs, these superstores kept careful track of which books were selling, which books were being preordered or requested, and which genres or categories of books sold best at different locations (Whiteside 40). For example, academic books and test prep materials might sell better at a Barnes & Noble adjacent to the local college campus, whereas books on travel, gourmet cooking, and home décor might do best at the store just outside a wealthy gated community. That data helped superstore executives fine-tune ordering, stocking, displaying, and booking author signings, but it also helped publishers and distributors to fine-tune their delivery process. Finally, a store with a better grasp on the types of books likely to sell well was less likely to over- order on a regular basis, further saving the publisher money when it came to returns.

One of the central aspects of the superstore design was an open floor plan and spacious, clearly marked category sections. These stores were able to become a part of the social fabric of suburban family life because these sections were designed to appeal to specific age, gender, and taste group demographics so that every member of a

“typical” suburban family might feel catered to individually. Additionally, parents could feel good about making book browsing and buying a part of their weekend leisure

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routine: book culture remains associated with upper and middlebrow taste cultures.

Education, particularly self-driven education, is held up as a nearly universal positive value in American culture, so the conspicuous consumption of books at the local book superstore would be met with near universal approval from peers.

The expansion of the book industry into larger conglomerate corporations helped usher in the age of the blockbuster strategy to that market. However, it was in partnering with these large bookstore chains that the blockbuster strategy really began to flourish. A book publisher, having identified the four of five major titles they want to promote in the coming year, could negotiate with the corporate owners of thousands of bookstores about placing promotional materials in store publications or on the walls of stores months in advance. The publisher and bookstores could coordinate release dates, schedule author visits at high profile stores, and distribute appropriate numbers of titles to select stores where data indicated that type of title was likely to sell best.

Publishers and bookstores could then hash out a mutually beneficial strategy for publicizing and selling potential blockbuster books before the books were complete.

Much of this emphasis on blockbusters was in an attempt to make a previously unpredictable book market reliable and predictable. The difficulty with the book market is that each book, while nearly identical to every other book in terms of paper, binding, and cover, is actually a completely different product. Each book has to be marketed individually and consumers are notoriously fickle when it comes to choosing entertainment products, or what Elberse terms “experience goods” (41). However, as book publishers were folded into larger corporations, executives with an eye on the budgets sought to eliminate this kind of uncertainty. According to Radway, “Their

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overwhelming interest in predictability has also helped to forge an important link between the now more profit-minded paperback houses and the increasingly successful bookstore chains” (Radway Reading the Romance 37).

This system, while beneficial to the corporate bookstores and publishers, does have some downsides. First, smaller publishers and authors without high profiles may have difficulty breaking in to this system. Miller notes that much of the wall space that features book posters and displays that purport to feature “staff recommended books” are actually promotional spaces: only publishers willing to pay for the privilege may see their new releases or backlist titles advertised in these high-value spaces (Reluctant

Capitalists 99-101). This practice originated in mall bookstores:

In the mid-1980s, Waldenbooks developed a promotional vehicle called Waldenbooks Recommends. The program featured a single title, chosen each week, and given a prominent place in racks in front of each store’s cash register. While Walden selected the title, the promotion was conditional on the book’s publisher paying as much as $3,000. (100)

While superstores were not the first to engage in this practice, they continue it today.

Further, stores may also publish promotional material, like the Discover Young Writers booklet that Collins analyzes: “The booklet is offered free as a critical selection of the best new literary fiction, apparently without profit motive as a public service – the sort of

‘advice’ we would expect to get from a friendly librarian” (66). These seemingly editorial or curatorial publications seem to promote texts based on their literary quality, but still serve as a function of the retail goals of the superstore. Pamphlets and staff recommendation sections give super bookstores the same air of social credit as hosting story hour or other community events: the stores attempt to function as community centers, even as they are more explicitly concerned with selling merchandise.

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Second, the blockbuster strategy standardizes the bookstore experience and much of bookstore stock. Customers are reassured that a Barnes & Noble in

Connecticut will have much in common with a Barnes & Noble in Florida. Collins notes that many superstores attempt to demonstrate attention to local artists or culture by reserving a small section for local writers, or books written in or about the local area, but by and large, the books in stock in the rest of the store will remain the same. Third, just like librarians can only select a certain number of books to stock on library shelves, based on budgets and shelf space, so too a buyer for a superstore can only order so many books to display and stock. However, some critics of these stores would argue that while librarians attempt to select the best books based on measures of literary quality, local appeal, and benefit to patrons, the bookstore buyer makes selections based only on potential profit. Those critics who prefer to imagine the book industry as devoid of capitalist interest, based solely on artistic and literary merit, find the thought of a bookstore stocked solely to guarantee the highest possible profits downright offensive.

Fourth, the rise of these massive superstores, and their online counterparts, also led to an expectation of discounts on books. Bestsellers and other popular texts are often marked down to nearly half the traditional retail price. Independent bookstores regularly find themselves unable to compete with these markdowns, made possible by bulk discounts provided to the superstore by the publisher for purchasing a certain number of copies. Further, less popular books, which are not purchased in such large qualities, do not receive the same sized discounts, meaning the consumer must pay more for a less popular book. This is yet another example of how being pre-selected as a blockbuster prospect helps to ensure blockbuster status.

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The turn of the 21st century saw a rise in online bookstores and ordering sites, specifically of Amazon.com. The super bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble also featured online components, where customers could research books, locate titles in their local stores, or order titles to be delivered directly to their home. “Bn.com complements Barnes & Noble’s brand with a Web site that offers selection on a par with

Amazon. Discount cards work equally in both channels, and you can get same-day delivery in Manhattan where B&N has several superstores” (Anderson 49). However, the rise of the e-book, digital media readers, and the addition of non-book materials to

Amazon’s warehouses helped to drive back the expansion of these mega bookstores.

The shift towards e-commerce has also changed the way individuals shop and their expectations from any given store: “If a store doesn’t have a book in stock, the clerks are still able to satisfy a customer request by ordering it for them online.… The unlimited shelf space of the Web retail allows them to offer their customers more variety and convenience, cementing brand loyalty” (Anderson 49). This rise of online retailers and e-book sales is still in the process of altering the book industry in unpredictable and incomplete ways and so cannot be completely analyzed here.

By the 1990s, book superstores had become a fixture in the American suburban landscape and the blockbuster strategy had become firmly ensconced in the book industry. This combination of corporate bookstore ownership and publisher strategy was helping to push sales of bestsellers higher and higher, and gave rise to more frequent examples of books achieving blockbuster status. Just like with bestsellers, there is no specific sales total or popularity index against which one measures an individual book to determine whether or not it has achieved blockbuster status. Bestseller status is

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attained by comparison against other books sold at the same time: a book that reached

#1 in the summer of 1960 might not have made it into the top 20 during the summer of

2000.11 Blockbusters, on the other hand, are bestsellers that exceed the expectations of an average bestseller. For some blockbusters, they might maintain a place on the bestseller list for an extended period of time beyond what most bestsellers attain: for example, Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 136 consecutive weeks before dropping off the list 2 years after its release

(Wyatt). The book continued to hover at the edges of the list, and reemerged in the top

15 when the film adaptation was released in May 2007. “As of 2009, it has sold over 80 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 40 languages” (Mexal 344).

Other blockbusters might earn their place in that category through hype, pre- sales, and a rapid spike in sales on the weekend it is released. Miller notes the growing

“odd but not-unheard-of situation of a title making a best-seller list before its release date” (Miller, “Best-Seller List” 294) For example, it was widely reported that Sarah

Palin’s memoir, Going Rogue, reached the top of online bestseller lists like

Amazon.com and BarnesandNoble.com a month and a half prior to its release date

(Montopoli).12 Still others might be propelled to extended bestseller status based on public controversy: debate likely helped both Palin and Brown reach blockbuster status.

However, it is possible to become a blockbuster without controversy or pre-release

11 Mott devised a strategy for comparing bestseller status across decades: he deemed any book that sold equal to or more than one percent of the population in the decade following its publication to be a “true bestseller.”

12 A more traditional list like The New York Times or Publishers Weekly would attribute the total of pre- sold books to the actual release date, so Going Rogue appeared on the bestseller list for the week or month it first appeared in bookstores. Palin’s memoir was #1 on the New York Times list the week it was released and remained there for six weeks.

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hype: Tuesdays with Morrie, a romanticized memoir about conversations with a dying mentor, remained on the New York Times Hardcover bestseller list for four years before being released in paperback (“About the Book”). These, and other examples, demonstrate that there is no standard genre or formula to guarantee blockbuster status.

However, publishers have turned increasingly to the YA category in search of the next

“big book.”

YA Literature: Beginnings

Since the post-war boom, American culture had shown increasing interest in adolescents. It was not long after the “discovery” of this stage of life by child rearing experts that American companies discovered that teens were a unique market, interested in products specific to their age and experience. The American book industry soon also found young adults to be a lucrative market. While Aiden Chambers and Kay

Webb helped to introduce and popularize paperback books for teens in Britain, publishers in the U.S. also worked to discover and publish texts that would specifically appeal to this new demographic group. Defining YA, just like defining children’s literature, is a complicated and sometimes controversial process. The following sections will analyze the history of YA, discuss the impact of British YA paperbacks on the

American market, and demonstrate how the educational and consumer markets responded to the rise in YA, starting in the 1970s.

Defining YA

Many scholars, including Michael Cart, identify Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth

Summer (1942) as the first young adult novel: it was published “about the same time that America began recognizing the teenage years as a separate part of the life cycle”

(“Insider to Outsider” 96). However, the young adult genre as such began in 1967, as

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“realistic fiction for teens” began appearing in bookstores, starting with S.E. Hinton’s

The Outsiders and Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender (96). The Outsiders was written by a teen and is about the social divides between groups of teens (the Socs and the

Greasers) that sometimes turn violent and even deadly (Chambers 270). The story takes the form of a confessional letter written to a teacher (McGee 176). The Outsiders is often identified as the first YA novel because it set many of the physical conventions for early YA publishing.

The format of the paperback of The Outsiders set the standard for the YA genre. Published as a mass-market paperback, The Outsiders was smaller and less expensive than the trade texts commonly used for Young Readers or the pre-teen audience. The book’s size set it apart from the trade paperbacks and suggested that the book was intended for a more mature audience—not a child, but a Young Adult. (Yampbell 350)

As other publishers followed the size and format standard set by The Outsiders, YA books became recognizable on bookstore racks (and in the hands of teens) as a distinct type of book aimed at a specific audience. American publishers sought to use the paperback format to attract young adults to a new type of literature aimed directly at them. Yampbell also notes that the less expensive retail price for YA books meant that teenagers could purchase these books independently. While adults usually purchase children’s literature for younger readers, these books were designed to eliminate the adult mediator (350). Making YA books financially accessible was one of the key steps to popularizing the genre for publishers and booksellers.

In terms of content, The Outsiders addressed many themes and ideas that would become common in YA novels of the 1970s. The theme of feeling like an outsider is a common issue: books like Paul Zindel’s The Pigman (1968), Judy Blume’s Are You

There God? It’s Me Margaret (1970), and Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War (1974),

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focus on themes of feeling like one does not belong, does not fit in, or will not be accepted by peers. The Outsiders also wrote convincingly about the groups that teens use to identify themselves; in this case, divisions based on socioeconomic status.

Future YA books would go on to address divisions based on school activities (jocks, science nerds, theater geeks, stoners), while others focused on groups determined by geography, age, gender, race, and sexual orientation.

