YA Literature, Circa 1960-something

One reason that I get so excited about contemporary YA literature is that today's choices are astonishingly better than the books published for teens when I was at the age to read them. It's no wonder that S. E. Hinton, who is about my age, wrote The Outsiders as the kind of book she wanted to read as a teen--an amazing accomplishment! I read Almost April and Mrs. Mike and most of Poe's and Conan Doyle's stories. I'd already read Treasure Island and Little Women and Kidnapped. The classroom fare for ninth graders in the mid-1960s was Great Expectations, which I didn't learn to enjoy until I revisited it in my forties (though I loved A Tale of Two Cities). A little later, I read To Kill a Mockingbird, This Side of Paradise, A Separate Peace, and The Catcher in the Rye. I have fond memories of Jane Austen's and the Bronte sisters' and Hardy's novels, many of which I read on my own in eighth through tenth grades. I'll bet I'd have loved The Outsiders if it had been published before I graduated from high school.

When my students tell me that they've been reading The Canterbury Tales and Beowulf and The Odyssey in high school, I can't help but wonder why they aren't getting opportunities to read wonderful books like Monster. Some have read Speak, more have read Hatchet and The Giver. So much YA lit revolves around sensitive issues--and then there's the use of profanity. My goodness, you'd think that teens would never hear "the f-word" unless their English teachers brought a contemporary YA novel to class! This has been my students' objection to the wonderful Fat Kid Rules the World by K. L. Going, a truly joyous novel about the reconnection of estranged brothers, the commitment of a strait-laced military man to rescuing an over-the-counter-medication-addicted punk rocker, and the emergence from outcast status into coolness of a suicidal overweight teen. (And K. L. Going was gracious enough to respond to an email from one of my students who decided to write his critical paper on Fat Kid.) A couple years ago, after reading student journal entries about cutting in my writing classes, I decided this was an important issue that could be confronted through literature in my YA lit class, and I selected Cut by Patricia McCormick. Some of my students felt very strongly that it might put ideas into the heads of teen readers who otherwise would not have thought about cutting, and I couldn't help but wonder whether these students had heard of the Internet.

The fact remains that we want sanitized literature in the classroom, whether young people are really reading the classics or the online guides to them at Bookrags or Spark Notes or--you fill in the rest of the list. There's nothing truly sanitized about The Scarlet Letter which, after all, is about adultery, but it's clothed in the respectable language of the nineteenth century and proper remorse is shown. In contrast, wonderful books like Dance on My Grave by Aidan Chambers and Rainbow Boys by Alex Sanchez and Inexcusable by Chris Lynch are likely a bit too explicit about sexuality to receive any administration's or school board's seal of approval. Too bad, because these are books that teens might actually read.