Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  In 1956 a third early critic, Frank G. Jennings, was even blunter, grumbling, “The stuff of adolescent literature, for the most part, is mealy-mouthed, gutless, and pointless” (226). This may smack of overstatement for dramatic effect, but it is true, I think, that “much of the literature written for young adults from 1940 through 1966 goes largely and legitimately ignored today” (Nilsen and Donelson 1993, 574).

  Books or Ladders?

  Adolescence has always been viewed as a period of transition, of moving upward from one stage of development to another, and so it is not surprising that its literature, in the early years at least, should have been viewed as a ladder—or, more precisely, a rung on a ladder between children’s and adult literature. This idea of reading ladders may have been the inspiration of Dora V. Smith, who, in the 1930s at the University of Minnesota, taught the first college-level course in adolescent literature. At least one of her most celebrated students, G. Robert Carlsen (1984, 29), thinks so, recalling that “in her classes we constructed ladders placing titles on the rungs according to our judgment of quality … through reading guidance a teacher was to move readers from one level to a higher one.”1

  Consistent with this concept is the corollary notion of stages of reading development (which echoes psychological stages of adolescent development!); that is, it is possible to identify certain specific types—or categories—of fiction that will appeal to young readers at certain specific ages or grade levels in school. In his influential 1967 work Books and the Teen-age Reader (Harper), Carlsen identified three such stages: (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. 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.

  Carlsen linked these aspects of reading development to the University of Chicago psychologist Robert J. Havighurst’s influential theory of developmental tasks, which seemed to suggest that if teenagers are to successfully climb the ladder of personal development from childhood to adulthood, they must successfully complete seven distinct life tasks: (1) achieve new and more mature relations with age mates of both sexes; (2) achieve masculine or feminine social roles; (3) accept their physiques and use their bodies effectively; (4) achieve emotional independence of parents and other adults; (5) prepare for marriage and family life; (6) prepare for economic careers; and (7) acquire a set of values and an ethical system as a guide to behavior (i.e., develop an ideology that leads to socially responsible behavior). “To accomplish [the tasks],” he claimed, “will lead to happiness and to success with later tasks, while failure leads to unhappiness in the individual, disapproval by society, and difficulty with later tasks” (Havighurst 1988, 61).

  Havighurst’s ideas influenced work other than Carlsen’s. Evidence of this may be inferred from the Alm article. In it, the critic described what he perceived as the prevailing focus of young adult writers’ attention: “In the main,” he asserted, “these authors deal with an adolescent’s relationships with others his own age, with his parents and other adults, and with such worries as deciding upon and preparing for a job, ‘going steady,’ marrying and facing the responsibilities of adulthood” (Alm 1955, 315). Though unacknowledged, this simply echoes Havighurst’s list of development tasks.

  Carlsen (1984, 29) was more candid, recalling of his own teaching methods: “I applied Robert Havighurst’s concept of developmental tasks to adolescent books. It seemed to me that the most popular and successful titles, like Daly’s ‘Seventeenth Summer,’ were books in which characters were dealing with one or more of the developmental tasks. So we looked not only at the story content, but also at the conflicts and turmoils besetting the characters.”

  Personally, I think the persistent attempt to transform literature into utilitarian ladders too often turned the early critics’ attention from the work to the personal problems of the reader; that act, in turn, invited the transformation of a promising literature into the series of undemanding, formula-driven problem novels that would emerge in the sixties and seventies. I also think that frogmarching literature into ready-made category pens labeled for reading-age suitability homogenizes readers, smacks of the didactic and dogmatic, and threatens to turn literature from art to tool. Small wonder that young readers, beginning to feel manipulated, joined their voices in the chorus that greeted the looming new decade: “Never trust anybody over thirty.”

