When I was eleven, I didn’t know I was gay; I only knew that I felt different from other people, even from my own family. I was beginning to try to put together the puzzle pieces: I knew I liked boys, the clothes they wore, and the things they did, but I knew I didn’t want to marry one. My secret engagement to the girl across the street, which had seemed like a real possibility when she first accepted my proposal at age seven, was on the rocks; she was beginning to show an interest in boys and would laugh at me whenever I reminded her of her promise. If I didn’t keep it quiet, I figured it wouldn’t be long before she started laughing at me in the presence of other girls.

I had to go underground.

Enter Harriet M. Welsch, who became my role model and savior. I read Harriet the Spy soon after it came out (and I now bless the school librarian who put it on the library shelves for me to find). I was absolutely shocked by it at the time. Shocked that Harriet could defy her parents and her friends and still survive. Shocked that she loved and missed Ole Golly so much that she threw a shoe at her father to express her anger. Shocked that an adult author could know so well what really went on in the minds of children.

But the thing that shocked me the most about Harriet was her cross-dressing. It’s an aspect of the novel that girls today would miss entirely (thank goodness!), but in 1965 Harriet’s spy clothes struck me as revolutionary. Back then, girls in blue jeans and hooded sweatshirts were uncommon, though not unheard of. But Harriet’s high-top sneakers were solely boys’ wear. I know for sure, because I used to beg my otherwise indulgent, liberal parents for them, and they refused, although they bought them regularly for my brothers.

I’ve read elsewhere of women my age who were inspired to keep notebooks and start their own spy routes, eat tomato sandwiches, and leave anonymous notes after reading Harriet the Spy and The Long Secret. At eleven I didn’t particularly like tomatoes, didn’t have the patience to write, and already had a spy route, so I wasn’t inspired to start any of those things. What Harriet did inspire me to do was to experiment with cross-dressing. I used whatever money I earned doing odd jobs to buy boys’ clothes on the sly and then went into other neighborhoods to play at passing as a boy. When an old man in a grocery store called me “Sonny,” I knew I had passed the test. It was remarkably easy to do, and it was as deliciously thrilling as sneaking into Agatha K. Plumber’s dumbwaiter. Over the course of a year, I developed an extensive wardrobe of boys’ clothes, which I kept hidden at the back of my closet when I wasn’t wearing them as my own version of a spy uniform.

It really came as no surprise to me to learn that at the time she was writing Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh had been a butch known within the lesbian community as Willie. When she came into a large inheritance, she bought men’s clothes and had them tailored for her, vowing never again to wear women’s clothes. I don’t know if she consciously thought of Harriet as cross-dresser, but I am certainly not the only one to have recognized her as a kindred spirit.

Which brings me to the purple socks.

Harriet the Spy fans will remember the Boy with the Purple Socks as a kid in Harriet’s class who was so boring no one ever bothered to learn his name. “Whoever heard of purple socks?” Harriet wonders in chapter two. “She figured it was lucky he wore them; otherwise no one would have even known he was there at all.” He later tells his classmates that his mother wanted him to dress completely in purple so he would stand out in a crowd, but he refused to comply, except for the socks. And, as it turns out, the purple socks do make him stand out in a crowd, not to the masses but to a smaller group of kindred spirits. He also stands out to readers in the gay community, for whom the color purple has symbolic meaning. The purple socks are representative of the details Fitzhugh put into her books that resonate with a gay audience used to reading between the lines.

Reading Harriet the Spy today as an adult, I find a queer subtext throughout. Not only is Harriet the quintessential baby butch, but her best friends, Sport and Janie, run exactly contrary to gender stereotypes. Sport acts as the homemaker and nurturing caretaker of his novelist father, while Janie the scientist plans to blow up the world one day. It was as if Fitzhugh was telling us kids back in the sixties that you didn’t have to play by society’s rules, the first lesson a queer kid has to learn in order to be happy. Harriet’s whole ordeal — being ostracized by her friends after they invade her privacy by reading her spy notebook — sounds to me very much like a coming-out story. Her parents’ response to it all is to take her to a psychiatrist for analysis. Sound familiar? Most importantly, the sage Ole Golly resolves matters with a piece of advice that takes on special meaning for queer kids:

Sometimes you have to lie. But to yourself you must always tell the truth.