The birth and growth of YA books was largely powered by innovative publishers, the emerging paperback market, and booksellers eager to capitalize on the emerging teen market. However, even as YA became a standard section in publisher’s lists and in bookstores, controversial issues incited debates, many of which still continue to this day. Yampbell summarizes these issues: “The Young Adult genre and market has been problematic since its inception. Defining and promoting the genre was, and continues to be, plagued by four major problems: audience, “acceptable” subject matter, location in stores, and marketing and publicity (350). The unsettled nature of these topics has led to a number of instabilities within this category of literature, and, I would argue, has helped fuel the significant and consistent dismissal of YA by cultural critics and more traditional academics. Specifically, the instabilities in audience and content, coupled with exponential growth in popularity, has led many critics to dismiss YA as a mere marketing category, instead of a defined and legitimate category of literature.

On the surface, the category of “young adult” seems easy to define: a young adult is a person who is no longer a child but has not yet reached full adulthood.

However, various elements of American culture and its legal system complicate this definition. In the United States, a young person legally becomes an adult at age 18.

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However, culturally, many young adults who attend college are not considered to be fully adults, especially if they live at home or have the majority of their financial needs met by their parents. This cultural division also quickly becomes a class division, as many lower class individuals graduate high school (or leave high school before graduation) and begin immediately working blue collar jobs in order to help support their family, or to marry and start families of their own.

Cultural critics in the first decades of the 21st century point to a significant decline in children leaving their parents’ homes, starting full time jobs, and supporting themselves fully. This “death of adulthood” has been blamed on factors as diverse as the economic recession, “helicopter parenting” techniques, generational differences, and progressive political policies like the Affordable Care Act (which allows children to remain on a parent’s health insurance until age 26).13 In a diverse nation such as

America, cultural markers of adulthood vary depending on geographic region, social status, economic class, religion, race, and cultural background. This concept of adulthood becomes even more complicated when considered in a historical context.

Just as complicated is the boundary between childhood and young adulthood. At what point does a child cross over into the young adult category, or, translated into marketing concepts, at what point does a reader transition into purchasing young adult books? “How can publishers create a market specifically for the teenage audience?

Does YA need to encompass the ages of 12– 18? 13–19? 12–25? 14 and up?”

13 This discussion on the end of adulthood has multiple facets: some critics like Robin Marantz Henig see it as a failing of the millennial generation (“What is it about 20-somethings?”). Others, like Derek Thompson view it as a result of the great recession (“Adulthood, Delayed”). Others seem to care less about the causes, but ruminate about the effects it is currently having on literary and popular culture (Graham “Against YA” and Scott “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.”) Finally, there are others who insist that there are benefits to the trend of delaying certain cultural markers of adulthood (Sternberg, “The Case for Delayed Adulthood.”)

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(Yampbell 350). While some experts debate about a specific age range, others argue whether the category should be based on numerical age at all. Psychologists, pediatricians, and other child rearing experts have, over the past century, worked to divide childhood into specific stages, many of which are not directly tied to numerical age. For example, young women may be divided based on whether or not they have begun their menstrual cycles: this biological marker indicates a specific level of physical maturity that is not determined by numerical age (though historically in many cultures, the onset of menstrual cycles marked a girl’s entrance into adulthood).

Attempting to define the YA audience based on psychological or emotional levels of maturity often leads to attempts to limit the type of subjects that might be covered in the YA category. “The subject matter of a YA book is different depending on whether the book is intended for a thirteen-year-old or a seventeen-year-old. Despite intended age determinations for these books, liberals and conservatives continue to battle over the age appropriateness of subjects such as relationships, sex, drugs, and death”

(Yampbell 350). Many parents, teachers, educators, and cultural critics have strong feelings about how old or how mature a young person must be in order to be exposed to certain topics: these feelings are often based on an individual’s sense of what childhood means and how long that innocence should be maintained.

YA literature can also be judged from an educational standpoint: at what point are students ready to graduate from more simplistic texts or starter chapter books into more complex material. It is true now, just as it has been for centuries, that some advanced and motivated children do not require specialized literature: “Motivated by pressure from peers, parents, and educators, children who read will move directly from

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Young Readers into Adult Literature, completely bypassing most, if not all, of the Young

Adult novels” (Yampbell 350). Some YA editors, like Aiden Chambers (whose editorial guidance of Topliner will be discussed in detail below), saw YA literature as tool, not for those advanced readers, but for more reluctant readers. He, along with other educators, felt that if teens had books that they could relate to or that were comparable to their own experiences, they might be more likely to continue reading.

Therefore, one of the major defining characteristics of this genre of literature, its audience, remains a hotly contested topic. Are YA novels aimed at voracious, advanced readers aged 12-18? Or are they designed to target reluctant, struggling readers most often associated with lower socioeconomic urban schools, aged 16-25? Over the past half-century, some publishers have responded to this instability in audience by putting out a wide variety of titles that addressed all of these potential variations. Others have created even more specific sub-categories, like “middle grades” and “new adult” books, in an attempt to further narrow age and maturity levels and therefore avoid controversy over what content might be made available to specific age groups.14

The Emergence of YA Paperbacks in Britain

Despite concerns about content matter in books aimed at teenagers, the market presence of literature aimed at adolescents steadily grew. The post-war era saw a growing understanding of adolescence as a distinct developmental period in the lives of

Western children, embraced by American and British cultures as a time of exploration, social development, and independence. This focus on adolescence increased during the 1960s and 1970s, as the teenager became an omnipresent figure in educational

14 For more on this topic, see the Deirdre Donahue article “New Adult Fiction is the Hot New Category.”

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institutions, cultural representations, and economic developments. According to

Pearson “At the beginning of the 1960s, the concept of a specialist literature for the adolescent was only just beginning to emerge in Britain: the librarian and critic Sheila

Ray identifies the ’career novel’ as the only genre aimed directly at teenagers during the

1950s” (58). Pearson’s book analyzes the influence of two figures in British publishing on the children’s and young adult book markets: Kay Webb, the highly influential head of Puffin books from 1961-1979, and Aiden Chambers, founder of Topliner paperbacks aimed at reluctant adolescent readers and chief editor from 1968 – 1979.

Pearson claims that children’s literature imprints in Britain in the 1960s and

1970s “were typically small and often overlooked by their parent publishing houses” which meant that, much like early children’s literature editors, they were able to “exert a strong individual influence over the lists” of those publishing houses (12). The story of

Kay Webb’s promotion to the head of the British children’s publishing imprint, Puffin

Books, resembles that of early American children’s literature publishers like Louise

Seaman Bechtel, Ursula Nordstrom, and May Masse, though half a century later. Just like in America, the post-war children’s literature publishing industry was largely female- dominated and was considered less important than other publishing divisions.

Originally, Webb was expected to work from home and only “work in the office on days when there were company meetings, to which she was not invited” (77). Webb insisted on an office, a salary commensurate to her male colleagues, and in 1966 was awarded a seat on the Penguin board (80-81). At the time Webb was hired, Puffin dominated the paperback children’s market to a near monopoly: since its founding in 1939, there were virtually no other competitors in that specific niche market (73). As a paperback

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publisher, “Puffin was largely unable to benefit from the lucrative library market, which accounted for at least 70 per cent of sales.… it relied instead upon the market for private book ownership, which had traditionally been very small” (82). However, Webb made a push towards specializing in “quality” children’s literature at Puffin, placing an emphasis on high literary quality and what she termed “a proper expectation of life,” meaning an appropriate amount of “socializing and educating force” (90-91).

Webb’s standards for the books that Puffin would publish were high and the imprint reaped the rewards. Puffin became known as a trusted name in children’s literature publishing: Puffin was the brand parents could turn to when looking for high quality, “safe” titles for their children. During her tenure, “she published 10 of the titles awarded the Carnegie Medal… along with an additional 11 Carnegie winners dating from before 1961” (92). Webb also made a point to acquire the rights for American

Newbery Medal winners, which Pearson asserts is “a fact which speaks even more strongly of a motivation for quality: whereas the publication of Carnegie Medal winner may have been motivated partly by the additional publicity and prestige afforded by the award, the relative obscurity of the Newbery Medal amongst the British public limited its value as a promotional tool” (92). Webb’s evaluations of children’s literature appeared to be well in line with the edubrow canon of both American and British children’s librarians.

As British children’s literature turned towards more realistic and adult topics,

Webb struggled with how to give young readers what they wanted while still maintaining the Puffin brand expectations. “Puffin’s reputation for publishing ’the best in children’s books’ made the tensions surrounding more explicit and realist content in children’s literature particularly acute for Kaye Webb” (Pearson 102). Webb had built Puffin’s

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reputation on high quality, “a degree of respectability,” and the “perception that [Puffin] books would not contain anything ’harmful’” (102). Webb attempted to maintain this brand identity of “safe” literature by starting the Peacock imprint, which published the more mature books that would come to be labeled as YA. Webb’s standards and editorial skill made her particularly good at her job, steadily selecting best-selling titles for her list in a wide variety of genres. According to Pearson and Reynolds, Webb was a key figure in ensuring publication for a number of high profile fantasy titles. Pearson writes: “her enthusiasm encouraged Rex Collings to publish Watership Down, she won first British publication rights to Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and her first Puffin original was Clive King’s Stig of the Dump (1963)” (95). The popularity of these novels in Britain would help import more fantasy titles into American YA culture.

Webb’s influence on the children’s and YA paperback market is still felt today.

Webb was one of the first paperback editors to put specific emphasis on the book cover for the paperback reprint, a consideration that continues to drive paperback sales in the current consumer market (Pearson 108). Webb also started the Puffin Club in 1967, which for a small membership fee, gave children a subscription to a quarterly magazine,

The Puffin Post, and a membership pack which included a badge, a notebook, and other knickknacks, all branded with the Puffin logo (84). While many in the publishing industry were skeptical that children would respond to such a marketing device, the

Puffin Club registered thousands of young people who were eager to be part of a reading community. Members became a captive audience for news about new releases in the Puffin line. “The sense of exclusivity the Puffin Club generated through strategies such as the use of secret codes and passwords between members,

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branded merchandise, and reader contributions to the Puffin Post were all effective means of creating brand loyalty, but also functioned on a more fundamental level to build a sense of community” (110). The widespread success of the Puffin Club helped to make children’s literature paperback publishing appealing to more publishing houses.

By the end of Webb’s tenure at Puffin in 1979, Puffin no longer held a monopoly over the market: indeed, competition in the children’s paperback market had become quite stiff.

At the same time that Webb was working at Puffin, Aiden Chambers was looking for a way to use the paperback format to help encourage reading amongst reluctant readers. Chambers, a teacher and librarian, believed one of the major obstacles in getting adolescent students to read and engage with books was a lack of quality reading material (Pearson 122). Topliner catered more towards the library/education market and produced original paperbacks (books that did not come out in hardback first) (124).

Chambers was an advocate for a distinct, whole literature for adolescents, arguing that eager young readers would quickly graduate to adult texts, but that reluctant young adult readers would never advance beyond popular literature if they could not find material relevant to their young experience (132). In comparison to Webb’s middle-class audience for the Puffin books, Chambers drew on his distinctly working-class background and commissioned texts that dealt with issues relevant to this class. In his writings on the subject, Chambers argued for “adolescence not only as legitimately distinct from childhood and adulthood, but also as possessed of the same kind of inherent value which had been claimed for childhood” (132). It was that philosophy that guided Chambers in his editorial work on YA books. Pearson argues: “The idea

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that adolescence possessed important and distinctive qualities underpinned the view that books for teenagers could do more than present adult literature in a more easily digested format, and could constitute a literature in their own right” (133). While

Chambers left Topliner in 1979 shortly before the list was discontinued in 1980, the effect of Topliner on the young adult market is unquestionable.

One of the major reasons Topliner closed up shop was because of the increasing amount of competition in the adolescent paperback market from Puffin and new adolescent paperback lines in existing paperback lists, such as Piccolo (Pearson 165).