  The Times, They Were A’—Well, You Know…

  This brings us to the 1960s, when the times and the literature would both be a-changin’! If one song—nasal balladeer Bob Dylan’s 1964 release “The Times They Are a-Changin’”—epitomized the social mood of this turbulent decade, one novel did the same for the nascent genre soon to be called young adult literature. As had been the case in the 1940s with Maureen Daly and her Seventeenth Summer, the sea change would arrive with the appearance of a single young writer—again, a teenage girl—and the publication of her first novel. This time the book was The Outsiders, by S. E. Hinton of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  And so it is that we have two young women and two books, each with farreaching influence on young adult literature and each with enormous popular attention because of the novelty of their authors themselves being teenagers. But there the similarities end and the differences begin. For starters, Hinton was writing about boys, not girls (one reason her publisher suggested she use her initials instead of her given name, Susan Elizabeth). And she wasn’t writing about tree-shaded streets in small-town middle America. Instead, she was writing about mean urban streets where teenagers didn’t have time to agonize over first love and dates for the prom; they were too busy agonizing over whether they would survive the next skirmish in their ongoing war with a rival gang.

  For it was warfare that Hinton (1967a) was writing about—class warfare as symbolized by the two gangs that appear in The Outsiders: the Greasers and the Socs. Soc was short for “Socials, the jet set, the Westside rich kids” who “wreck houses and throw beer blasts for kicks” (10–11). (The Soc as a term and a social type had been around since the early fifties. One of the students in Daly’s 1951 Profile of Youth is referred to as “a ‘real sosh,’ short for ‘social.’ That meant he was considered one of the right crowd, dated the right girls and went to the right dances” (109). As for the economically deprived Greasers, they are “almost like hoods” and are given to their own antisocial behavior— they “steal things and drive old souped-up cars and hold up gas stations” (11).

  Significantly, Hinton’s story is told in the first-person voice of one of the Greasers: fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis, who lives with his older brothers Sodapop and Darry, the latter of whom acts in loco parentis, because the Curtis boys’ real parents have been killed in a car wreck before the story begins. As Ponyboy reports, “The three of us get to stay together only as long as we behave” (11). They try to avoid the more lawbreaking Greaser activities, contenting themselves, instead, with wearing their “tuff” hair long, dressing in blue jeans and T-shirts, and lifting a fist in the inevitable rumble.

  Hinton’s was not the first novel to deal with gangs. Frank Bonham’s story of Los Angeles, Durango Street, had been published in 1965, but there was something about The Outsiders that captured the imagination of its readers and spawned a new kind of literature, “books,” as Richard Peck (1994, 154) has put it, “about young people parents thought their children didn’t know.” Hinton knew them, though; she went to school with them every day in Tulsa. She knew from personal observation what their lives were like, but as a reader, she didn’t find that kind of first-person reality being depicted in the pages of young
adult literature.

  “The world is changing,” she wrote in an impassioned New York Times Book Review article, “yet the authors of books for teen-agers are still 15 years behind the times. In the fiction they write, romance is still the most popular theme, with a horse-and-the-girl-who-loved-it coming in a close second” (Hinton 1967b, 26). Hinton continued, “Nowhere is the drive-in social jungle mentioned… . In short, where is the reality[?]” Hinton was not alone in wondering that.

  In 1966 George Woods, then children’s book editor of the New York Times Book Review, wrote, “One looks for modernity, boldness, for realism. The teen-age novel, especially, should grapple with the delights and the dilemmas of today’s teen-agers. Delicacy and restraint are necessarily called for, yet all too often this difficult problem is resolved through avoidance. A critic in touch with the world and aware of the needs of the young expects to see more handling of neglected subjects: narcotics, addiction, illegitimacy, alcoholism, pregnancy, discrimination, retardation. There are few, if any, definitive works in these areas” (169).

  Not quite four months before Hinton’s piece appeared, Nat Hentoff delivered a similarly scathing indictment of young adult literature in the Times. Writing of his own first YA novel, he asserted, “’Jazz Country’ failed, as have most books directed at teen-agers… . [M]y point is that the reality of being young—the tensions, the sensual yearnings and sometime satisfactions, the resentment against the educational lock step that makes children fit the schools, the confusing recognition of their parents’ hypocracies and failures—all this is absent from most books for young readers” (Hentoff 1967, 3).