It is this piece of advice, with all the focus on the first sentence, that aroused adult ire, most notoriously in the pages of this very magazine in a biting editorial by Ruth Hill Viguers titled “On Spies and Applesauce and Such.” Ironically, these indignant adults were generally the same ones who would have made life difficult for gay people (the ones not lying about their identities) or for anyone who refused to conform to their standards. But for gay kids focusing equally on both sentences, the advice turned out to be a lifesaver. All those years ago, whether consciously or unconsciously, Louise Fitzhugh provided us with the tools for survival.

In all her books, from Suzuki Beane to Nobody’s Family Is Going to Change, the message is inherent: Be true to yourself. Refuse to conform. Find your own way, even if your friends and family threaten to reject you. It will be painful, but you will survive. This was pretty powerful stuff for those of us who read her books when we were young.

I doubt that Harriet the Spy has quite the same impact on nascent gay readers now, and that’s probably a good sign. It’s indicative of the progress our society has made over the past forty years. There’s far greater visibility for gays and lesbians in mainstream culture, and many kids now go to schools where they have openly gay teachers and can join a Gay Straight Alliance group. There is also now a growing body of gay literature for teens and even younger children in which they can see themselves in a positive light. That’s not to say that it’s any easier for kids today grappling with their own queer identities. But it may make it a bit easier to find the keys to their own survival.

More Reading Between the Lines

Not every young reader is ready for overt self-examination; some may prefer to find themselves in books that don’t explicitly deal with gay themes but that may strike a chord nonetheless.

Molly Bang Goose (Blue Sky/Scholastic, 1996)
Although not specifically about gay identity, this story will certainly resonate as an allegory with anyone who has ever felt out of place at home. Three nearly wordless double-page spreads dramatically set the scene as a goose egg falls out of its nest during a violent rainstorm and rolls down a hole into a den of woodchucks. The egg hatches soon thereafter, and the woodchucks immediately accept their newest family member. But the gosling never feels completely at home in her family and eventually realizes that she must set off on her own to see if she can find what she is missing.

Tomie dePaola Oliver Button Is a Sissy (Harcourt, 1979)
The boys at school tease Oliver and call him a sissy because he prefers reading, drawing, and jumping rope to sports. Oliver’s parents push him to participate in sports (just to get some exercise), but Oliver refuses, opting instead for a tap-dancing class. A now-classic portrait of a gentle boy who refuses to bow to peer pressure.

Alexis De Veaux An Enchanted Hair Tale; illus. by Cheryl Hanna (HarperCollins, 1987)
It’s Sudan’s hair — a “fan daggle of locks and lions and lagoons” — that sets him apart from his peers. Grownups fear his hair, and neighborhood kids tease him mercilessly: “and wherever Sudan went, / people saw his head; / they pointed and said, / ’He’s strange. He’s queer. He’s different.’” Upset, Sudan storms away and, far from home, stumbles upon a whole family of folks with enchanted hair who admire him and help him celebrate his differences. De Veaux’s poem deals with the necessity of leaving home to find a community of kindred spirits, an aspect of reality for most gays and lesbians that’s rarely addressed in gay/lesbian literature for teens. But the idea that there are others out there who are like you can be extremely comforting to kids who, like Sudan, are called “queer.”

Glen Huser Stitches (Groundwood, 2003)
Travis is a kid who has been teased since he was in first grade. First, it was words like girlie. As he grew older, it was “Sissy. Crybaby. Fruitfly. Fagface.” As he enters junior high school, his interests in sewing, puppetry, and theater are encouraged, first by an English teacher and then a home economics teacher, but these same interests are part of what mark him as a target for continued bullying. This thought-provoking, touching novel never overtly addresses Travis’s sexuality, because Travis himself is barely beginning to consider that aspect of his identity. Instead, it focuses on the facets of Travis’s personality that make him the person he is. While the book doesn’t shy away from the harsh reality of bullying and violence, it nonetheless remains an uplifting story full of warmth, humor, and hope.

J. K. Rowling Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Levine/Scholastic, 1997)
Many adults have found a queer subtext in the Harry Potter books, especially the first volume in the series. Not only is Harry an outsider within his own family, but they expect him to repress the parts of himself that make him stand out as different. They are embarrassed by him and, quite literally, keep him in the closet (the cupboard under the stairs). As he approaches puberty, he learns that there are others like him who share the qualities his family finds repugnant. There is, in fact, an entire subculture that co-exists with the Muggle mainstream, a parallel culture that goes largely unseen unless you know the small signs to look for. Harry is introduced to this world by a trusted guide, Hagrid, and, for the first time, he feels at home.

