Young adult literature
Young adult literature is typically written for readers aged 12 to 18 and includes most of the themes found in adult fiction, such as family dysfunction, substance abuse, alcoholism, and sexuality.
The earliest known use of term young adult occurred in 1942. Prior to the 1930s teenagers, adolescents and young adults were still considered children in society. After teenagers were recognized as a distinct social group, librarians developed the category of young adult literature to help bridge the gap between children's literature and adult literature. According to a study conducted in 2023, 55% of young adult literature consumers were over 18 years of age. 78% of adult consumers purchased with the intent to read themselves. Of these adult buyers, 51% were between ages 30 and 44. This highlights the fact that readers of young adult literature are often adults.
Definitions
Author and academic Michael Cart states that the term young adult literature "first found common usage in the late 1960s, in reference to realistic fiction that was set in the real, contemporary world and addressed problems, issues, and life circumstances of interest to young readers aged approximately 12–18". However, "The term 'young adult literature' is inherently amorphous, for its constituent terms 'young adult' and 'literature' are dynamic, changing as culture and society — which provide their context — change", and "even those who study and teach it have not reached a consensus on a definition".Victor Malo-Juvera and Crag Hill, in "The Young Adult Canon: A Literary Solar System", note that in 2019 there was no consensus on the definition of young adult literature and list a number of definitions, including:
- Books that readers aged 12 to 20 chose independently
- Literature written for young people aged 11 to 18 and books marked as "young adult" by a publisher
- Literature including a teenager who is the main character and who, as the center of the plot, engages in problems related to and relatable to the lives of teenagers
- Novels told by "a teen protagonist speaking from an adolescent point of view, with all the limitations of understanding that implies"
History
Librarians first defined this new category of fiction, in particular librarians from the New York Public Library. The NYPL's first annual Books for Young People list was sent in 1929 to schools and libraries across the country. Then "In 1944 NYPL librarian Margaret Scoggin changed the name of her library journal column from 'Books for Older Boys and Girls' to 'Books for Young Adults', and the genre was christened with a name that has lasted to this day". Initially the YA genre "tended to feature the same" boy and girl love story. But in the 1960s the novels developed to more fully examining the lives of adolescents. Particularly noteworthy was S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders.Pre-20th century
French historian Philippe Ariès argues, in his 1962 book Centuries of Childhood, that the modern concept of childhood only emerged in recent times. He argues that children were in the past not considered as greatly different from adults and were not given significantly different treatment. Furthermore, "Teenagers weren't a designated demographic in most respects until around World War II, due in part to advances in psychology and sociological changes, like the abolishment of child labor". With this development came the marketing of "clothes, music, films, radio programs, and... the novel" for young adults.On the other hand, Sarah Trimmer, in 1802, recognized young adults as a distinct age group, describing "young adulthood" as lasting from ages 14 to 21. In her children's literature periodical, The Guardian of Education, Trimmer introduced the terms "Books for Children" and "Books for Young Persons", establishing terms of reference for young adult literature that still remain in use.
"At the beginning of the eighteenth century", according to M. O. Grenby:
A number of works by eighteenth and nineteenth-century authors, though not written specifically for young readers, have appealed to them. Novels by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Edith Nesbit.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, published in 1865 and one of the best-known works of Victorian literature, has had widespread influence on popular culture and literature, especially in the fantasy genre. It is credited as helping end an era of didacticism in children's literature, inaugurating an era in which writing for children aimed to "delight or entertain". The tale has had a lasting popularity with adults as well as with children. It was inspired when, on 4 July 1862, Lewis Carroll and Reverend Robinson Duckworth rowed in a boat with the three young daughters of scholar Henry Liddell: Lorina ; Alice ; and Edith Mary. During the trip Carroll told the girls a story that he described in his diary as "Alice's Adventures Under Ground" and which his journal says he "undertook to write out for Alice". She finally got the manuscript more than two years later. A shortened version for young children, The Nursery "Alice", was published in 1890.
A number of novels by Robert Louis Stevenson were first published in serial form, in a weekly children's literary magazine, Young Folks, including Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Black Arrow. This magazine was for boys and girls of an older age than many of its contemporaries.
Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer is described by publisher Simon & Schuster as "The classic tale of a young boy's adventures on the Mississippi in the nineteenth century". The same description can be applied to its sequel, Huckleberry Finn. The protagonist is an early adolescent who is navigating the hardships of society with an entertainment aspect of adventure that ties in history with literary merit.
20th century
According to journalist Erin Blakemore, "Though young adult literature had existed since at least Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series, which was published in the 1930s, teachers and librarians were slow to accept books for adolescents as a genre".In 1942, Seventeenth Summer – called by some the first young adult novel – by seventeen-year-old Maureen Daly, was published. Its themes were especially relevant to teenagers, underaged drinking, driving, dating, and angst.
Another early example is the Heinlein juveniles, which were science fiction novels written by Robert A. Heinlein for Scribner's young-adult line, beginning with Rocket Ship Galileo in 1947. Scribner's published eleven more between 1947 and 1958, but the thirteenth, Starship Troopers, was instead published by Putnam. The intended market was teenaged boys. A fourteenth novel, Podkayne of Mars, featured a teenaged girl as the protagonist.