  A year later the Newbery Medal-winning author Maia Wojciechowska (1968, 13) joined the chorus, criticizing authors of books for the young who “keep going back to their own turn-of-the-century childhoods, or write tepid little stories of high school proms, broken and amended friendships, phony-sounding conflicts between parents and children, and boring accounts of what they consider ‘problems.’ The gulf between the real child of today and his fictional counterpart must be bridged.”

  Hinton’s great success came in managing to bridge that gap and, by giving fictional counterparts to the real teenagers she knew, to introduce to young adult fiction new kinds of “real” characters—whether they were the alienated, socioeconomically disadvantaged Greasers or the equally alienated but socioeconomically advantaged Socs.

  Her novel was innovative, too, in its introduction of thematic relevance. Hinton (1967b, 26) had been quite right when she pointed out, in her New York Times piece, that “violence, too, is part of teenagers’ lives.” Before her, though, authors had tended to ignore this basic reality of adolescent life. But Hinton used it as a tool to define the daily lives of her characters, both as individuals and as gang members, and this use was groundbreaking and consistent with the demands of the realistic novel.

  As we have seen, Hinton rejected the literature that had been written for her generation, calling it “the inane junk lining the teen-age shelf of the library.” And her rejection of the established literature for young adults is also consistent with the universal rejection of the status quo, which was such a hallmark of the iconoclastic sixties, a decade that belonged to the young.

  Because of her own youth, Hinton came to symbolize that rejection as well as its replacement by a new kind of literature. Richard Peck (1993, 19), writing of the authors, including himself, whose work would follow hers, has said she “may be the mother of us all.” The Young Adult Library Services Association confirmed that assessment in 1988 with the presentation, to Hinton, of the first Margaret A. Edwards Award, which recognizes lifetime achievement in writing young adult books.

  So Hinton’s significant place in the evolution of young adult literature is secure, yet reading her first novel today, one is struck by what an odd hybrid it is: part realistic fiction and part romantic fantasy that, at its self-indulgent worst, exemplifies what the critic Terrence Rafferty (1994, 93) has called “morbid adolescent romanticism.” Her Greasers are such romantically idealized figures, in fact, that it is small wonder that Ponyboy is, himself, enchanted by other romantic figures, the Southern cavaliers of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. There is some verisimilitude in this, however. The sociologist Frederick Thrasher had earlier, in his 1929 study of 1,313 Chicago gangs, pointed out that gang members placed a high value on physical prowess, peer loyalty, and even chivalry (Kett 1977).

  Another element of romanticism is Hinton’s sometimes-sentimental treatment of her theme of lost innocence, which may, in turn, invite some revisionist comparisons with J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and his band of Lost Boys.

  This loss of innocence was also the theme of J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (Little, Brown, 1951), a more distinguished work of fiction that, though published for adults, is also a more viable model for the modern young adult novel than is Hinton’s. Catcher’s most powerful contribution is the idiosyncratic, first-person voice of its narrator, Holden Caulfield. But the book is also quintessentially adolescent in its tone, attitudes, and choice of narrative incidents, many of which are rite of passage, including the obligatory (and obligatorily embarrassing) encounter with a prostitute. The latter introduction of sexuality may explain why none of the early critics of YA books—Alm, Burton, Jennings, Carlsen—included Catcher in their analyses (Catcher did make it into Carlsen’s 1971 revision).

  Wry, cynical, funny, and intensely self-conscious, Holden’s voice is one of the more original in American fiction, and the story he tells is a marvel of sustained style and tone. Even more than Seventeenth Summer, Catcher helped establish a tradition of first-person narrative voice for young adult fiction.