Andrea U’Ren Pugdog (Farrar, 2001)
Mike assumes his pugdog is male because of his tough exterior and rough-and-tumble personality. But when a veterinarian informs him that Pugdog is female, Mike completely changes the way he interacts with his dog, much to Pugdog’s displeasure. Hilarious illustrations of a slobbering Pugdog — and a prissy poodle named Harry — help drive home the point about the importance of accepting individual differences.

From the January/February 2005 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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The Man from the 
Land of Fandango

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This article provides historical background information on Ms. Horning’s “Caldecott at 75” article, “Mei Li and the Making of a Picture Book,” published in the January/February 2013 print issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

Thomas Handforth drawing in Beijing. Photo courtesy of Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art Archives.

Thomas Handforth

Thomas Schofield Handforth was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1897. He was an artistic child, and one of his earliest memories was his delight at age three in walking across a rustic moon bridge in one of Tacoma’s city parks. “For me the great experience was the sight of the arc’s reflection in the lily pond, forming the other half of the perfect circle. It was the circle of the Yin and Yang, Chinese symbol of the universe.” A few years later, he drew the symbol as one of the first pictures in his childhood drawing book, followed by Hokusai’s Blue Wave, and a page of dragons. His early interest in Asian art was also fueled by a great uncle who gave him a two-volume set of reprints of Hokusai’s One Hundred Views of Mt. Fujiyama.

Handforth dropped out of the University of Washington after a year, and went to New York and then Paris to study art. But he found school dull, so he spent the next decade traveling through North Africa and Mexico, finding subjects to draw. He was especially drawn to common people in motion — dancers, wrestlers, and children. In the 1920s, he created 120 etchings and began to make a name for himself in the American art world. One of the people who collected his work was an American attorney, Edwin de Turck Bechtel, whose wife was Louise Seaman Bechtel, head of the new children’s division at Macmillan. She was looking for an illustrator for a new book by one of her star authors, Elizabeth Coatsworth. Since the book was set in Marrakesh and Handforth was living there at the time, she arranged to have him meet the author, who was also staying there, and Handforth agreed to illustrate the book. Neither the book, Toutou in Bondage (Macmillan, 1929), nor the illustrator made much of a splash at the time. His second illustrated book, Tranquilina’s Paradise (Minton, Balch, 1930) by Susan Smith, drew on his experiences in Mexico, and also quickly faded into obscurity.

In 1931 Handforth received a Guggenheim Fellowship for travel to Asia where he could pursue his work as a graphic artist. He expected to spend two weeks in Beijing, but he felt so at home there that he ended up staying for six years, renting a space in an old house that had fallen into disrepair. In Beijing he turned from etching to lithography because he felt that the spirit of China was better captured with a brush and a “greasy crayon.” He bought himself a new press for his lithography and worked in stone, experimenting with different techniques.

He found no shortage of subjects in the courtyard surrounding the old palace, where there were always acrobats, dancers, wrestlers, old men and children, as well as farm animals. A shy man, Handforth was most comfortable around the children, and he frequently imitated Charlie Chaplin to entertain his models. A favorite of his was a nine-year-old boy who was a sword dancer, who never seemed to tire of posing. A young girl acrobat was another favorite model. But it was a bossy four-year-old girl named Mei Li who soon claimed his attention. With her pet duckling and her little white dog, Mei Li ruled over the courtyard, finding adults to pose for the American artists and instructing them on just how to do it. “If they ever weakened in this job of posing,” Handforth wrote, “she would give them a piece of her mind.”

Handforth wanted to somehow put all of his favorite subjects together, so he decided to create a picture book, using them all as models. Mei Li, of course, would be the protagonist. The author/artist recalled: “She assumed such importance, which she rightly deserved, as the leading lady, that she crowded many of my other friends out of the story. She was that kind of a girl.”

He worked on the book for two years, taking his inspiration not only from the people who lived and worked around the courtyard but also from the Chinese art that he loved. Handforth connected his affinity for Chinese art with his understanding of how picture books work:

My goal in etching and lithography is to do, without imitating its technical manner, a Western Hsie-y, i.e. “to write the meaning.” (The Chinese Hsie-y is closely related to Chinese calligraphy.)

