Coming of Age

Just about a month ago I was sitting on the top floor of the Doubletree Hotel in New Orleans looking out at two revealing prospects. To my left, a huge red tanker filled the muddy waters of the Mississippi and passed right in front of a spanking new casino: a perfect image of a port where life continues as always and yet nothing is permanent. New Orleans makes most other American cities seem two-dimensional, pieced together yesterday by developers. And yet the air of endless Mardi Gras it offers in its slot machines and clubs and beads is meant to suggest a Saturday night that never fades into Sunday morning. To my right was a ballroom filled with activity as librarians and publishers chattered together about teenagers and the books they love.

As incongruous as they might seem, the two images were linked, for young adult literature is a product of that very American blend of constant change and enduring adolescence. And, just now, teenage readers are on publishers' minds.

Walking the exhibit halls at the ALA Midwinter conference, I kept hearing names and rumors of new YA lines from major publishers which echoed exactly the same plans that English houses announced at Bologna last year. I saw a reviewer, just finishing her stint on the Newbery committee, begging for a galley of E.R. Frank's America, because she was so eager to bring it to her college-level YA literature class. On Sunday about 60 local teenagers came to discuss the Best Books for Young Adults nominees. I was sitting next to an editor from an online bookseller, and suggested she help us hook up electronic links, so that next midwinter, in Philadelphia, off-site kids could join in the fun.

To young editors just entering the field, it must seem as if the teenage end of books for young readers is the most dynamic, and healthiest, part of the business. Just a few years ago, they would have had just the opposite impression.

The Early Years

The first thing to know about YA in America is that it is paradoxical. Its history is short and well-known, yet opinions vary greatly on what YA is. It overlaps with every other genre of literature, from books clearly for children to those entirely aimed at adults, and yet it has some identity of its own. It is easy to find sections in libraries, shelves in bookstores, listings in publisher's catalogues identified as "young adult," yet the label seemingly refers to different kinds of books. It is the type of books for young people that is closest to adult books, and yet is the genre most invisible to adult eyes. These mixed definitions, assumptions and conceptions are like a geological record: they hold the traces of different adolescent experiences, beliefs and buying patterns. Today, just as the largest boom in the teenage population in 30 years is hitting the schools, YA is a fractured field.

The term YA is an odd one; it refers to no clear developmental age group. If anything, it seems to apply to people in their 20s who are just leaving college, beginning careers and starting families. That is the sense it had when, as a phase of life, people first began using it. That was about the time of the bohemians in Paris during the period between 1820 and 1840. Those artistic and lifestyle rebels defined much of what we associate with not only the experience but the art of adolescence: they were outrageous individualists with their long hair, Byronic affinity for love affairs, passion for drinking out of skulls, and delight in dressing in ways designed to provoke the bourgeoisie. And yet they were cliquish in the extreme, constantly forming "in" and "out" groups, factions with codes, favorite hangouts and manifestoes. Their art either reported on their own lives or went off into wild imaginative realms. The most famous piece of art to emerge from this world also defined its most central characteristic. When Mimi, the tragic heroine of Puccini's opera La Boheme, dies, her lover sings, "My youth is dead."

As Mimi dies, so also does the stage of life she represented the time of being bohemian. How did that period shift down in age and over to America? Let's skip ahead to the United States in the 1960s. The children of the Word War II generation had now reached adolescence. They had grown up in a strange combination of security and insecurity. Their parents had done well, buying a series of cars and homes in the suburbs and providing them all the TVs and radios, cowboy costumes and Barbie dolls they wanted. But the shadow of the cold war and the Bomb had always lingered. The kids were confident enough to rebel without fearing the consequences, and anxious enough to mistrust the world that had nurtured them.

You might say they were the perfect product of America: the Stage Set. They were now old enough to see behind the props and billboards and to mistrust the patriotic slogans they heard at school and on TV. And yet they had no more solid alternative to present than to pull down the set and to erect another: the hippie playland of Woodstock Nation. This generation was caught between a protected childhood defined by children's books and a wilder world seen in subversive comics; between the Mickey Mouse Club on TV and images of first the civil rights struggle and then the Vietnam war on the same sets. They did not recognize themselves in any of the books then available for teenagers which were very tame novels of dating at 17 or becoming a nurse or boys who lived long ago and far away.

Librarians who had these teenagers in their schools faced a problem: there were more and more potential readers, and nothing on the shelves for them to read. Luckily for the librarians, America at the time was both rich and confident. It believed, for good or ill, that enough money, will and planning could solve the world's problems whether by defeating Communists in Vietnam, ending poverty and racism in America or building as many young adult sections as any librarian could want. President Lyndon Johnson provided the money, and the librarians created a place for a literature that did not even exist yet.