Pearson notes that Chambers followed the American model for success in paperbacks and for new forms of literature in particular, and he helped to expand the field of YA literature in Britain, which in turn improved the YA market overall (165). Chambers himself went on to win both the Carnegie Medal in 1999 and the Printz Award in 2003 for Postcards From No Man’s Land and to write criticism of YA literature for decades.15

Kay Webb and Aiden Chambers helped to bring paperback books into wider acceptance in the British publishing market. As discussed in Chapter 5, the American and British industry had always been entwined, but in the post-war era, those markets became increasingly complementary and symbiotic. As we saw with Watership Down in

Chapter 5, American and British markets did not always value the same texts in the same ways. However, when it came to children’s literature, both markets saw an increase in funding, popularity, and availability of a wider range of texts for children and increasingly, for young adults. Webb and Chambers helped to demonstrate that children’s paperback publishing could be profitable divisions of a publishing house.

15 The difference in the award dates is due to a delay in the publication of Post Cards From No Man’s Land in the United States.

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When both editors stepped down in 1979, the book publishing industry had seen major changes, including an increased importance in YA literature. The popularity of YA would cause shifts in children’s literature marketing, with long-range consequences for educators, publishers, booksellers, and cultural critics.

YA Literature from 1970 to 1990s

The 1970s saw the emergence of YA as a significant category and publishers worked with authors, educators, and booksellers to craft genre conventions. Many early

YA novels are what are now called “problem novels.” Michael Cart defines the problem novel as: “didactic works of social realism that sacrificed art on the altar of individual

“problems of the week” (alcoholism, drug abuse, divorce, poverty, etc., ad nauseam)”

(“Insider to Outsider” 96). These novels fell back on the didactic nature of early children’s literature, giving authors, editors, and publishers an opportunity to prescribe moral behavior and courses of action to young people on a new set of topics. While more liberal critics decried the lack of diversity and the reinforcement of Christian, heteronormative, upper-middle class standards of morality, more conservative critics declared these books obscene and inappropriate for even mentioning topics like teen pregnancy, teen drug use, or child abuse.

Cart argues that as a backlash to the problem novels of the 1970s, the YA literature of the 1980s “returned to genre, principally romance but also—at the end of the decade—horror. The ‘80s was also the decade of paperback publishing, especially in the form of original series like Sweet Valley, Wildfire, and (shudder) Fear Street”

(“Insider to Outsider” 96).16 Publishers also responded to changes in the industry by

16 These series were issued as original paperbacks, meaning they never appeared in hardback. Additionally, many of the series like Sweet Valley High and Babysitters Club followed a syndicate

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giving more attention to the appearance of YA books, specifically the covers. “In the

1970s and early 1980s, artists creating teen novel covers used primarily watercolors to depict pensive looking teens in a scene from the book, or during a key moment for the protagonist” (Yampbell 356). The early 1990s saw a dip in the YA market, especially in the hardcover market. Teen series continued to sell well, but publishers and booksellers worried that YA might be a declining market (Cart, Young Adult 55). This concern was also brought on by a gradual lowering of the age of YA protagonists and the perceived market for these books: Cart attributes this decline in age to the rise in middle schools and the growth of middle grades literature (52). In order to combat this loss of older teens, booksellers like Barnes & Noble agreed to move YA books out of the children’s section and into their own section of new and refurbished bookstores (52). The category of YA remained in flux, causing many critics to dismiss the entire category as a mere marketing gimmick.

As YA books gradually moved out of the children’s sections and into their own space in the new superstores, publishers also changed the look of those books.

According to Yampbell, “In the late 1980s and early 1990s, photographs of brooding, contemplative teenagers gradually replaced watercolors” (357). Towards the end of the

20th century, publishers responded to rapidly changing tastes and a more sophisticated teen audience through additional attention to YA book covers. “Sophisticated graphics in many media forced publishers in the late 1990s to create dramatic and stimulating,

“fast and furious” book covers” (357). These covers helped to boost sales in the more

strategy: books were created by a single author, who set the standard formula of the books, the ghostwritten by other authors. In contrast, a series like Harry Potter was first released in hardcover, was written by a single author, and was designed to run for a specific number of books (though both types of books ultimately inspired spin-offs, merchandising, and adaptation into other mediums).

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visually oriented superstores, where potential blockbusters were often displayed on shelves cover-out (instead of spine-out), or in stacks on tables, where they were more likely to catch they eye of a teen and inspire an impulse buy.

By the late 1990s, teens were buying books. Lots of books. In this decade,

“children’s book publishing became the fastest-growing area of the American publishing industry. In 1994 an estimated five thousand new titles were published, more than double the number of a decade earlier” (Marcus, Minders 303-304). In 1998, Publishers

Weekly and BookExpo America teamed up to conduct a survey of “teens’ reading and recreational habits. Surveying one hundred teenage book buyers, the study indicated that teens spend nearly ten percent of their disposable income on books” (Yampbell

354). The study went on to say that these teens spent approximately $50 every three months on books (354). Young adults had money to spend and surveys and sales figures showed that they were spending at least some of it on books.

Market success also led to improved texts and infrastructures to encourage high quality literature for teens. Many look at the period from the late 1990s to the late 2000s as the start of a “golden age” of YA literature, in which teen reading habits increased and YA books began to engage with topics of race, class, sexuality, and teen violence in a more nuanced, less didactic way. Children’s literature covered race riots, the culture wars, and poverty (Yampbell 366). The late 90s also saw a proliferation of awards aimed either at incorporating YA titles into an existing award, or at honoring YA titles separately from children’s books. The National Book Award, created in 1950, introduced a children’s literature category in 1969. That category was discontinued in 1984, but was reintroduced in 1996; however, this award was now called “Young People’s

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Literature.” According to Cart, “The more expansive new name allows its judges to consider not only children’s but, for the first time, young adult books, as well” (“Insider to

Outsider” 96). There was clearly enough attention being paid to children’s and young adult literature to cause the National Book Award to revisit children’s literature as an award worthy category.

When it comes to awards dedicated purely to honoring YA books, the Printz

Award was established in 1999. It “is presented annually by the Young Adult Library

Services Association to the best young adult book of the year, ‘best’ being defined solely in terms of literary merit. To be eligible, a book must be published as a young adult book” (Cart, “Insider to Outsider” 96). However, Cart notes that it is possible for the same book to win both a Printz and a Newbery Medal, since “YALSA defines ‘young adult’ as persons 12–18 years of age” and the Association of Library Service for

Children (ALSC), “defines ‘children’ as persons up to age 14. There is, thus, a two-year age overlap, 12–14” (97). However, in the tradition of the Newbery, the Printz award is the first award dedicated exclusively to recognizing the literary merit of young adult literature and is considered the most prestigious of all the YA awards. This award is the

ALA’s attempt to evaluate and prize books within a highly profitable and visible category and to establish standards that align with their previously determined literary preferences.

Since the early 1990s, concerns about the death of the YA market had pervaded the book industry. Similar fears resurfaced in the early years of the 21st century, experts in publishing and education feared that the growth of the children’s literature market had slowed, or even begun to reverse itself. Yampbell writes:

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After Young Adult book sales peaked in 1999, at $38.9 million, sales in 2000 and 2001 showed a steady decline. Although paperback sales in 2000 and 2001 outweighed hardback sales by nearly five to one ($25.5 million vs. $5.2 million), overall book sales dropped to $37.6 million in 2000 and $30.8 million in 2001. (353)

Some book industry experts attributed this decline in sales to the increase in alternate forms of media aimed at young people: video games, the Internet, television, and movies. Others tried experiments to recapture the attention and allowance dollars of the teen market. “In the late 1990s, publishers introduced a new, trim hardback size at a lower price to entice teen interest in hardback books. This failed as teens favored smaller, lighter, less expensive books” (Yampbell 354). This dip in the market proved to be momentary, and by 2004 “hardcover net unit sales increased 14.8 percent and YA paperback net unit sales increased 5.3 percent from 2002 to 2003” (354). The difference between 1999 and 2004, of course, was the emergence of a certain British wizard, whose seven book series would clear the way for the age of the YA blockbuster.

Commercial Book Market Response to the Emerging YA Genre

Before moving into a discussion of the 21st century emergence of YA blockbuster series, I would like to go back and examine the effect of YA literature on some of the professions we have been studying. First, the publishing industry’s response to the emergence of the YA category was overwhelmingly positive. The children’s and YA market were so lucrative that publishers rapidly began to expand their publishing in that category. According to Marcus, “publishers once known only for hardcover books added paperback lines to their list, while paperback houses expanded in the opposite direction.

In 1985… Scholastic inaugurated a hardbound trade imprint” (Minders 305). In a decade where many other categories of books were seeing significant declines, the growth of children’s and YA literature caused a lot of excitement among publishers.

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While many scholars point to 1967 as the official beginning of the YA genre, there are other books that predate The Outsiders that are regularly identified as YA classics. Once publishers and booksellers saw the profits that came from marketing and selling teen-centric books directly to the adolescent audience, many began to reach into their backlists and retroactively assign the category of YA to books that fit the theme.

Titles like The Catcher in the Rye (1951), and A Separate Peace (1959) quickly found a home in the YA category, despite being published and marketed originally as adult books. As an example, Tribunella notes:

Initial reviews [for A Separate Peace] in the New Yorker, New Statesman, Saturday Review, and Time made no reference to the book as being specifically for young adults, and its review in the Horn Book Magazine, a publication concerned with literature for children and young people, appeared in a section intended to highlight current adult books of interest to high school students. (93)

Just as early children’s literature librarians appropriated titles originally intended for adults for their lists of recommended titles (Treasure Island, Don Quixote, The Last of the Mohicans, Arabian Nights, or Grimm’s Fairy Tales for example), publishers and book sellers appropriated popular and literary adult texts that fit the standards of this new genre to be included on YA lists and in bookstore displays. This retroactive claiming helped publishers to expand their YA lists even while they commissioned new original works and encouraged authors to explore the new YA genre.

Publishers sought to continue to divide childhood into more and more specific categories. Just as the micro-niche categories in Early Reader picture books helped encourage parents to purchase more books, more specific niches of childhood encouraged parents and young people to take a step-by-step approach to their own

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reading maturity. In 1967, G. Robert Carlsen published Books and the Teen-age

Reader in which he identified three specific stages of adolescent development.

(1) early adolescence, or ages eleven to fourteen, grades five to eight; (2) middle adolescence, or ages fifteen to sixteen, grades nine and ten; and (3) late adolescence, or ages seventeen to eighteen, grades eleven and twelve (Carlsen 1980). He then developed corollary categories of books that he believed offered unique appeal to students in each stage of development. (Cart, Young Adult 23)

Working from the educational side of the problem, Carlsen categorized existing books that he believed would appeal to students within these different age groups. “For example, early adolescents would like animal, adventure, and mystery stories; middle adolescents would welcome war stories and historical novels; and late adolescents would dote on searches for personal values and books of social significance” (Cart,

Young Adult 23). When these categories began to catch on, such as with the growth of the middle school movement, publishers were quick to respond with their own marketing categories that matched up with these sub-divisions.

Marcus quotes Steven Mintz’s observation that in the 1990s “marketers coined the word tween to describe the demographic group from eight to twelve” (Minders 313).