…The rhythm of Hsie-y is not contained within the frame. What is visible is only like the fragment of melody carried in and out of the picture frame toward infinity on a two-dimension plane.

From this approach the Picture Book seems to me to present possibilities analogous to those of the Chinese scroll: giving a larger segment of “melody” with variations and with a definite progression in time from beginning to end.

Although the people who lived around the courtyard were the inspiration for his picture book, the story Handforth wrote was original. In it, he imagined Mei Li as a little girl, determined to attend the New Year Fair, even though girls of her station were not allowed to go. Taking three lucky pennies and three lucky marbles, she follows her older brother, San Yu (modeled after the son of a rickshaw driver) to the walled city of Beijing where she sees camels, horses, a trained bear, circus performers and acrobats, and has her fortune told by a young priest: “You will rule over a kingdom.” After a day filled with activity, she and her brother just make it out of the walled city before the gates are closed (thanks to a beggar girl who holds the door open with her feet, in return for the lucky penny Mei Li had given her on her way into the city). They get home in time to greet the Kitchen God, who tells Mei Li that “this house is your kingdom and palace. Within its walls all living things are your loyal, loving subjects.”

Contemporary critics have been quick to call Mei Li sexist due to its conclusion that the only “kingdom” Mei Li can possibly rule over is her own household. In fact, whether we like it or not, it represented reality for most Chinese girls and women in the time it was written, and Mei Li’s spirited response to the Kitchen God’s prophecy is strikingly modern: “It will do for a while, anyway.” Those who charge the book with sexism seem to ignore that the whole story is set in motion by Mei Li breaking with tradition by following her brother to the fair, where she continues to prove her brother wrong whenever he points out things girls can’t do. And, of course, it is Mei Li — and not her brother — who is the hero of the story. A year later, Handforth wrote of her: “No Empress Dowager was ever more determined than she. A career is surely ordained for her, other than being the heroine of a children’s book.”

Pu Mei Li holding the book she inspired. Photo courtesy of Zi Tan and Peggy Hartzell.

Pu Mei Li

The real child who inspired the story was Pu Mei Li, born during a famine in the Anhwei Province in 1934, and left on the doorstep of a missionaries’ home as a baby. She spent her second year in an American mission foundling asylum, and was adopted at age two by Helen Burton, an American businesswoman who had lived in China since 1921. Mei Li was the youngest of four Chinese girls adopted by Burton, who owned a popular gift shop called The Camel Bell Shop (or The Camel’s Bell Shop), located in a popular Beijing hotel. Burton had been born and raised in Bismarck, North Dakota, and like Thomas Handforth she had developed a strong affinity for China, coupled with a robust wanderlust. Prior to moving to China, she had worked as a stenographer for the Chamber of Commerce in Honolulu, Hawaii, where one of her duties was to send form rejection letters to other women seeking similar work. She always took the time to add her own handwritten note: “I came and it worked out fine.” Soon after she arrived in Beijing, she noticed how fascinated Westerners were with the bells worn by the camels there, and she began to buy them in bulk to sell to tourists. She ran her popular shop for twenty-two years until she was sent to an internment camp in 1943 during the Japanese occupation of China. While in the camp, she established a trading post called White Elephant Bell (or White Elephant’s Bell), where inmates could trade personal items for necessities. She was one of the lucky few who was sent back to the United States as part of a prisoner exchange.

As a result, Burton was separated from her adopted daughters, and lost contact with them. In 1948, she went back to China to try to find all four girls. Three older daughters were married with families of their own, and teenaged Mei Li was attending a Methodist Mission School. In a letter to friends, Burton said of Mei Li: “Her teachers report great latent strength—a born leader, as they say. The children about her submit to her commands as readily as the masses are swayed by any dictator. Let us pray that hers will be a benevolent dictatorship at least.” Burton left China and Mei Li, expecting to return soon, but another dictator came to power soon after she left, making her return impossible and resulting in the Communist-ordered imprisonment of her eldest daughter. Pu Mei Li was not heard from again during Burton’s lifetime.