At first those young adult sections featured a mix of the adult titles teenagers might like: the trippy weirdness of a Carlos Castaneda, the black rage of an Eldridge Cleaver, the angst and sense of Jungian mystery of a Hermann Hesse, the fearless honesty of a J.D. Salinger. Side by side with these titles were books for children or adults, such as J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy, as well as science fiction by masters such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury.

In order to make sure that these shelves were filled with the best possible books, librarians created national committees that would, annually, pick the Best Books for Young Adults. The makeup, goals and rules of these committees have changed over time, but what is important is that all along, they have had to consider both what they, as educated adults, believe to be the books that would be best for teenagers and what they learn by discussing such books with their teenage readers and finding out which are most popular, most important in young lives.

One central issue is to define the role of YA literature in this difficult blend of adult judgment on behalf of teenagers and teenagers' own preferences in the books they talk about, take out of the library, and even buy. This mix is more of an issue for this age-group than for any other. Parents buy books for children, and even when they bring a child into a store with them and ask what the child wants, the parent is still present as the intermediary. Adults, who have both more defined tastes and larger wallets, buy for themselves in patterns that publishers know and understand. Teenagers are in the most ambiguous middle ground.

Parents no longer feel confident about buying books for them unless it is a book for a very specific need, such as to prepare for school or for some religious event such as a Bar Mitzvah or confirmation, or to deal with some of the dangers ahead, such as changes in the body or safe sex. But teenagers do not have that much money, especially after what they spend on music, clothes, sports, entertainment, dates, and so on, is subtracted. Teenagers are in their own world, where they do not appreciate adult suggestion, but they still depend on adults such as parents, teachers, librarians and mentors to provide much of the world of books.

The YA sections of the libraries were not dominated by adult books for long. Change came for two reasons. First, as the teenagers whose lives mandated the creation of the sections got older, or into more trouble, they started to publish books about their own experiences. A book such as Go Ask Alice was about a life of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll, and the toll it took. It said directly to teenagers: I am you, my story is yours. Soon an entire and flourishing wing of young adult publishing was created around what is called the problem novel.

Each book centered around one particular problem of teenage life and showed the reader that he or she was not alone in facing it. Whether it was being overweight, or having parents who were getting divorced, or falling in love with a person of the same sex, or struggling with drugs, or being a secret alcoholic, or facing child abuse or even incest at home, or being anorexic or bulimic, or cutting crosses on your arm, or running away from home and being a prostitute, or joining a gang, or being suicidal, there was a book whose plot followed very closely that actual experience and, as often as not, provided either models for coping or even listed groups to contact for help. Problem novels also covered many kinds of physical ailments, grave diseases, and life experiences such as the death of a parent or other close relative. They were very much like the booming adult industry of self-help and coping books, but generally in the form of a first-person novel.

It is easy to make fun of these books, but they did serve a function. They created for teenagers a world of literature in their own voice about their own experiences. They defined a territory that, like teenagers' lives, was not childish but did not center on adults.

The second reason for the transformation of the YA section was the creation of the YA paperback. While all of these problem novels benefited from that development, they were only a part of the flood of books that paperbacks made possible. Paperbacks are far from a new idea. They were introduced in America in at least three different eras before they became a real success just before World War II. But it was not until the 1970s that a publisher at Dell named George Nicholson (still active in the field as an agent) realized that books for teenagers would be ideal paperbacks. In this cheap and widely distributed form, a whole world of literature flourished. While many of these books did include teenage problems, authors such as Judy Blume, Paul Zindel, Robert Cormier and Bruce Brooks added real literary quality to the field. They invented a fresh voice in American fiction that teenagers loved.

These novels also tended to be in the first person and often to have a slightly mocking, subversive tone, as the teenage narrator exposed the ridiculous, foolish, secret-ridden world of adults and other family members. They made the strong feelings and often sarcastic tone of a teenager's inner voice into a literary narrative style.

Since these paperbacks were manufactured expressly for teenagers, they looked different from adult books. The classic book of this period had to have a realistic cover showing characters with whom readers could identify. Though paperbacks were aimed at bookstore sale, librarians soon realized that the best way to get teenagers to use their sections was to stock some of them. Even if the books soon became battered and worn, they were cheap and easy to replace.

By the 1980s, then, the young adult field had mutated from being a library section made up largely of adult books to being a bookstore and library genre with its own star authors, its own familiar forms, even its own design. But then the entire world of books for younger readers changed. It was like the middle novel in a fantasy trilogy: darkness descended and only the faithful still believed in YA.