Marcus continues: “In an era of niche marketing, the tweens – whose average weekly income rose from $6 to $22 a week during the 1990s – became one of the most popular markets for clothing manufacturers and record companies” (312). Peer pressure helped propel young people through these different niches, as pre-tweens sought to emulate their slightly older teen siblings and friends. Young people were eager to attain markers of maturity and to discard books, television shows, music, and fashion that might keep them associated with a younger age niche. The 1990s featured boy bands, fashion trends, and slang terms that were quickly adopted and discarded in a few short years,

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as young people grew into and quickly out of these newly branded stages of adolescence. One of the major turning points in reviving the ailing YA market of the early 1990s was the separation of YA from middle grades literature. Editor Marc

Aronson argued for this division in response to the times. “We have frozen our terms around a late sixties reality that no longer exists and we may be doing ourselves harm by calling books that deal with older teenage life or deal with coming of age in a sophisticated way, ‘YA’” (qtd in Cart, Young Adult 59). He felt that older readers were

“turned off” by the association of YA with younger teens and encouraged booksellers and publishers to split the categories for the good of both audiences (59).

Marcus notes that the shift towards a more consumer driven market left publishers more vulnerable to the whims of the public. “As publishers sought new ways to limit the risk, the larger houses quietly imitated the practice of inviting buyers from the major [bookstore] chains to attend internal meetings at which book projects then under consideration by the house were discussed” (Minders 293). Marcus notes that in addition to weakening the strength of editors within the houses “buyers’ reactions now became an important, if not determining, factor in [a publishing house’s] decision for or against proceeding with a title” (293). These buyers were often consulted on design choices and were even granted veto power over cover design in some cases (293).

Marcus argues that this level of influence of big bookstore buyers over big children’s literature publishers determined a lot about children’s literature of the 1980s and 1990s.

He continues: “In this way, the largest booksellers assumed an informal yet significant role in the editorial process, a development whose closest historical parallel was to be found in the dominant influence during the decades preceding World War II of the small

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coterie of librarian critics led by Anne Carroll Moore” (293). Starting in the 1980s, buyers for superbookstore chains occupied the same position as those early librarian pioneers.

For critics who feared consumerism had taken over children’s literature, this usurpation of the advisory role that librarians used to play was a damning sign.

Educational Response to the Emerging YA Genre

Early on, the emergence of a literature aimed at adolescents was viewed as a positive thing by many educators. One of the earliest educational approaches to adolescent literature was to use it as a “rung on a ladder between children’s and adult literature” (Cart, Young Adult 23). According to Cart, Dora V. Smith was the first person to teach a college level course in adolescent literature at the University of Minnesota in the 1930s. There, she required her students to construct reading level ladders, “placing titles on the rungs according to our judgment of quality” (Cart, Young Adult 23). The thought behind this exercise was to train teachers how “through reading guidance a teacher was to move readers from one level to a higher one” (23). However, this initial approach did not value YA literature as its own distinct literature, but as a transitional tool from children’s literature to adult classics.

In 1930, the ALA formed the “Young People’s Reading Roundtable” “whose annual list of best books for ‘young readers’ (think ‘young adults’ here) contained a mixture of children’s and adult books” (Cart, Young Adult 8). Taking their professional endorsement of the concept of young adulthood one step further, the ALA formed the

Young Adult Services Division in 1957 (7).17 In 1973, additional acknowledgement of YA

17 The name of this subcommittee was changed from Young Adult Services Division (YASD) to the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) in 1991 in response to a study (Fine). For the sake of clarity, I will refer to this subcommittee as YALSA throughout the remainder of this project.

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literature as a “serious body of literature expressly written and published for young adults” occurred when YALSA “finally began considering YA titles for inclusion on its annual Best Books for Young Adults list (the list had been called by that name since

1966 but had included only adult titles)” (32). YALSA began to present awards expressly for young adult literature, echoing the proliferation of prizes in other areas of

American culture. They awarded S. E. Hinton “the first Margaret A. Edwards Award, which recognizes lifetime achievement in writing young adult books” in 1988 (27). As previously mentioned, in 2000, YALSA inaugurated the Michael L. Printz Award: an award “that would serve the same purpose for young adult literature that the Newbery

Medal did for children’s literature” (68). These marks of professional endorsement by the ALA subcommittee helped to legitimize YA as a distinct form of literature with its own standards of excellence and as more than just a profit-driven marketing category.

As previously discussed, the educational market of the 1960s and 1970s saw a decline in influence and financial support. “Thanks to a combination of taxpayer revolts

(spearheaded by California’s notorious Proposition 13), diminishing federal funding, and the American economy’s recessionary malaise, the institutional market continued its precipitous decline throughout the eighties and into the early nineties” (Cart, Young

Adult 51). However, the steady increase in public and school libraries throughout the

20th century meant that, even with financial cuts, the number of libraries with services dedicated to young people was enormous. “Although this funding was cut drastically during the early 1970s, the broadened client base remained. By 1977 the number of school and public libraries in the United States had reached 83,953” (Turow 18).

Publishers still regarded this market as important and valuable, and so many publishing

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houses and imprints remained dedicated to publishing books and other materials for the educational market. However, the decline of financial influence by school and public libraries was clear.

By 1993 the industry magazine Publishers Weekly noted that the market had dropped from 80-90 percent institutional to only 50-60 percent (Dunleavy 1993). As a result, Nielsen observed, major publishing houses ‘moved from the past practice of binging out about 80% fiction and 20% nonfiction to doing 80% nonfiction and 20% fiction’ - the point being that, while cash-strapped institutions were avoiding ‘nonessential’ fiction, they continued to buy nonfiction to support curricular needs. (Cart, Young Adult 51)

However, these developments did not entirely change the relationship between the librarians, educators, and publishers. “The major client relationship has been institutionalized and its surface manifestations - the interactions between editors and librarians - are generally recognized as an integral part of the juvenile library market”

(Turow 19). Publishers attuned to the educational market attempted to adapt to the needs of these educational institutions by altering their outputs. The introduction of paperback books and YA did have some effect on this publisher-educator relationship.

“The large scale introduction of paperback reprints of popular juvenile library titles into classrooms, book fairs, some bookstores, and some department stores (as well as into libraries) - an activity initiated by non juvenile publisher Dell in the late 1960s” broadened the availability of texts for educators and added a new form of competition when it came to stocking libraries and purchasing books for the classroom (Turow 19).

Spending cuts did not just affect the number of books public libraries could purchase. It also meant a drastic decrease in the number of staff members dedicated to children’s and young adult library services. “According to a 1988 survey conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics, only 11 percent of America’s libraries had

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young adult specialists on staff” (Cart, Young Adult 55). In a period of time where young adults were increasingly in danger from gang violence, sexually transmitted diseases, poverty, teen suicide, and gun violence in schools, many experts felt this lack of services for teens in public schools and libraries was an additional hindrance (67). A

1992 survey conducted by YALSA reported “a continued ‘dearth of qualified staff’ and the prevailing feeling, among librarians, that YA funding was the first area to be cut at times of fiscal crisis and that ‘the loss of library funding’ had become ‘a national epidemic’” (Cart, Young Adult 55). Furthermore, those schools and libraries that did find money in their budgets for young adult services “were increasingly spending their dwindling resources on new technology instead of books” (53). The lack of funds meant libraries had to prioritize where to spend money, and if any money was spent on young adults, it was likely to be in the form of nonfiction or new computers. Dwindling funds and staff matched the decline in influence of librarians on the production side of the book market. Despite these limits, librarians remained powerful proponents of literacy and democratic access to books throughout the country.

Even as teachers and librarians began to accept YA as a legitimate form of literature, useful at the very least in helping reluctant teens acquire the reading habit, many academics refused to acknowledge YA as a legitimate field before 1960.

However, some pioneering academics were beginning to examine and analyze YA literature as early as the mid-1950s. Michael Cart identifies Dwight L. Burton as the first academic to write criticism of YA literature in 1951. In his essay, “The Novel for the

Adolescent” Burton “devoted the lion’s share of his attention to an analysis of work by four adult authors whose novels either showed ‘a keen perception of the adolescent

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experience’ or ‘have a peculiar appeal to certain elements of the adolescent reading public’” (Cart, Young Adult 22). Another of the first academics to deal with this topic,

Richard S. Alm, wrote on a similar topic in 1955. He claimed that YA writers, “noting the heightened attention given to adolescents and their problems by psychologists, educators, and librarians, have turned to the personal concerns of the teen-ager” (qtd in

Cart, Young Adult 22). Unfortunately, most of the authors that Burton and Alm highlighted were adult novelists, including Dan Wickenden, Ruth Moore, C.S. Forester,

Thomas Wolfe, James Street, Dan Wickenden, and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (22).

As children’s literature made in-roads into the American university system in the

1970s, it also opened up the possibility of study of young adult literature. One of the major hindrances in discussing YA literature was its common association with the extremely lowbrow series paperbacks and genre fiction, specifically romance and horror. However, as the ALA began to introduce infrastructures to highlight and award the best literary examples of YA literature, academics followed carefully. In the spring

1996, the Children’s Literature Association published a special issue of the Quarterly, devoted entirely to “Critical Theory and Young Adult Literature” (Cart, Young Adult 58).

Courses that focused on the history and development of YA literature followed and became increasingly popular at the university level. This infrastructural shift, like the creation of YALSA and the Printz award, granted the YA category increased legitimacy and created another apparatus for experts to express approval toward YA texts.

The turn of the 21st century marked a renaissance of young adult literature, specifically within the older teens demographic (as well as some adults!). Cart identifies a few factors as key to this renaissance. The first was the growth of the teen

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demographic. “America’s teen (twelve to nineteen) population spiked significantly, growing 16.6 percent from 1990 to 2000, when it totaled 32 million. That rate of increase was widely expected to outstrip that of the general population before peaking in 2010”

(Young Adult 57). This meant that there was also a resurgence in youth culture, because the steady increase in the teen demographic meant more consumers for that culture (62). It also meant another increase in the number of students enrolled in

America’s schools, though this one was not quite as big as the baby-boom spike of the

1950s. Record numbers of high school students enrolled in U.S. schools in 1996 and

1997. An ALA report concluded: “From the fall of 1997 through 2007, the nation’s schools can expect a thirteen percent increase in grades nine through twelve” (qtd in

Cart, Young Adult 62).

The second factor in the renaissance of YA literature was driven by the turn towards the whole-word style of teaching in America’s schools (a change that harkens back to the Reading Wars debate discussed in Chapter 3). Teaching experts in the late eighties and early nineties returned to this style of teaching and often “employed trade books instead of classic basal readers (Dick and Jane, anyone?). Although at first the movement primarily affected the children’s book market, it would have a longer-range and salutary impact on young adult literature by bringing contemporary books into the classroom” (Cart, Young Adult 57). Just like in the 1960s, teachers turned to trade fiction to help find books that students would want to read, on topics that more closely related to their lives. In addition to cheering up executives at publishing houses, the incorporation of contemporary YA literature into the classroom would help teachers to connect with students and helped open teens to the possibility of reading for pleasure.

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At the start of the 21st century, the young adult market became a dominant and extremely successful section of the book industry, with its success bleeding over into other areas of the entertainment industry. As teens were increasingly encouraged to read for pleasure in an attempt to improve vocabulary, grammar, and comprehension skills, teachers, and librarians looked for titles that would both educate and entertain their students. In our contemporary moment (2015), teen series titles have a huge influence on the market: this influence was established and enabled by one specific series about a boy wizard, but has expanded beyond this single series to encompass a wide variety of genres, age levels, and types of books. As we will see, the Harry Potter series paved the way for the current dominance of YA in the book market. By examining the marketing strategy for The Hunger Games, I will demonstrate how the standards that the Harry Potter phenomenon established created a pattern for launching and sustaining blockbuster sales for select YA titles. This pattern will show the effects of the blockbuster strategy on the children’s literature market and on the relationships between children’s literature experts at the turn of the 21st century.