Behind the Wall

At the exact same time Helen Burton was in China, searching for her daughters, Thomas Handforth had decided to settle down to work on his art and was searching for a house in Los Angeles. He wrote his friend of the perfect house he had found, which he called the Castle of Mystery: “But if I should become lord of the castle, you would never have to guess my address again. I would be anchored for life in a pile of reinforced concrete blocks from which it would be impossible to extricate myself. And there is on the grounds a building (a garage to which there is no access for cars — just the place for those two presses — litho and etching — which too would help to hold me down.” He longed to get back to Beijing to retrieve the printing presses he had sealed behind a wall there. But a few months after he had bought his house, he died suddenly of a heart attack.

News of Thomas Handforth’s death came as a shock to all who had known him and his work. He was just fifty-one when he died and was at the beginning of a promising new era in his career, one that might have included more picture books. Instead, he is remembered for just one.

And what of Pu Mei Li?  A few months ago I heard from Thomas Handforth’s niece, who had just made contact with the son of one of Mei Li’s sisters, now living in the United States. He was able to confirm that Mei Li had indeed survived and lived to old age in China. We’ll probably never know what sort of career she had or whether she ruled her own kingdom, but at least we’ll always have this testament to her life and spirit, captured like a “fragment of melody carried in and out of the picture frame toward infinity on a two-dimensional plane.”

This online-only companion to Ms. Horning’s “Mei Li and the Making of a Picture Book” article is part of our Caldecott at 75 celebration. Click here for archival Horn Book material on Thomas Handforth and Mei Li.

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Spirit Seeker:
John Coltrane’s Musical Journey

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A Certain October

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Silvey’s arguments are not new; they’re just the most recent version of a decades-old debate. Controversy has dogged the Newbery Medal from its inception, always coming in the form of pointed attacks from those outside the process who are critical of the books selected for the award. Who could have guessed, when bookseller Frederic G. Melcher created the award in 1921, that people would come to care so quickly and so deeply about the books deemed “most distinguished”? That was what Melcher wanted, but I doubt it was his intention to stir things up from the get-go when he made the decision to put the award selection into the hands not of booksellers or teachers but of children’s librarians.

According to the history of the award, as told by Melcher himself, the idea for a children’s book award came to him suddenly in the midst of a meeting of the Children’s Librarians’ Section of the American Library Association (ALA) at its Annual Conference in Swampscott, Massachusetts, in 1921. He was there to promote the concept of Children’s Book Week, which he had launched with Franklin W. Mathiews, chief librarian of the Boy Scouts of America, two years earlier. “It was a great opportunity for Book Week’s pro¬motion,” recalled Melcher years later.

As I looked down from the platform at the three or four hundred people, I thought of the power they could have in encouraging the joy of reading among children. I could see that I was sure of having the librarians’ cooperation in Children’s Book Week, but I wanted to go further and secure their interest in the whole process of creating books for children, producing them, and bringing them to the children.(2)

Those most invested in Children’s Book Week at that time were booksellers, who hoped to reach parents as consumers with their campaign “More Books in the Home”—just in time for the Christmas shopping season. In 1921, children’s librarianship was still a relatively new profession, and Melcher wisely saw librarians as potential partners in getting this message out. Despite the fact that the influential children’s library leader Anne Carroll Moore had served on the Children’s Book Week committee from the beginning, other members of her profession were not entirely enthusiastic about what some booksellers were doing. At the same 1921 ALA meeting in Swampscott, the head of the Children’s Librarians’ Section, Clara Whitehill Hunt from Brooklyn Public Library, told those assembled:

I saw, last November, big advertisements of the “Week” which noted, along with excellent titles, many books which no good public library places on its shelves. I saw the names of speakers who were to appear in a certain book department each day of the week, and most of the speakers were authors whose books the ALA would not dream of putting on its approved lists.(3)

The Gimbels Book Week ad, November 1920.

A search through the New York Times during the second week of November 1920 turns up exactly the advertisements to which Hunt referred. “Kiddies! This Is Your Book Week! Bring Along the Grown-Ups to the Gimbel Celebration…You’ll find ’em all at Gimbels—so carefully selected you can’t choose wrong.” Included among the “carefully selected” books were Adventures of the Teenie Weenies and three volumes of the Boy Mechanic (“Here’s the book for any wide-awake boy”[4]). In the other ad Hunt referenced, Bloomingdales presented their program of author speakers not recommended by the ALA. For the record, they were: David Cory (author of Billy Bunny); Henry C. Walker (author of the Jimmy Bunn stories); Frank Parker Stockbridge (author of Yankee Ingenuity in the War); Dorothy Whitehill (author of the Polly Pendleton series, Twin series, etc.); Lillian E. Garis (author of the Girl Scout series); William Heyliger (author of the St. Mary, Fairview, and Boy Scouts series); Howard R. Garis (author of the Uncle Wiggly series), and Horace Wade, “the eleven-year-old author of In the Shadow of the Great Peril.”(5)