  Holden’s tone and manner are clearly echoed in the work of Paul Zindel, whose own first novel The Pigman was published in 1968, a scant year after Hinton’s. Zindel’s debt to Salinger is the more obvious, as his characters, like Salinger’s, hail from the urban East—New York City, to be precise. Another YA pioneer, John Donovan, whose first novel I’ll Get There, It Better Be Worth the Trip was published in 1969, also employed the New York setting and, like Zindel, echoed Holden’s unmistakable voice and attitude.

  Because Zindel was an accomplished playwright and a demonstrated master of dialogue (he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1971), it’s not surprising that he chose to tell his story in not one but two first-person voices: those of teenage friends John and Lorraine, whose brash, colloquial tone invites further comparison with Holden’s. There are other similarities: John, like Holden, is both “extremely handsome” and a prodigiously gifted liar. He hates school, too, and has a horror of being a “phony in the crowd” (Zindel 1968, 71).

  Further, Holden’s favorite word is madman, and after having some kind of indeterminate breakdown, he tells his story “about this madman stuff” from a sanitarium where he has been sent “to take it easy” (Salinger 1951, 1). There are numerous references to mental illness in The Pigman, too. Lorraine tells readers “how really disturbed” two of her classmates are and believes herself to be paranoid. For his part, John announces he is a lunatic. Neither of the two is really insane, of course, only terminally smart-alecky.

  Zindel’s biographer, Jack Forman (1994, 933), summarized critical opinion: “’The Pigman’ was a groundbreaking event because—along with S. E. Hinton’s ‘The Outsiders’—it transformed what had been called the teen ‘junior novel’ from a predictable, stereotyped story about high school sports and dances to one about complex teenage protagonists dealing with real concerns.”

  Complex? Real? Perhaps—but John and Lorraine seem more types of disaffected modern youths than real characters (and, frankly, their narrative voices are so similar as to be sometimes indistinguishable). Compared with their parents, however, they are positively Chekhovian in their complexities. Zindel seems to have taken George Woods’s thoughts about adult hypocrisy to heart, for John’s and Lorraine’s parents are one-dimensional cartoon versions of prevailing adult stereotypes. J
ohn thinks, “I would rather be dead than to turn into the kind of grown-up people I knew” (Zindel 1968, 178).

  Given their respective romanticism and dramatic hyperbole, it’s a bit surprising that Hinton and Zindel have traditionally been accorded the lion’s share of the credit for ushering in a new age of modern, realistic young adult fiction. Especially when a third writer, whose first young adult novel was also published in 1967, served up an authentically realistic work of fiction in terms of theme, character, setting, style, and resolution. I refer to Robert Lipsyte, whose gritty, often hard-edged novel The Contender (1967) offers a richly realized theme—becoming an individual and transforming the self—that speaks to the quintessential adolescent experience. His protagonist, Alfred Brooks, is a black teenager living with his aunt in a tiny Harlem apartment. For Alfred, the future offers nothing but dead ends—until he discovers Donatelli’s Gym and learns that, though he may not have the killer instinct necessary to become a successful boxer, he does have the necessary strength of character to become a contender in the larger arena of life.

  Lipsyte, like Zindel, was already an established writer before turning to young adult fiction. At the age of twenty-seven, he was one of two internationally syndicated sports columnists for the New York Times. His experience as a journalist, trained to search for the telling detail and for reporting the unflinching, though often unpleasant, truth guaranteed a book that is a marvel of verisimilitude in the details of its setting: the boxing world and its gritty, New York streets backdrop. The characters, even the minor ones, are real people, not conventional types. They have believable motivations and authentic reactions to one another and to the situations in which they find themselves. With four decades of hindsight, it now seems that it is The Contender and not The Outsiders or The Pigman that is a model for the kind of novel that Woods, Hentoff, and Hinton herself had called for in the articles cited earlier in this chapter. This revisionist critical opinion was reflected in the long-overdue awarding of the Margaret A. Edwards Award to Lipsyte in 2001.