The Hunger Games as YA Blockbuster Series

The history of Harry Potter is well documented and extensively analyzed in other books and so will only be dealt with briefly here.18 At the 1998 ALA meeting, Scholastic distributed galleys of a book by a debut author. In pitching the book to librarians, they claimed that the book “had a large, enthusiastic readership in the United Kingdom, not only among middle-grade school children but also (this was the surprise) among college

18 For example, Marcus covers the history of Harry Potter in Chapter 9 of Minders: “Suits and Wizards at the Millennium’s Gate.” See also Lana Whited’s The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter and Susan Gunelius’s Harry Potter the Story of a Global Phenomenon. Mary Pharr makes connections between Harry Potter and The Hunger Games in “From the Boy who Lived to the Girl Who Learned” in Of Bread, Blood, and Hunger Games.

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students” (Marcus, Minders 312). The book was Harry Potter and the Philosopher Stone

(soon to be renamed Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone for American markets) (312-

313). At this time, Scholastic was considered one of the “down-market” publishers: in

1998 it was best known as the publisher of R. L. Stein’s Goosebumps series (a paperback horror series mostly despised by librarians and teachers.) In short,

Scholastic authors did not win prizes and were not looked upon favorably by the educational market. However, being “down-market” had helped Scholastic adapt quickly to the new publishing environment. “Scholastic was rapidly becoming the avatar of the new publishing era: a market- and media-savvy house with a list that ran the gamut from mass-market to high-end trade and with a culture that rewarded experimentation”

(305).19 Scholastic was flush with money from popular series like Goosebumps, which allowed the house to take chances on unknown authors, like J. K. Rowling.

As you are well aware, the Harry Potter books took off in the American market, just like they did in the British market. Sales of the books eclipsed previous records in both children’s and adult publishing. Further, the publication history of the series altered the global children’s literature market in a number of important ways. First, it upended the expectations that many experts had held for decades about what child and teen readers would and would not do. For example:

it had been widely assumed by publishers, librarians, and educators that few boys cared to read works of fantasy; that few preteen boys were truly avid readers in any genre; and that none but the ‘special’ child of either sex would voluntarily tackle a book of any description that was much more than two hundred pages long. (Marcus, Minders 314)

19 Marcus also notes that at that moment “Scholastic was run by Bernette Ford, one of the very few African Americans in an executive position at a publishing house (305). Children’s literature publishing is still hugely homogenous in terms of race: see Chapter 7 of this project for more on this subject.

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Expert opinions were quickly undermined by the size and scope of the Harry Potter

Phenomenon, in which millions of children eagerly awaited the publication of each novel, even as each successive novel in the series grew longer, more complex, and significantly darker in terms of subject matter. This phenomenon forced educational experts to reexamine their assumptions and expectations about the reading habits of

“the child” in order to account for the actions of real children.

Second, while Harry Potter eventually became a massive marketing phenomenon, the initial growth and popularity of the series was based off of word-of- mouth peer recommendations. Once Harry and his friends at Hogwarts had established credibility with young adults and earned steady sales for the first two volumes,

Scholastic and its British counterpart Bloomsbury recognized the blockbuster potential of the series and began to fully back the series with an extensive and coordinated marketing campaign. As the books became increasingly popular and set sales records, media outlets that normally did not cover books began to run stories about midnight

Harry Potter parties, the simultaneous release of the books between the British and

American markets, and the record-setting first print runs of each book. The superstores were more than happy to host release parties, during which they could also sell spin-off merchandise, paperbacks of the previous novels in the series, and similar books that could be advertised to the Harry Potter audience as the next big thing.

Third, the Harry Potter series appealed to adults. “Rowling is said to have awakened a new generation of children to a love of reading, and few would criticize her for this achievement. What was even more surprising was that she appeared to have won many adults back to reading as well” (Falconer 16). Early in the series, Bloomsbury

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began to put out adult-friendly editions of the Harry Potter novels, with less whimsical, and therefore less recognizable, covers. There was enough demand for these books to make this marketing tactic successful; however, it wasn’t until the seventh and final book in the series that this adult version actually outsold the original. “By that time,

Waterstone’s was estimating that 60% of Rowling’s readership was made up of teenagers and young adults, a substantial number of whom must have grown up alongside the series itself” (Falconer 16). Adults had likely been reading teen books for decades, but Harry Potter made the phenomenon highly visible and as a result, hotly contestable.

Fourth, while blockbuster books are usually considered non-literary by the critical audience, there are times when these mainstream books become so big that even the most critically elite feel the need to review them or comment on them. Harold Bloom famously wrote in a Wall Street Journal article that “The Harry Potter epiphenomenon” basically demonstrated the downfall of literate society, proclaiming:

At a time when public judgment is no better and no worse than what is proclaimed by the ideological cheerleaders who have so destroyed humanistic study, anything goes. The cultural critics will, soon enough, introduce Harry Potter into their college curriculum, and The New York Times will go on celebrating another confirmation of the dumbing-down it leads and exemplifies. (Bloom)

While it is not surprising that Bloom, a staunch high culture canonical defender, objects to the popularity of Harry Potter, it is surprising that he took the time to say as much publicly, rather than simply ignoring Harry Potter “mania.” According to Marcus, “the outsized success of the books made them a lightning rod for attacks from many quarters,” many of which stemmed from a disapproval of adults reading children’s literature, since that category is often seen as antithetical to serious literature (Minders

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313). Despite its many (highly vocal) critics, the Harry Potter series continued to break sales records, clearly demonstrating that its success had escaped the control of the tastemakers.

This phenomenon has been the catalyst for many of the changes in 21st century children’s/YA literary culture. In examining the marketing strategies and innovations that

Scholastic made new use of with Harry Potter, we can now recognize the strategies that have become a standard part of launching a blockbuster YA series like The Hunger

Games. Many series, like Twilight and The Hunger Games followed in Harry Potter’s footsteps, tapping into the new crossover market and enthusiasm for children’s literature in American culture. Publishing houses scoured their manuscript piles for the next big series worthy of blockbuster backing. Publishers also attempted to negotiate the new emerging infrastructure for hyping and promoting those titles. Word of mouth had proven to be extremely important to starting Harry Potter on the road to blockbuster status, and many of the word-of-mouth powerhouses, like librarians, were migrating online to blogs and Internet discussion boards. Publishers realized if they wanted to try to repeat the success of Harry Potter with new YA books and series, they would need to tap into that online culture early as a part of blockbuster campaigns.

A prime example of word-of-mouth driving a book’s blockbuster status was The

Hunger Games. According to Laura Miller’s Salon article, The Hunger Games started off with “in-house enthusiasm” or excitement from professionals within Scholastic:

“Scholastic employees began eagerly passing the manuscript around the office. It was the first stirring of what would become a tidal wave of word of mouth.” Scholastic then turned to its network of “‘Big Mouths,’ children’s publishing lingo for booksellers who

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have exceptional influence with co-workers and peers. These people run regional associations, organize book fairs and set up school events. Teachers and librarians come to them for hot tips on new kids’ titles” (Miller, “Making of a Blockbuster”). These

“Big Mouths” act as liaisons between the publishers and the most influential children’s literature tastemakers, such as librarians in top library branches, critics with popular book review columns and blogs, or educators with influence over district-wide reading lists. Publishers could pre-select texts like The Hunger Games for blockbuster treatment, but had to rely on experts to positively review and promote the book before they could move onto the next stage of the campaign. Scholastic reportedly sent the

“Big Mouths” photocopied manuscripts rather than wait for more polished Advanced

Reader Copies (ARCs) in order to build early buzz (Miller, “Making of a Blockbuster”).

The early enthusiasm from children’s literature specialists helped to create the positive feedback effects that Elberse argues are necessary for blockbusters to come into being. Early buzz in the educational and bookselling industry can be used to justify blockbuster buzz within the publishing house. For example:

In early summer, Publishers Weekly, the industry’s trade publication, ran a story on how Scholastic had twice doubled the book’s print run in response to “early raves, particularly online, where commentary has lit up blogs and listservs.” The book was well on its way to bestseller status. (Miller, “Making of a Blockbuster”)

By increasing the size of the initial printing of a novel based on “buzz” alone, Scholastic was able to solicit free publicity, making it more likely that the release of The Hunger

Games would be talked about as an event in the making. The presence of online chatter ensured that doubling the print run was not merely an unfounded publisher ploy to generate publicity: the demand appeared to already exist, justifying the increase. As the release date grew closer, articles cited both the online buzz and the size of the first

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printing as evidence that the book would be a hit (Sellers). As previously noted, a publisher’s investment in a title often indicated their confidence in the text’s blockbuster potential. This confidence helps to create Elberse’s positive feedback effects.

The Hunger Games debuted on the 28 September 2008 New York Times

Children’s Chapter Book list at number 9 and slowly worked its way up.20 In addition to its impressive early performance in the children’s market, Miller claims:

the possibility of ‘The Hunger Games’ crossing over to adult readers (the Holy Grail for children’s book marketers) got its first big public boost when Stephen King reviewed it for Entertainment Weekly (even if he only gave it a B) a few days after the book came out. Not long after that, Stephanie Meyer, whose “Twilight” also made significant inroads with adult readers, raved about “The Hunger Games” on her blog. (“Making of a Blockbuster”)

The combination of the adult crossover readers and an endorsement from a huge teen author like Meyer helped propel The Hunger Games from bestseller to blockbuster.

While The Hunger Games (much like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone before it) behaved as a steady seller, the second novel in the trilogy, Catching Fire, debuted in

September 2009 at #1 on the USA Today Bestseller list. It also appeared on the New

York Times Children’s Chapter Books list (with The Hunger Games right behind at #2 after 52 consecutive weeks on the list). The release of the second book and confirmation of a film adaptation deal helped propel the series into blockbusterdom, the way the pre-buzz of the first novel’s launch propelled it to bestsellerdom. On 17 August

2012, The Hunger Games trilogy overtook the Harry Potter series as Amazon’s top selling book, which included hardcover, paperback and e-book formats (Bosman). As of

October 2014, the series has sold more than 65 million copies in the U.S. alone.

20 Comparing the bestseller numbers of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games is like comparing apples to oranges, since the Children’s Chapter Book list where The Hunger Games first appeared did not exist until after all of the Harry Potter books had been published. The Children’s Chapter Book list debuted in June 2008: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released 21 July 2007.

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The first installment of the film franchise topped the worldwide box office and made almost $700 million. The second film, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire “was the top domestic film of 2013 and the 10th highest-grossing North American release of all time, with more than $860 million around the world” (Hall). Together the first two films made over $1.5 billion (Hall). The third installment of the film, based on the first half of the third book, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay- Part 1, debuted while I was writing

Chapter 6. According to the Associated Press, it set a record for first day advance ticket sales at the end of October and spent its first three weeks of release at #1 in the box office. As of 8 December 2014, Mockingjay – Part 1 had earned over $250 in domestic ticket sales for Lions Gate (“Mockingjay”). Additionally, the star of the film adaptations,

Jennifer Lawrence, has become a blockbuster star in her own right: she won an Oscar for her role in Silver Lining Playbook and has appeared in other franchise films, including the X-Men: First Class series.21

The Blockbuster as the New Canon Maker

Children’s literature has always had a distinctly uncomfortable relationship with the effects of popularity and sales on its canon formation. While other children’s literature scholars, like Kenneth Kidd, have remarked on the ability of children’s literature prizes, like the Caldecott and Newbery, to provide children’s books with a distinct financial reward and a likelihood of remaining in print far longer than other children’s books, the list of blockbuster titles rarely overlaps with that of the prize winners (“Prizing” 168). However, because children’s literature is seen by the

21 X-Men: First Class is a reboot of the 2000-2006 X-Men film franchise, which itself is based off of a comic book series with a long history of transmedia adaptation, specifically television, video games and books.