These were the very types of books children’s librarians railed against in their selection standards. Hunt herself included more than one reference to popular formula series fiction, other¬wise known at the time as “fifty-cent books,” in her list of “Don’ts” in book selection. She wrote, for example: “Don’t let those adults who point pridefully to themselves as products of a trash-reading childhood shake your determination to give today’s children better mental food than those worthy citizens had.”(6) Earlier, in a statement that echoes eerily in modern times, Hunt had explained why she thought it was so important to offer children better books: “Just so surely as America neglects to fill her children’s minds with good ideas, just so surely will those children, a few years hence, be swayed by every shrieking demagogue and yellow journal working to undermine our country.”(7)

By giving the Children’s Librarians’ Section the power to select the Newbery Medal winners, Melcher got their support for Children’s Book Week by assuring them that children’s librarians would become the key tastemakers. Just a year after her criticism of the way Children’s Book Week was taking form under Melcher’s watch, Hunt had only laudatory words for him as he handed her the first Newbery Medal to present to Hendrik Willem van Loon for The Story of Mankind. “We feel strong and powerful because you believe in us and are putting in our hands a weapon, one of the most potent of our times—publicity of the best kind.”(8)

From a children’s librarian’s standpoint, the Newbery Medal promised to lift children’s literature to higher standards, or, as pioneering children’s editor May Massee described it, to “rescue it from mediocrity.”(9) Given this, it’s not surprising that popularity was not a criterion for selection—in fact, quite the opposite. To these librarians, popularity meant “poor style, poor binding, narrow margins, pulpy paper.”(10) Rather, the focus for the Newbery Medal has always been on distinguished books—whatever “distinguished” means to the group of children’s librarians making the selection each year. From the beginning, the term was left intentionally vague: “Because creative talent cannot and should not be confined to any pattern, the words ‘most distinguished’ were wisely undefined and unqualified, so that no limitations were placed upon the character of the book.”(11) But the terms have always included a sentence about what “distinguished” does not mean: “The award is not for popularity.”(12)

While the Newbery Medal, for the most part, was widely embraced almost immediately by librarians, teachers, publishers, booksellers, the press, and the general public, there was one group that was, not surprisingly, unhappy with the award: those who wrote popular series fiction. The authors of “boys’ books,” in particular, grumbled about the “blood-thirsty”(13) librarians who knew nothing about real boys and what their reading interests were. How could these women possibly be entrusted to decide what books were best for children? (And by children, of course, they meant boys.) Louise Latimer, director of work with children at the Washington, DC, Public Library, addressed these sorts of charges in a talk she gave to the Children’s Librarians’ Section at the 1924 Annual Conference in Saratoga Springs, New York.

I believe I can go further and assert that few fathers, if any, and few leaders of boys, if any, could tell you as accurately and sympathetically—not sentimentally, mind you—what a boy likes to read as a children’s librarian of many years’ experience. This is not remarkable, for more boys and boys of more types pass thru her hands, and she has their own testimony to support her opinions.

We cannot help but recognize, however, that the points of view connoted in these expressions (“high-brow,” “old maid,” etc.), have made a consistent approach to standards difficult. Have we let such criticism lower our standards in book selection? It is only as we have done that or as it has weakened our position in the community as judges of reading for young people that such criticism matters.(14)

Latimer’s last comment is especially interesting in light of the early criticism of the Newbery Award winners. At the time of her writing, there had been only three winners selected: The Story of Mankind, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, and The Dark Frigate—robust nonfiction, humorous fantasy/adventure, and a high-sea adventure. All were written by male authors and have a distinctly male point of view. A critic at the time would have been hard-pressed to claim that none of these were “boys’ books.” In fact, the next five Newbery Medal books were all written from male perspectives by male authors, and they include a war story (Gay-Neck, the Story of a Pigeon), a Western (Smoky, the Cowhorse), and historical fiction (The Trumpeter of Krakow), all mainstays in the reading preferences of boys. Were children’s librarians involved in the earliest selection of Newbery Medal books subconsciously looking for books to counter the charges, as Latimer feared might happen?

