Guest post by Jerry Griswold
“The Great Y.A. Debate of 2014” has become so pervasive that the New York Times Book Review provided a summary of the controversy in late June. In one corner is Ruth Graham and a few supporters. Grown tired of girlfriends keen on young-adult fiction (The Hunger Games, The Fault of Our Stars, et al.), Graham asserted in a provocative essay in Slate that “adults should be embarrassed about reading literature written for children.” In the other corner seems to be nearly everyone else on Twitter, those unashamed of their juvenile taste AND PROVOKED TO UPPER CASE.
Of course, Graham may only be playing the curmudgeon to provoke clicks in such numbers that the bean counters at digital publications swoon. Be that as it may, she seems ignorant of literary history when she flatly asserts that “It can be hard to remember that once upon a time, an adult might have felt embarrassed to be caught reading [a novel written for teenagers] . . . . The once-unseemly notion that it’s acceptable for not-young adults to read young-adult fiction is now conventional wisdom.”
If Graham had done her homework, she would have discovered that the opposite is the case. As I point out in my forthcoming book Audacious Kids: The Classic American Children’s Story, the bestseller lists of the past show that young and old readers happily kept company:
1865–1869: Our Mutual Friend, Hans Brinker, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Ragged Dick, Little Women, Innocents Abroad
1870–1879: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, The Luck of Roaring Camp, Little Men, Around the World in Eighty Days, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
1880–1889: Uncle Remus, Ben-Hur, Madame Bovary, Heidi, Treasure Island, A Child’s Garden of Verses, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Little Lord Fauntleroy, King Solomon’s Mines, War and Peace
1890–1899: Black Beauty, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Prisoner of Zenda, The Red Badge of Courage, Quo Vadis
1900–1914: Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, The Virginian, The Call of the Wild, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Penrod, Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna, Tarzan of the Apes
Indeed, our current era–where some 50% of the readers of the Harry Potter books or the Hunger Games trilogy are well beyond the age of eighteen–is not some aberration, but a return to familiar circumstances. Remember, in days of yore, young and old sat around the fire and listened to fairy tales together.
Jerry Griswold is professor emeritus of literature at San Diego State University and former director of the National Center for the Study of Children’s Literature. He is the author of seven books, including Audacious Kids: The Classic American Children’s Story and Feeling Like a Kid: Childhood and Children’s Literature, both published by Johns Hopkins University Press.