During the Reagan era, the initial conditions for YA books changed drastically. Now America was sliding down into a demographic trough for teenagers. There were fewer and fewer of them. At the same time, the entire idea of government funding for anything, much less rebellious, hormone-crazed, alienated and nonvoting teenagers, became increasingly unpopular. As libraries struggled to balance their budgets, YA specialists were some of the easiest jobs to cut. At the very same time, the children's bookstore market was being transformed.

Even as the number of teenagers declined, a boomlet of very young children appeared. And their parents, the now grown-up hippies who were entering their years of newfound wealth and concern with family values, were determined that their offspring would have the best of everything, so that they would grow up and go to Harvard and avoid their parents' mistakes. These parents were willing to spend money as never before on children's books.

Just as they appeared on the scene, the world of children's bookstores changed. Up to that point, the typical store that sold children's books was people said with some malice, yet also insight owned by the wife of a wealthy man. She ran it almost as a kind of charity, as a gift for children, and staffed it with retired teachers or librarians who had lifetimes of experience with children and reading.

Those small, essentially nonprofit stores gave way to huge national bookstore chains that were perfect for selling books to yuppies with young children. Throughout the country, Barnes & Noble and Borders created large family-friendly spaces in which parents could see hundreds of picture books for themselves, where children could listen to story hours, and where it was very easy to find birthday presents, gift books or school needs.

The chains gave and the chains took away. What they gave was a huge expansion in the number of stores that sold children's books and a vast increase in the space within those stores to show those books. What they took away was knowledge. Instead of experienced staff, they hired cheap labor. And the area the chain employees liked least was the children's section, where they had to sell books they knew nothing about. This was not so bad with books for younger children, that parents could sit in the stores and read with their youngsters. It was disaster for YA.

For publishers, the combination of this surge in population and the spread of the chains was a bonanza of unprecedented size. In the 1970s and 1980s, the volume of books sold doubled and then doubled again. But these were overwhelmingly books for younger children. Even as publishers expanded their children's book divisions, in the hallways editors kept saying, "YA is dead."

No new author, or even the latest book from a 1970s favorite, sold very well. The problem novel began to fade as TV talk shows and tabloids made the most seemingly private problem public knowledge.

A Literature of Their Own

Publishers responded to this in three ways: the series, the changing meaning of YA and the exceptional book. Paperback romance books for adult women readers are hugely successful in America. There have been series books for children since the 19th century and mysteries such as Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys since the 1930s. In the 1980s, publishers created paperback romance series for teenage girls, most notably Sweet Dreams and then Sweet Valley High and there were many efforts to copy them. Along with the Baby-sitters Club and Goosebumps for younger and middle-grade readers, these series provide a reliable, satisfying, repeated reading experience. They are like a familiar brand-name purchase: you read a book because you know what you will find, and yet you enjoy getting this particular version.

The YA series is essentially the voice of the 1970s YA book the one that convinces the teenager that you are inside his or her world perfected as a commercial product. A curious thing has happened to them. Though labeled YA, they have become the province of increasingly younger readers. As children grow up in a world where sex, violence and racism are more public, books written for them lose that edge that makes them seem like a passageway into the hidden world of adulthood. The series books are popular, but with children who are becoming teenagers, not with the older teenagers whose lives are depicted in the books. As they say in the magazine world, no 17-year-old would read Seventeen. That magazine is for the 13- to 14-year-old who wants to know how to look and act cool.

This downward slide in the age of YA had another source, too. Parents have pushed their kids to read ahead, to be ahead of their peers, ahead of their age level. They are proud to say their kids are reading adult books. And with the popularity and wide distribution of adult authors such as Stephen King and V.C. Andrews, it is not hard to find adult books that young teenagers like. The well-crafted psychological horror of these books provides a kind of thrill to those readers that a once off-limit topic such as sex no longer does.

Another world of adult books that has crossed into YA is fantasy and science fiction. Read avidly, especially, though not exclusively by boys, these books immerse readers in alternate universes. Some are quasi-medieval. Some are out in space or ahead in time, as was the sci-fi of the 1960s. Many are very long, include their own unique languages and require the reader to understand whole new geographies, laws of physics and particular blends of magic and superscience.

A third kind of book that blurs age levels is the graphic novel. These are fully illustrated comics-style books and magazines, often filled with gore and sex, and blessed with some of the most inventive and creative use of layout and design anywhere. They are much longer, more psychologically complex and more artistically inventive than comics or picture books. Yet they have very little text. Created in Europe and Japan as well as America, these are sold mainly in comics bookstores or by direct mail. Officially, they are for adults. Yet the particular combination of advanced subject, intense art and easy language makes them very popular with teens, especially males. Recently there have been a few efforts to create graphic novels for younger readers, as well as to include graphic novels in YA library or bookstore sections.