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mainstream reader as a specialized field, that field is rapidly becoming closely associated with a hyper-canon of blockbuster books, rather than its prize winners. The next time you encounter a news story about the cultural impact of children’s literature or trends in YA, pay close attention to the texts the author cites; most likely, they will be the blockbusters and not the prize-winners. Most often, stories in popular media about

YA literature, blockbuster books, or much of teen culture will begin with the triptych of

Harry Potter, Twilight, and The Hunger Games. To non-experts, the blockbuster appears to usurp the cultural relevance of these prizes and the authority of the prize- granting organizations.

Blockbuster books have also blurred genre and age-group definitions. As YA titles are placed in displays at the front of bookstores, they appeal to the crossover market of both children and adults. YA books make excellent crossover books, which historically echo 19th century reading habits when adults and children read the same texts. A crossover audience also creates a wider potential sales pool. This crossover appeal for YA has made marketable YA manuscripts a powerful and highly sought after commodity. This more powerful, financially relevant category has driven new genre distinctions, such as “new adult,” and increased sales, visibility, and power for YA imprints at large publishing houses. An increased number of YA books are being adapted into films, especially series books that can form a franchise, or novels by popular authors, like John Green.22 This franchise effect echoes adult culture, where

22 John Green’s debut novel Looking for Alaska won the 2006 Printz award. His 2012 blockbuster novel The Fault in Our Stars appeared on the top of bestseller lists and numerous “Best Of” lists that year. It was adapted into a film in 2014 and stars Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort (who also star in the film adaptations of Veronica Roth’s Divergent trilogy, making them blockbuster YA stars). Green’s other novel Paper Towns is being adapted into a film as of this writing and is slated for release in July 2015. Green is also known for his YouTube series VlogBrothers and Crash Course.

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Stephen King and John Grisham are perennial members of the bestsellers club. The crossover appeal of YA means texts can build an enormous audience, which makes these properties even more appealing to conglomerates using the blockbuster strategy.

Since a blockbuster book receives so much of a publisher’s marketing budget, the buzz for a book often builds to a high level before the book has even been released.

These book releases often cross into the realm of entertainment: the later novels in the

Harry Potter series were released in the midst of giant bookstore-hosted parties, where children came in their pajamas or Harry Potter costumes and counted down the hours to midnight (Rich; Miller, Reluctant Capitalists 128). Other marketing campaigns feature author appearances on talk shows, at book signings, at book readings, at schools, or public libraries. Sales can also be driven by news of film adaptations in the works or other transmedia adaptations (video games, computer games, commercials). All this marketing attempts not only to sell books but also to create publicity about the record number or speed of sales, which in turn creates more publicity for the book.

Predictably, there is also a growing cultural backlash against YA books. Articles that condemn adults for reading children’s books and that examine the decline of teen culture in general have become popular in many mainstream newspapers and magazines, such as Graham’s “Why YA?” in Slate. Cultural critics point to the upswing in YA books as blockbusters, read by both adults and children, as the infantilizing of

American culture and a problem because not only are the books mass-market and popular, but also they are concerned with the lives and adventures of children, who are often associated with lowbrow culture.

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The blockbuster book has become the new standard of excellence for major publishing firms, who must pursue “blockbuster strategies” in order to remain financially viable and culturally relevant. The interlocking of these hugely popular books with blockbuster films, television series, video games, transmedia advertising campaigns, and product endorsements has proven to be an effective means of helping blockbuster texts reach higher and higher levels of sales and cultural saturation. The blockbuster prize appears to be upstaging the more traditional establishment prizes and making the recommendations of children’s literature experts, like librarians and critics, obsolete when compared to the bestseller list and the book recommendation algorithms of popular online bookstores like Amazon.

While this shift towards YA properties has financial implications for children’s literature publishing imprints and media corporations that are too complex to analyze in this particular project, there are also implications for the field of children’s literature in the 21st century that must be considered. The select group of texts that achieve blockbuster status quickly create a representative canon, or a list of go-to texts, for non- experts to reference when thinking about children’s literature. This means in order for experts within the field of children’s literature to reach these non-experts, they must couch reviews, analysis, and other theoretical criticisms around these hyper-canonical texts. As librarians, booksellers and critics continually refer back to this hyper-canon, media firms seek to find and purchase media properties that are variations on a theme: the next Hunger Games or the next Harry Potter. It becomes important, then, for those individuals concerned with the breadth and diversity of children’s literature to help

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create the word-of-mouth praise for a wider variety of texts so that that the popularly elected blockbuster canon can begin to reflect a wider range of children’s literature.23

It is still too early to tell if these blockbuster books will come to reside in a longer- lasting canon of sentiment as the hype dies away and Harry Potter and Hunger Games fans decide which books to pass on to their children. It is likely that some of the contemporary blockbuster books will fade away as literature continues to evolve.

However, Harry Potter has already earned its place as a touchstone in the canon of significance, meeting Nodelman’s qualifications of both popularity and innovation. The effect Harry Potter has had on publishing, bookselling, and children’s literature scholarship makes the possibility of its canonization much higher. Regardless of its literary qualities, Harry Potter altered the field of children’s literature in significant ways, including how series like The Hunger Games were acquired, marketed, and received by the mass-market.

At this particular moment, the book industry is experiencing another seismic shift, similar in size and scope to the Paperback Revolution of the 1960s. The shift to digital media, combined with the age of the blockbuster strategy, has altered the infrastructure of children’s literature in meaningful ways, which we will ponder in Chapter 7. In looking at these changes within the historical context laid out in this project, we can then consider what they might mean for the children’s literature field and professional in the

21st century.

23 A Twitter campaign around the hashtag #WeNeedDiverseBooks has been trying to achieve just this since early 2014. See “FAQ” and “Mission Statement” from the We Need Diverse Books Website.

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CHAPTER 7 CODA: UNCHARTED TASTE TERRITORY

As I hope this project has demonstrated, the field of children’s literature features rich and complicated relationships between a wide variety of professionals. At the center of this field is “the child”: at once an idea, an objective, and a potential customer.

Each of the professions involved in children’s literature (including those outside of the scope of this project) helps “the child” to navigate the complicated process of growing up by providing them with a diverse range of texts. Each profession approaches the child in unique and specialized ways, based on their professional goals. Each profession has adapted to the challenges and innovations of the 20th century in different ways and will continue to adapt to professional, technological, and cultural changes in the 21st.

As evidence of these changes, I would like to examine the 2014 National Book

Award ceremony as a final case study. As I approached the end of my work on this project, I was thrilled to read in my Twitter feed that Ursula K. LeGuin would receive the

National Book Awards 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

This medal, the National Book Foundation’s version of a lifetime achievement award was presented to LeGuin on 19 November 2014 in a ceremony in New York City (“2014

Medalist”). Personally, I am a big fan of LeGuin’s work and because I had just finished writing Chapter 6 about the changing value of prizes in a contemporary blockbuster culture (or perhaps in spite of it), I was pleased to see such a talented female science- fiction writer receive such a respected award in recognition for her decades of work.

It is again perhaps because of my immersion in this project, but to me, the actual ceremony proved to be a microcosm of the contemporary book industry. As I read

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coverage of the event the next day, I felt almost as if I were holding the outline for this conclusion in my hand. Each topic I had identified as one to ponder or raise in Chapter

7 was represented in the evening’s events. This coda will therefore examine remarks made at this ceremony as its primary text. In decoding the references and larger conversations encapsulated in the presentation by Neil Gaiman, the acceptance speech by Leguin, and the ill-considered anecdote by Master of Ceremonies Daniel Handler, I will demonstrate the contemporary controversies and innovations currently affecting the children’s literature field.1

Neil Gaiman’s Introduction

British author Neil Gaiman was selected to present the Medal for Distinguished

Contribution to American Letters to Ursula K. LeGuin. Gaiman himself is the author of graphic novels, novels for children and adults, poetry, songs, and episodes of television.

Gaiman “is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula and the World

Fantasy Award, and is the only author to be awarded both the Newbery and Carnegie medals for the same work, The Graveyard Book” (“2014 Medalist”). Gaiman in many ways represents a 21st century breed of children’s literature author, who works across mediums, occasionally reinventing them as he does. However, his speech honoring

LeGuin narrates his own journey from childhood through his development as an author, and the ways in which LeGuin’s work affected him. He begins with an anecdote about the only time he had ever met LeGuin, at a science fiction convention in the Midwest twenty years prior. Even though they were members of the same professional

1 Transcripts for these speeches are available through the Guardian article “Ursula K. Le Guin’s Speech at National Book Awards” and the National Book Award website, where all of the acceptance speeches are archived (“Images of the Ceremony”).

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community, Gaiman was starstruck when LeGuin shared an elevator ride with him. To much laughter he described how LeGuin had only spoken to him once: she asked him if he knew about any room parties. However, the section of his speech that I wish to discuss begins with this evocative line:

I bought, with my own money, a copy of a book called A Wizard of Earthsea when I was 11.

In this one line, Gaiman embodies “the child” that the professionals of the children’s literature industry have been aiming to serve since the turn of the 20th century. This single, simple sentence embodies so many of the things that these professionals have aimed to accomplish. By 1968 when Gaiman was 11, there were books aimed at children available for him to purchase. Those books were affordable enough for him to purchase with his own money (a fact that Gaiman emphasizes when he speaks), and purchasing the text was a memorable event for him. It is clear that purchasing this book with his own money gives Gaiman pride to this day, which is something that Children’s

Book Week founders promised when they encouraged parents to bring more children’s books into the home. Gaiman begins with the act of purchasing, rather than reading, I argue, to emphasize the commitment he felt about literature even from a young age.

I read it and I discovered from that book that obviously going to wizard school was the best thing anybody could ever do. Other people may very well have read that and got their own ideas from it, I think, but Ursula did it first.

Gaiman’s speech moves from purchasing to reading, but even as he discusses his reaction to the book, he also nods to the current children’s literature market. He gestures towards Harry Potter here and his audience laughs softy in response, since the phrase “wizard school” has now become indelibly linked with the Harry Potter phenomenon. While this comment could be seen as combative, suggesting that Rowling

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borrowed the idea of a wizard school from LeGuin, I instead believe it was meant as an acknowledgement of the long tradition of fantasy in children’s literature. As we saw in

Chapter 6, the Harry Potter phenomenon did much to alter the ways in which children’s literature was marketed and received in our contemporary culture, but it also changed the way America viewed fantasy. As a science fiction and fantasy author, Gaiman is keenly aware that those genres have long been considered lesser, lower in the cultural capital hierarchy than other forms of writing for children or adults. However, the blockbuster phenomenon of Harry Potter changed that, especially in America.

This phenomenon began around the same time as a “nerd renaissance” in

American culture. Popular culture has shifted to feature works that were previously designated as “nerd culture” in the mainstream. While previously dismissed as lowbrow genre fiction, comic books have become common fodder for blockbuster films, television series, and may now feature critically acclaimed reboots or runs that challenge racial and gender norms. Long running science fiction shows like Doctor Who (which Gaiman has written episodes for) have surged in popularity around the world. YA dystopian trilogies have topped the bestseller lists and posted blockbuster sales figures. Part of this nerd renaissance can be attributed to the Internet, which has become home to millions of fan sites, blogs, fan fiction sites, and other communities dedicated to these genres. “Fandoms” surrounding particularly popular television shows, comic book characters, or fictional worlds, including Harry Potter, have become more mainstream and scholars, especially in the fields of children’s literature, comic studies, and digital humanities, have begun to engage with these online communities in the hopes of discovering how these fandoms remake their fictional materials to create something

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new. Emerging fandoms and new attention to sci-fi and fantasy will greatly affect the way these genres are perceived later in the century: children who grew up on paperbacks see no stigma in them now. Gaiman’s speech continues:

And I bought the rest of those books as they appeared and now I was completely hooked; I had a new favorite authors. Which meant that by the time I was 12, I was reading books like The Left Hand of Darkness, a glorious science fiction novel set in a world in which people change gender. And when you are English and you are 12 going on 13, the idea that gender could be fluid, that a king could have a baby, that its not what you thought it was, opens your head. It peels it. It changes it. I read everything I could by Ursula.

