Since I (Steve) began studying Young Adult in earnest 2002, I kept thinking about the legacy of the early writers and whether or not a default group of classics has been created within the classification. This is a great question and one that won't be resolved in one post. Nevertheless, one of the people you want in the conversation is Gary Salvner. His contribution as a scholar, as the executive director of ALAN, one of the founders of the Youngstown English Festival, and as an all round great guy assures his place in the conversation. In this post, he revisits his early involvement with Young Adult Literature and positions some questions about early authors and the continuing legacy of their works.
Gary's post is a valuable addition to anyone's set of resources for teaching literature, for marking some foundations, and for directly suggesting that we now work to embrace wider diversity in our field. This is one that should be bookmarked and shared with students at every level. Who knows, you just might be inspired to reread a few books or discover some of these authors for the first time.
Gary's post is a valuable addition to anyone's set of resources for teaching literature, for marking some foundations, and for directly suggesting that we now work to embrace wider diversity in our field. This is one that should be bookmarked and shared with students at every level. Who knows, you just might be inspired to reread a few books or discover some of these authors for the first time.
On Valentine's Day, the Old and New: A Life-Long Love Affair with YA by Gary Salvner
Recently, I (Gary) had an occasion to think back on where we have been in the field of young adult literature. I was gathering tributes for a memory book to be distributed this spring at our 40th anniversary Youngstown (OH) State University English Festival, and I found myself writing letters to many of the early titans in our field, including Richard Peck, Cynthia Voigt, Sue Ellen Bridgers, M.E. Kerr, Bruce Brooks and Robert Newton Peck. I surveyed another list of former Festival guests who had left us--Robert Cormier, Paul Zindel, Rosa Guy, Norma Fox and Harry Mazer, and William Sleator—and I got to musing about what they had given us and how this currently robust field of young adult literature might have evolved since they were writing.
About what they have given us. Certainly they gave us touchstones: Cormier’s The Chocolate War, Zindel’s The Pigman, Sue Ellen Bridgers’ lovely Home Before Dark, Voigt’s Homecoming saga, the futuristic House of Stairs by Bill Sleator, Bruce Brook’s marvelous Midnight Hour Encores, and Kerr’s great works addressing class and gender issues--Deliver Us from Evie and Gentlehands, for example. These are works that still merit a place in any classroom library.
As to how we’ve evolved, though, another feature of these early works struck me when I noticed how almost singularly “white” they are. Those early days of young adult literature were not terribly different from most literature and popular culture of the 1960s and early ‘70s—an assertion of a dominant Caucasian culture that rarely so much as acknowledged the diversity of our land.
I remember back even farther than the 40 years of YSU English Festivals I’ve helped to run. Almost fifty years ago I was standing in a middle school classroom in urban St. Louis, Missouri, one of my first teaching assignments. The students were completely different from me—all African-American, most living in public housing projects (including the infamous Pruitt-Igoe, one of the most notorious experiments in high density public housing in America). I recall feeling desperate about what I might give them to read. Our short story collection contained stories by O. Henry, Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” etc. I don’t recall a single story in the book portraying young people who looked and lived like my students. (In fact, now that I think of it, I don’t even recall a single teen character in those works, and offhand, I can’t think of a single female protagonist.) Rooting around in a St. Louis bookstore one day (there was no Amazon back then), I came across Frank Bonham’s Durango Street (published in 1965), one of our very first urban young adult novels, and tried it out with mixed success. I was a rough go, connecting with those students.
I remember back even farther than the 40 years of YSU English Festivals I’ve helped to run. Almost fifty years ago I was standing in a middle school classroom in urban St. Louis, Missouri, one of my first teaching assignments. The students were completely different from me—all African-American, most living in public housing projects (including the infamous Pruitt-Igoe, one of the most notorious experiments in high density public housing in America). I recall feeling desperate about what I might give them to read. Our short story collection contained stories by O. Henry, Jack London’s “To Build a Fire,” Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” etc. I don’t recall a single story in the book portraying young people who looked and lived like my students. (In fact, now that I think of it, I don’t even recall a single teen character in those works, and offhand, I can’t think of a single female protagonist.) Rooting around in a St. Louis bookstore one day (there was no Amazon back then), I came across Frank Bonham’s Durango Street (published in 1965), one of our very first urban young adult novels, and tried it out with mixed success. I was a rough go, connecting with those students.
By contrast, I think of the fresh diversity that YA lit has given young readers today. Stories about African-Americans, Hispanics, Native Americans, and immigrants from many countries. Stories that not only treat, but also honor, gender diversity, cultural variety, and ethnically rich settings and situations. In some ways, we’ve come a long way from those early years of YA, and it’s been a good and fruitful journey.
But I also think of literary quality, and here the road seems to angle not as certainly upward. Without a doubt, some YA writers today are giving us exhilarating, rich, and complex works—people like M.T. Anderson, Marcus Zusak, and Jennifer Donnelly. The range of literary types—from contemporary fiction to fantasy to historical and dystopian fiction, to verse novels, graphic novels, and nonfiction—is, I think, broader than it has ever been, and that’s to be celebrated as we also acknowledge with the body of current YA literature that readers don’t all look alike, read alike, and search for relevance (or even pleasure) alike.
But I also think of literary quality, and here the road seems to angle not as certainly upward. Without a doubt, some YA writers today are giving us exhilarating, rich, and complex works—people like M.T. Anderson, Marcus Zusak, and Jennifer Donnelly. The range of literary types—from contemporary fiction to fantasy to historical and dystopian fiction, to verse novels, graphic novels, and nonfiction—is, I think, broader than it has ever been, and that’s to be celebrated as we also acknowledge with the body of current YA literature that readers don’t all look alike, read alike, and search for relevance (or even pleasure) alike.
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And yet that matter of quality. I wonder how contemporary YA literature stands against those early classics in our field. Do we have writers shaping settings with as much care as Voigt does in taking us to the Chesapeake Bay region, or Rich Wallace does in Wrestling Sturbridge? Do we have themes jump out with the same urgency as M.E. Kerr and Sue Ellen Bridgers deliver them? Do we have a contemporary work as stunningly complex in plot and structure as Cormier’s I Am the Cheese? Do we have writers today who attend to every word stylistically as Richard Peck or Bruce Brooks did? Has there ever been a better first line written than Cormier’s in The Chocolate War? (“They murdered him.”) Or S.E. Hinton’s in The Outsiders? (“When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.”)
But perhaps I’ve set up an unnecessary competition between early and contemporary works in our field. Certainly the point isn’t to put them into battle and declare a winner—to assert that old is better than new, or vice versa.
Maybe here is the point: As we survey the hundreds, even thousands, of new YA titles that are published annually today, perhaps we might simultaneously reach back for some of those great works that have served us for decades. Perhaps we’ll find in re-reading them a realization that we’ve been given quite a remarkable foundation by these early writers. Perhaps we’ll be tempted to pull them out for our students and say, “Here’s one to try. This is quite some book.”
I think I’ll go read The Pigman again. It’s been a while.
Maybe here is the point: As we survey the hundreds, even thousands, of new YA titles that are published annually today, perhaps we might simultaneously reach back for some of those great works that have served us for decades. Perhaps we’ll find in re-reading them a realization that we’ve been given quite a remarkable foundation by these early writers. Perhaps we’ll be tempted to pull them out for our students and say, “Here’s one to try. This is quite some book.”
I think I’ll go read The Pigman again. It’s been a while.
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