In the 1950s, The Catcher in the Rye attracted the attention of the adolescent readers although it was written for adults. The themes of adolescent angst and alienation in the novel have become synonymous with young adult literature.
The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien are highly successful fantasy novels, which are read to young children and read by both children and adults They are found in the teen or young adult section of American public and school libraries.
A Wrinkle in Time, written by Madeleine L'Engle in 1960, received over twenty-six rejections before publication in 1962, because it was, in L'Engle's words, "too different", and "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was really difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adults' book, anyhow?"
In 1957 the Young Adult Library Services Association – initially called the Young Adult Services Division following a reorganization of the American Library Association – had been created. YALSA evaluates and selects materials for young adults, with the most active YASLA committee being the book selection committee.
Michael Cart argues that the 1960s was the decade when literature for adolescents "could be said to have come into its own". A significant early example of young adult fiction was S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders. The novel features a truer, darker side of adolescent life that was not often represented in works of fiction of the time. Written during high school and written when Hinton was only 16, The Outsiders also lacked the nostalgic tone common in books about adolescents written by adults. The Outsiders remains one of the best-selling young adult novels of all time. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, five other very popular books were published: I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, an autobiography of the early years of American poet Maya Angelou; The Friends by Rosa Guy; the semi-autobiographical The Bell Jar by poet Sylvia Plath; Bless the Beasts and Children by Glendon Swarthout; and Deathwatch by Robb White, which was awarded 1973 Edgar Award for Best Juvenile Mystery by the Mystery Writers of America. The works of Angelou and Plath were published as adult works but The Bell Jar deals with a nineteen year old's "teenage angst", and Angelou's autobiography is one of the ten books most frequently banned from high school and junior high school libraries and classrooms.
Authors Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman have both argued for the importance of British fantasy writer Alan Garner. According to Pullman Garner "is indisputably the great originator, the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkien, and in many respects better than Tolkien". Similarly Ursula le Guin in a review praising Garner's novel Red Shift, argues that "Some of the most interesting English novels of recent years have been published as children's books". Although Garner's early work is often labelled "children's literature", Garner himself rejects such a description. Critic Neil Philip, commenting on Garner's early novels, notes that "It may be that Garner's is a case" where the division between children's and adults' literature is "meaningless".
Judy Blume author of Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret., has significantly contributed to children's and young adult literature. She was one of the first young adult authors to write novels focused on such controversial topics as masturbation, menstruation, teen sex, birth control, and death.
Ursula le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, published in 1968, had a significant influence on YA fantasy fiction. It won or contributed to several notable awards for le Guin, including the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award in 1969, and was one of the last winners of the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. With regard to the Earthsea series Barbara Bucknal stated that "Le Guin was not writing for young children when she wrote these fantasies, nor yet for adults. She was writing for 'older kids'. But in fact she can be read, like Tolkien, by ten-year-olds and by adults. Margaret Atwood said that... A Wizard of Earthsea... since it dealt with themes such as "life and mortality and who are we as human beings", it could be read and enjoyed by anybody older than twelve. Reviewers have commented that the basic premise of A Wizard of Earthsea, that of a talented boy going to a wizard's school and making an enemy with whom he has a close connection, is also the premise of Harry Potter.
As publishers began to focus on the emerging adolescent market, more booksellers and libraries began creating young adult sections distinct from children's literature and novels written for adults. The 1970s to the mid-1980s have been described as the golden age of young-adult fiction, when challenging novels began speaking directly to the interests of the identified adolescent market.
In the 1980s, young adult literature began pushing the envelope in terms of the subject matter that was considered appropriate for their audience: Books dealing with topics such as rape, suicide, parental death, and murder which had previously been deemed taboo, saw significant critical and commercial success. A flip-side of this trend was a strong revived interest in the romance novel, including young adult romance. With an increase in number of adolescents, the genre "matured, blossomed, and came into its own, with the better written, more serious, and more varied young adult books published during the last two decades".
The first novel in J.K. Rowling's seven-book Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, was published in 1997. Originally marketed in the UK under the broad category of children's literature, the books received attention and praise for their increasingly mature and sophisticated nature, eventually garnering a significant audience of adult readers. This phenomenon led many to see Harry Potter and J.K. Rowling as responsible for a resurgence of young adult literature. It also established a pre-eminent role for speculative fiction in the field, a trend further solidified by The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins. The end of the decade saw a number of awards appear such as the Michael L. Printz Award and Alex Awards, designed to recognize excellence in writing for young adult audiences.
Philip Pullman's fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials, published between 1995 and 2000, added another controversial topic to the field by attacking established religion, especially Roman Catholicism. Northern Lights, the first volume in the trilogy, won the 1995 Carnegie Medal as the year's outstanding English-language children's book. Pullman has written other YA fiction, including the Sally Lockhart series, as well as books for younger children.