Gaiman here narrates his growth as a young reader, progressing from LeGuin’s novels for children through to her more mature science fiction novels. Gaiman is the

Progressive librarian’s dream child here: through early exposure to LeGuin’s children’s books, Gaiman developed a love of reading and an enthusiasm for learning through challenging texts. On his own, he progressed through LeGuin’s novels, tackling more mature and difficult texts. Through those texts, Gaiman developed also as a person, coming to understand new ideas about the world around him, concepts that were foreign and outside of his own experience. These texts challenged Gaiman to open his eyes and see his own world in a new way. However, The Left Hand of Darkness is a book that has also evoked challenges from religious groups as being obscene for its treatment of gender and sex, though likely fewer than if it were a book aimed at children. As a result, it has been removed from some school required reading lists.

There are some who might argue that the age of 12 is far too young for a child to begin grappling with the gender concepts raised in that novel. Gaiman points to this novel as a key moment in his development, and as we will see below, as a key to the way that he writes his own award-winning texts. Gaiman continues to describe his own growth, from

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voracious child reader to eager adult writer. In a section of the speech I have excised, he admires LeGuin’s style, the literary quality of his writing, and her clarity of word choice that he found impossible to copy. By reading LeGuin’s essays on craft, Gaiman claims he continued to learn and to come to understand the importance of language, usage, and understanding. By the time he reached his 20s, he had graduated out of the children’s reading room and wanted to become a writer himself. Just as children’s librarians imagined it would happen, Gaiman turned his love of reading into a successful career: he views this reading as the key to his own moral and ethical worldviews.

I learned from her the difference between Efland and Poughkeepsie. And I learned when to use the language of one and when to use the language of another. And I learned more than that. I didn’t just learn about language, I learned about the way that we use language. To use a hackneyed phrase but a true one, she raised my consciousness. She would write about women’s issues, write about the way that women wrote, write about her life in a way that made me as a young writer starting out on Sandman suddenly ask myself whenever a new character needed to come on “is there any reason why this character couldn’t be a woman?” And if there was no reason, then they were. Life got easy. She made me a better writer and I think she made me a better person who wrote.

Children’s literature experts, including librarians and teachers, have asserted for more than a century that the books that children read can have long lasting and impactful effects. Gaiman, who is regularly praised for his depictions of the fantastic, cites the important lessons he learned from LeGuin about language and storytelling. However, he also credits her with his own understanding of how to represent female characters in the traditionally male-centric genres of science fiction and fantasy. The utopian vision of the

Progressives, who imagined that children could reshape society if taught in a different way, shines through Gaiman’s story. His own experiences with reading science-fiction and fantasy written by a feminist has in turn made his own writing more attuned to the representation of women. The boys and girls who will read his works will hopefully be

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affected in similar ways. If this pattern holds, 21st century science fiction and fantasy and perhaps even realistic fiction will begin to represent more diverse characters.

Gaiman’s interaction with LeGuin’s literature has made him a more engaged citizen of the world, and he argues, a better human being. Gaiman concluded his speech by recognizing all the types of writing LeGuin has done over the years and calling her “a giant of literature.”

For her fiction, her nonfiction, and not just as a writer of science fiction, as a writer of fantasy, as a writer of mainstream fiction, as a writer for adults, as a writer for children, as a writer with huge ideas and a writer who could deal with people, and she is all of these. But as a giant of literature who is finally getting recognized, I take enormous pleasure in awarding the 2014 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters to Ursula K. LeGuin.

LeGuin’s Acceptance Speech

To the givers of this beautiful reward, my thanks, from the heart. My family, my agents, my editors, know that my being here is their doing as well as my own, and that the beautiful reward is theirs as much as mine.

While Gaiman’s speech portrays him in the position of the child as reader, LeGuin begins her speech as a member of a professional community. As we saw in Chapter 6, the increasingly professionalized world of book publishing escalated the need for an author to rely on an agent, as well as to interact with editors and publishers on a more professional level. While very common for an acceptance to speech to mention all of these professional contacts, it is worth highlighting that LeGuin places herself as an author within a network of experts and professionals and grants them shared credit in her award. In a future version of this project, I might also consider looking at the professionalization of the author, including the author an advertised product much like their novels. Gaiman describes how he read every book LeGuin wrote, a kind of brand loyalty that many advertising companies would strive to inspire.

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In our contemporary moment, as social media continues to expand, authors are increasingly encouraged to promote themselves (their brand) on Facebook, Goodreads,

Tumblr and Twitter. Some, like John Green and Maureen Johnson, have extensive online presences and regularly interact with fans. Others, like Stephanie Meyer, have public blogs where they post occasionally. J.K. Rowling, who probably doesn’t need to increase her name recognition, has a Twitter account for herself, and for her pen name,

Robert Galbraith. However, even in this extremely networked age, it is possible to be a successful children’s/YA author without giving in to the trappings of social media.

Suzanne Collins, author of The Hunger Games trilogy, for instance, rarely gives media interviews and has virtually no social media presence, beyond a very professionally maintained web page. I argue as the book industry increasingly interacts with the

Internet, it will change the way authors interact with their fans, both by choice and by contractual obligation, much as the advent of the television book tour altered the way books were sold in this country. The 21st century will bring new publicity responsibilities to authors and their professional allies and will allow publishers and authors to interact with children, young adults, and parents in new ways.

And I rejoice in accepting it for, and sharing it with, all the writers who’ve been excluded from literature for so long – my fellow authors of fantasy and science fiction, writers of the imagination, who for 50 years have watched the beautiful rewards go to the so-called realists.

While Gaiman playfully refers to Harry Potter in his introduction, LeGuin is more blunt.

Coming from a generation previous to Gaiman, LeGuin clearly remembers a time in which science fiction had no semblance of acceptance in the literary establishment. Her term “writers of the imagination” places science fiction and fantasy under a similar umbrella of speculative fiction, a category that is just starting to find a place in serious

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scholarship. Novels like LeGuin’s Left Hand of Darkness are starting to be considered part of the Western Canon (Harold Bloom even agrees). LeGuin has won dozens of awards in her lifetime, though the vast majority of them are not the mainstream awards

(Newbery, National Book Award, Pulitzer), but specialized awards dedicated to science fiction and fantasy (Nebula, Hugo, Locus). The proliferation of prizes has made sure that LeGuin’s work has not gone unrecognized, but has also allowed for the big prizes to continue on in the same manner as they had before. As a professional writer, LeGuin is a part of a community of authors who tour, visit conventions, appear at literary events, and frequent the same book industry circles. Here, she claims to accept this award on behalf of a marginalized group within that profession.

Even as “nerd culture” has become more mainstream, as discussed above, the increasing numbers of niches in literature means that authors like LeGuin and the writers of the imagination may be increasingly segregated from the realist writers. In a contemporary bookstore, LeGuin might be shelved in the “Science Fiction” section, but an online vendor might use specific algorithms to suggest LeGuin’s novels under the category of “1970s Feminist Science Fiction” or “Award Winning Speculative Fiction

Series Books.” If books like Earthsea or The Left Hand of Darkness were shelved in such specific categories when they were first released, would Gaiman stumbled upon them? How do the increasingly specific bookstore categories like “Young Adult Realistic

Romance” and “Young Adult Speculative Fiction” change the way teens browse, encounter, and consume literature? And how will libraries, both public and school, respond to these specific marketing categories when evaluating, recommending and shelving books? While these 21st century marketing innovations make it easier for

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readers to find books just like the one they have just put down, it might also create generations of tunnel-vision readers who read heavily within one specific subgenre, assisted by helpful computer algorithms and ever-more specific categories.

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom – poets, visionaries – realists of a larger reality.

LeGuin points to the idea that the 21st century has already drastically changed the ways in which we live, work, learn, read, and experience the world. It seems to be a given that the next decade will look extremely different from this one. While LeGuin is right in acknowledging that this sea change will affect the book industry, she also indicates that the book industry, specifically writers of the imagination, will be able to affect the world.

As a science fiction writer, LeGuin is used to imagining the world differently from where it is now: her vision of the writer embodies Ernst Bloch’s concept of the utopian daydream (Bloch 91-94). LeGuin recognizes the value and importance of the poet and the fiction writer at a political moment where politicians thrust Science, Technology,

Engineering and Math degrees (STEM) forward as the degrees of the future, over the humanities and social sciences. The American school system has increasingly deemphasized the professionalism of the teacher, relying instead on rigorous standardized testing to evaluate learning and ensure teachers are not shirking their duties in the classroom. LeGuin’s assertion that we will need “realists of a larger reality” emphasizes her belief in the power of imagination to change the real world. As we have seen, librarians, teachers, and publishers have also seen the potential to change the world through literature, especially literature for children. LeGuin argues that the work

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done by these professions throughout the 20th century will become even more important in the 21st.

Right now, we need writers who know the difference between production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial.

Much as Anne Carroll Moore and her fellow pioneering librarians feared, the increasing cultural value of children’s literature also meant an increasing market value in the production and sales of children’s literature. LeGuin alleges here that editors in publishing houses are being increasingly pressured to shape books to fit easily into existing marketing categories and advertising strategies. Books like Watership Down and even Harry Potter were considered massively successful and some of their success can be attributed to the fact that they were innovative, outside of the traditional box. As markets continue to shift and change, it is important to remember that children’s literature itself is an invented marketing category of the late 19th century. In pushing books to conform to the existing market, large conglomerate publishers are denying themselves the opportunity to create new and innovative forms of art.

The long-running tension between popularity and quality can also be seen in this scenario, as LeGuin fears the quality of art will be sacrificed on the alter of bestsellerdom. LeGuin calls for responsible authorship and book publishing, thereby challenging the social credit of these groups: if publishers are only trying to make something profitable, then their professional status is in jeopardy.

I see my own publishers, in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an e-book six or seven times more than they charge customers.

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While the shift to digital technologies and e-readers could be compared to the

Paperback Revolution of the 1960s, there are new complications in this contemporary situation that were not present previously. First, the emergence of paperbacks in mainstream and trade literature did constitute a drastic change in the delivery systems for culturally “legitimate” texts. However, while paperback books did demand certain changes in display mechanisms and care, on an institutional level, they could still function within the existing system. Paperbacks could still be stocked on shelves, be tagged and stamped with due dates, and fit through the book return slots of existing public libraries. The choice for public libraries to stock VHS tapes, books on tape, CDs, and DVDs also indicated a shift in ethos but likewise, was still accomplished by repurposing existing shelves and display units.

LeGuin refers here to the current dispute between librarians and publishers over the cost and distribution rights of e-books in public libraries. When dealing with physical books or media, librarians most often order library copies of hardcover books, with special durable bindings that hold up well under constant use: these books are generally slightly more expensive than the mass-market copy hardcover would be, because the materials are higher quality. However, librarians might also purchase paperback copies of popular fiction, YA fiction, or genre fiction that are identical to mass-market copies and the same price. Some public libraries accept donations of mass-market fiction that are purchased directly from a bookstore or online retailer. Once the book has been sold, the library is allowed to lend that book to as many patrons as choose to borrow it, until the book physically deteriorates beyond usability.