Between the adult books that claim teenagers' attention and the ever-younger assumed readership of YA books, libraries have had to make adjustments. Some have started to experiment with dividing their selections for teenagers. The area called Young Adult is really for readers up to 14 or 15. Books for older teenagers, then, might be mixed in with adult books.

As the world of YA has diminished, split off into series and younger books, with readers lost to adult books, it has also been pushed in new directions by the new subjects and authors who have come onto the scene since the 1970s.

In 1965, author and teacher Nancy Larrick informed the guardians of American children's books of something they should have admitted themselves: the world that appeared on their pages was all white. She was right. Not only were there no black characters and no books by black authors for children, every other American minority group, or foreign people in their own countries, were portrayed in a patronizing or inaccurate fashion. With the advent of a true young adult literature, more and more black, Asian, Hispanic and Native American authors have entered the field. There are gaps, but books now exist that are not only about these groups but written by members of them.

This change has come just at a time when the literature of America's minority populations has gotten more and more attention. Whether it be a Nobel Prize winner such as Toni Morrison, a bestselling novelist such as Amy Tan, or an immensely popular family historian such as Alex Haley, American literature has gained much of its vitality from its nonwhite authors. This also means that more and more of these artists are writing memoirs or novels about coming of age. Even as the YA field seemed to be collapsing, it has been energized by exciting new voices such as Jacqueline Woodson, Kyoko Mori, Victor Martinez and An Na as well as adult authors such as Sandra Cisneros, Alice Walker and Gish Jen who had a great deal to say to teenagers.

Another change in adult attitudes and literature that has had a direct effect in YA is the increasing acceptance of books about gay or lesbian identity. John Donovan's 1969 book, I'll Get There: It Better Be Worth the Trip, was the first YA novel to explore this topic. But it remained a very difficult area for publishers until quite recently. Now, as bookstores, advocacy groups and even high schools devoted to gays and lesbians have proliferated, some of that hesitation has ended. As a result, the field has grown from the problem novel in which the key moment is the revelation of the protagonist's sexual preference to novels that explore a character's ambiguous sexual yearnings, as well as nonfiction series that provide role models of successful and creative gays and lesbians.

One area that has given a surprising boost to young adult literature is poetry. Verse has been out of favor in America for a long time. It was seen as either incredibly boring or impossibly difficult to understand. Neither made it a good match for teenagers. But that has changed. The popularity of rap music has made adolescents very conscious of the power of words, rhythm and rhyme. The revival of the Beat poets as emblems of rebellion, sexuality and coolness has encouraged teenagers to drink espresso, grow beards, read Kerouac and recite their own poetry.

Teenagers writing and publishing their own work is another possible source of new vitality in YA. Teenagers have been raised on the books discussed here, most of which tried to make the reader feel comfortable with his or her own experience and voice. It is not so strange that those readers should want to try their hands at it themselves. If an adult can mimic the voice of a 14-year-old, why shouldn't that girl try to speak for herself? Her work might appear in print in publications by schools and libraries, in magazines devoted to this cause, such as the Write Stuff, Merlyn's Pen, New Moon and Teen Ink, and on the Internet.

The Internet offers many kinds of new opportunities for teenagers and those who publish books for them. On the one hand, a number of library and school systems give teenagers ways to post their works; on the other, we are just beginning to tap its potential as a forum in which teenagers can evaluate and discuss YA books.

Internet book discussion is one of the most exciting developments in YA, and more and more schools and libraries are establishing teen reading groups in which readers discuss and evaluate books in some cities, such as New York and Berkeley, librarians even post the results of these talks on the Web.

The publishing industry has watched the new generation of teenagers come of age they went from Goosebumps to Harry Potter. How will they change the field? They arrive at bookstores whose selections are oriented toward 12-year-olds and at libraries whose YA sections stop at 14. Yet they have unprecedented opportunity to express their opinions and to communicate with their peers. And, I suspect, they will have experiences that will be as unlike anything in print as had their parents.

Out of this combination of absence and access may well come a whole new set of voices. The new teenage readers may favor new language choices. They may be especially receptive to experiments in design and layout as in the graphic novel or the Eyewitness style of nonfiction. Books in combination with Web sites, digital music or electronic games may arise as a new subgenre. As international cooperation in the exploration of space expands, we may see that frontier shift from a site for fiction to a place for not only science but personal narrative. A generation reared on games of electronic quest and combat may be especially receptive to new picaresque tales about life in the teenage tangle a new Cervantes and a new Candide for a new time. On the other hand, teenagers who have already read adult horror may seek out new levels of psychological intensity in their books.

Whatever new forms YA takes, it will most likely hearken back to its two initial forms: the direct expression of teenage experience and the invention of new worlds as wild, dangerous and profound as this one feels to the teenagers who are first learning to master it.

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