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E-books, by virtue of being digital media, are controlled by Digital Rights Media codes (DRMs) embedded within the file that limits the number of devices or readers that can access that book. For an individual user, this may be an annoyance: you can only read your copy of The DaVinci Code on three different devices before you must purchase a new copy. For a public library, these limits undermine their previous model of lending. Millions of library patrons likely borrowed The DaVinci Code from their public library in the last decade: if the library had to pay a fee per borrower, librarians would be even less likely to stock popular texts. Some publishers view the shift to digital media as an opportunity to charge libraries per user for each e-book: others have attempted to price library editions of e-books much higher, while still limiting the number of patrons allowed to use that copy. The shift to digital media also creates a change in the fundamental infrastructure of libraries. E-books can not simply be picked up and read: they must be uploaded into a user’s device of choice (iPad, Kindle, laptop, smart phone) in order to become legible. E-books do not occupy space in the stacks: they exist on the library’s server. Likewise, e-books, as digital media, are not constrained to a single user at a time, since the media could theoretically be viewed on an infinite number of screens at the same time.

As public libraries continue to suffer from recession and post-recession budget cuts, e-books have created additional strains on their systems. For public libraries in affluent neighborhoods, simply securing e-book files is enough to make texts available to patrons; however, in poor urban neighborhoods or rural areas, the large majority of patrons do not own their own tablet computers or smart phones. Access to the Internet is likewise limited and patrons may not be as technologically savvy. Libraries are faced

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with whether to invest technology budgets into e-readers that patrons can borrow or

Internet-ready computers that patrons can use to apply for jobs, file taxes, or take online classes. With dwindling budgets for books, many libraries are unsure what digital media formats are worth investing in, and which will be obsolete within a decade. Librarians on a local level are permitted to make these kinds of decisions, based on their professionalism and social credit, but many within the ALA and library training programs at top universities are struggling to adapt to these new technologies and how they might change the professional work of the librarian in the 21st century.

We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience, and writers threatened by corporate fatwa. And I see a lot of us, the producers, who write the books and make the books, accepting this – letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish, what to write.

This is the section of LeGuin’s speech that got the most publicity and reaction in the press; likewise, the audience in the room when she gave this speech burst out into applause. Here, LeGuin addresses Amazon.com, the massive online retailer. Amazon was founded in 1994 as an online retailer to sell books. The company soon expanded to sell CDs, DVDs, software, textbooks and other materials traditionally found in a bookstore. In 2007, Amazon introduced the Kindle, a lightweight e-reader, and helped push e-books into the mainstream. The increasing popularity of Amazon, which provides a selection of millions of titles, all available for delivery to your home address, led to a seismic shift in the book industry and is largely credited with the bankruptcy of the brick-and-mortar super bookstore Borders.

On the one hand, Amazon has done some fantastic things for the book industry.

Hard to find books, rare books, and out-of-print books are listed on its website, sometimes through partnerships with third-party sellers like independent bookstores or

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specialty bookstores. Amazon has allowed millions of people to self-publish books and introduced the idea of allowing individuals to pay for a copy of a book printed just for them. Amazon has also built a complex algorithm that helps recommend additional texts to buyers, based on their browsing and purchase history. While this feature can act as a word-of-mouth advertisement tool (imagine Gaiman had received an email with a list of books like The Left Hand of Darkness when he was 12), it often reinforces the patterns of bestsellerdom and path dependencies we discussed in Chapter 6. Amazon closely guards how those algorithms work and so it is difficult to tell how independent those suggestions are of publisher-paid advertisement, bestseller lists, or other market interests.

On the other hand, Amazon has become such a huge entity in the book industry that it has solidified some negative practices. Amazon’s heavily discounted prices and free shipping for Prime members has undermined independent bookstores. Further,

Amazon has been accused of playing favorites with publishers and negotiating in bad faith with others. This includes the incident to which LeGuin refers, when Hachette

Publishing Group was in negotiations with Amazon about pricing for their books and the digital versions of those books. When both groups reached what felt like an impasse in negotiations, Amazon retaliated by removing the “Order” button from the pages of hundreds of Hachette’s books. While this tactic was largely condemned in the mainstream media, sparking Twitter campaigns to order books directly from Hachette or, better yet, to purchase Hachette books from independent bookstores, Amazon

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continued with the practice until a contract was reached (and some alleged even for weeks after).2

Amazon has introduced a new form of bookselling into the complex web of book industry professionals and while everyone agrees that it has become a major player in the book market, it is still unclear about how its practices, policies, and innovations will affect the industry in the future. Amazon’s infrastructure, including a bestseller list and personalized recommendation pages, places this online bookseller as a major influence on the 21st century book and media industry, including children’s literature.

Books aren’t just commodities; the profit motive is often in conflict with the aims of art. We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words. I’ve had a long career as a writer, and a good one, in good company. Here at the end of it, I don’t want to watch American literature get sold down the river. We who live by writing and publishing want and should demand our fair share of the proceeds; but the name of our beautiful reward isn’t profit. Its name is freedom.

LeGuin concludes her speech by invoking the power of literature to change the world.

While she decries the profit motives of capitalism that she argues has compromised the work of the author in our contemporary society, she also reminds the audience that literature is often an agent of change. While she asserts that authors should continue to demand their fair share of the royalties and rights, especially against the publishers and booksellers that she sees as overly greedy, she also reminds authors that the rewards of their craft can be much more than financial. LeGuin’s defiant speech speaks to a belief in the power of literature to challenge the unjust, improve broken systems, and educate future generations to be better. I believe that the early pioneers of children’s

2 For more on this controversy, start with Ellis-Petersen’s article in the Guardian.

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literature would readily agree and would have applauded LeGuin’s speech from behind their desks in the children’s publishing department or from within the stacks of the children’s reading rooms. At 85 years old, LeGuin is speaking to the next generation of authors, publishers, educators, and readers. Together, these groups will help chart out new fantastic worlds and present new ideas to 21st century children. LeGuin is right to warn them of changes in the field, even as she benefits from those changes: she would not have received this award 50 years ago. As the 21st century continues, taste cultures and the industry will continue to shift and change: LeGuin here urges her fellow authors to take notice, to stay informed, and to continue writing for what she deems to be the right reasons.

Handler’s Joke

While LeGuin’s speech was clearly a highlight of the evening, unfortunately, the event was not without controversy. Daniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, the author of A

Series of Unfortunate Events, acted as the master of ceremonies for the evening. After presenting the award for young people’s literature to Jacqueline Woodson for her memoir Brown Girl Dreaming, Snicket made a racially-based joke. Handler joked that he had told Woodson that if she won the award as he expected she would, he would be sure to tell the audience a specific anecdote about herself.

I told Jackie she was going to win, and I said that if she won, I would tell all of you something I learned about her this summer, which is that Jackie Woodson is allergic to watermelon. Just let that sink in your mind.

Apparently aware of the controversial nature of this statement, Handler continued: “And

I said, “You have to put that in a book.” And she said, “You put it in a book.” And I said,

“I’m only writing a book about a black girl who’s allergic to watermelon if I get a blurb

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from you, Cornell West, Toni Morrison, and Barack Obama saying ‘This guy’s OK. This guy’s fine.”

Before the ceremony concluded, social media had begun reporting on the joke and demanding for Handler to apologize. Soon, every story that mentioned Woodson’s

Book Award win also mentioned the watermelon joke. In fact, Woodson’s win received more attention because of the controversy. Many people demanded Handler apologize, both on Twitter and in articles in popular media. Other critics noted that earlier in the evening, Handler had joked about how he would never win a Coretta Scott King Award, since it is an award reserved for black authors of young adult fiction. The next day,

Handler did issue an apology on Twitter, claiming that “My job at last night’s National

Book Awards #NBAwards was to shine a light on tremendous writers, including

Jacqueline Woodson and not to overshadow their achievements with my own ill- conceived attempts at humor. I clearly failed, and I’m sorry” (Handler).

Handler’s ill-fated jokes demonstrated that the world of children’s literature is not immune to more adult concerns like race, gender, sexuality, or class. Many criticized

Handler for tarnishing a shining moment for Woodson with the specter of racial insensitivity. Others lamented that the coverage of Woodson’s win would forever be linked with this “joke” and the incident would forever be a footnote in the story of her career.

On 28 November, Woodson published an editorial in the New York Times titled

“The Pain of the Watermelon Joke.” In it, she recounts her personal experience with a camp song that she found in library book: it was illustrated with “caricatures of sleepy- looking black people sitting by trees, grinning and eating watermelon. Slowly, the

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hideousness of the stereotype began to sink in. In the eyes of those who told and repeated the jokes, we were shuffling, googly-eyed and lesser than.” She wonders if her allergy to watermelon was actually a “deep physical revulsion that came from the psychological impression and weight of the association.” She recounts the experience of hearing Handler, her friend, make this joke to an audience still in the midst of a standing ovation following her acceptance speech. She writes:

In a few short words, the audience and I were asked to take a step back from everything I’ve ever written, a step back from the power and meaning of the National Book Award, lest we forget, lest I forget, where I came from. By making light of that deep and troubled history, he showed that he believed we were at a point where we could laugh about it all. His historical context, unlike my own, came from a place of ignorance.

Woodson notes that despite the We Need Diverse Books grassroots campaign and the fact that three of the twenty National Book Awards finalists were people of color, the publishing industry is still heavily homogenous. “The world of publishing has been getting shaken like a pecan tree and called to the floor because of its lack of diversity in the workplace.”

This lack of diversity in present not just in award winners, but also throughout the publishing industry. A 2014 Publishers Weekly survey reported that 89% of respondents who identified themselves by race were white, 3% were Asian, 3% Hispanic and 1%

African-American (Milliot). This report was released in September 2014, but was picked up again and re-circulated through social media as a part of the Handler controversy.

As this project has often noted, the history of children’s literature in America has been dominated by whites. Further, the idealized vision of “the child” that American authors, illustrators, editors, publishers, booksellers, librarians, educators, and academics have been working with has historically been framed in white, upper-middle-

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class, Christian, male, heteronormative, able-bodied terms. The demands of the We

Need Diverse Books campaign asks professionals in the field to try to imagine the real children that exist outside of that idealized, unrealized concept while asking parents, educators and other book buyers to seek out books that support this more diverse vision of childhood. The start of 21st century has already featured wide-reaching calls for increased diversity in children’s literature especially, but also in mainstream media.

Hopefully, the emerging taste territories of the coming decade will be informed by more diverse characters written by a wide variety of authors, illustrators, and storytellers.

What Comes Next

Children’s literature has had a long history. Even in the course of the past century and a half, children’s literature has grown, changed, evolved, and transformed in ways unimaginable to the early pioneers who worked to bring it into the mainstream.

While we currently stand at a moment of great change, children’s literature seems to have become a permanent addition to our culture. The 21st century will likely feature many uncharted territories in terms of diversity, technology, marketing, and controversy.

The hierarchy among children’s literature professionals will likewise continue to shift as a result of these changes. What these three speakers at the National Book Awards ceremony represent together is that children’s literature can often be a catalyst for change, whether it is in the mind of a young boy, the literary hierarchy, or the complex racial politics of America.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Rebekah Fitzsimmons received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in English from the University of Florida in 2015. Her work focuses on children’s literature and American culture. She also completed her Master of Arts degree at UF in 2010. She has published articles in Children’s Literature and the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts and has forthcoming chapters in two edited collections: The Early Reader in Children’s

Literature and Culture, edited by Jennifer M. Miskec and Annette Wannamaker and the

Prizing Children’s Literature Collection, edited by Kenneth Kidd and Joseph Thomas.

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