“Robust” boy books of the 1920s.

We’ll probably never know, but what happened over the next ten years is curious. After nearly a decade’s worth of boys’ books written by male authors, the second decade of Newbery Medal winners were all written by women, and many of them were classified as girls’ books in their times. By 1939, author Howard Pease had had enough. As an invited speaker at an ALA preconfer¬ence on children’s reading hosted by the Section for Library Work with Children, the author best known for his high-sea adventure books (popular with boys) delivered what amounted to a misogynistic rant to an audience of four hundred children’s librarians, most of whom were women. He berated them for creating a children’s book world controlled by women and feminine values. He was especially critical of the books most prized by children’s librarians. “All the models held up today are girls’ books. All the qualities demanded of writers today are feminine qualities—the delicate, the fragile, the beautiful, the poetic, the whimsical, the quaint, the fairylike.”(15)

“Nostalgic” girl books of the 1930s.

Pease’s speech raised the eyebrows and the ire of the women in attendance who, understandably, found his remarks insulting. In his own report of the event, Frederic Melcher refuted the assertion that women are not good judges of “red-blooded” adventure stories and pointed out that fewer men write for children because there is less money in it. But, he noted, the successful children’s writer might make more money in the long run as the books bring in greater royalties over time. He put out a call for more men to write children’s books: “One of the objectives before publishers of children’s books may well be to find more men who have something to say and know how to write to compete in a field where women writers outnumber them two to one.”(16)

As the father of the Newbery Medal, Melcher artfully walked the fine line between both sides of the argument in an attempt to pacify librarians and authors, and that might have been the end of it. But a few months later, in the October 1939 issue of Elementary English Review, educator and school library advocate C. C. Certain stirred the pot again. In an editorial titled “What Are Little Boys Made Of?” he took on the Newbery Medal at full force, charging that the winners represented “a kind of faded prettiness,” particularly in the last decade. “Just imagine, if you can, the average tousle-headed American boy, or for that matter, his girl counterpart, sitting down for an hour to read Thimble Summer by Elizabeth Enright (Newbery Award, 1939), or Roller Skates by Ruth Sawyer, or Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink…”(17) As the most recent Newbery winner at the time, Thimble Summer was held up as an example of a particularly bad Newbery Award winner. “Garnet [Thimble Summer’s protagonist] over and over again loses herself to young readers in mature reflection and adult parlance.”(18) Mr. Certain, on the other hand, was pleased with the Newbery choices of the 1920s, citing The Dark Frigate and The Story of Mankind as books he could imagine the “average American boy” reading “with zest.”(19) Although she was writing about different books, Silvey would make essentially the same argument nearly sixty years later in “Has the Newbery Lost Its Way?” saying that the most recent winners were “particularly disappointing” especially in comparison to the winners from the previous decade, which were much more popular with children.

Certain revisited his complaints in the next issue of Elementary English Review, in an “Open Forum on the Newbery Award,” inviting readers to join him in a discussion of the award. He makes his own opinion clear: “The children themselves cannot but be disappointed in books that are so highly sentimental and reminiscent of childhood. Confronted with these award books, they will come to regard all literature as ‘sissy.’”(20)

Letters poured in to the Elementary English Review in response. Most, at least of those quoted in the April 1940 issue,(21) agreed with Certain’s arguments. And, like Certain, they believed the problem could be remedied by having teachers and school librarians choose the Newbery Medal winners instead. They felt that teachers were less likely to be sentimental and more likely to be in touch with the reading tastes and abilities of real children. There was a general agreement among those who wrote in that the Newbery Medal was being awarded by the wrong people to the wrong books, but Certain noted that few were brave enough to say so publicly. In fact, he wrote that many of the letters the Elementary English Review had received were anonymous. This also corresponds with Silvey’s report in which the people she interviewed would only speak out against the Newbery Medal on condition of anonymity. It’s not clear why teachers and school librarians—now or then—with valid concerns about how the Newbery Medal winner was selected were so afraid to speak out. Are children’s librarians really such a fearsome bunch? Howard Pease obviously didn’t think so.

The children’s librarians shot back with their own letters to the editor of the Elementary English Review, which were included in April 1940’s “Open Forum.” Quoted at length were letters from the chair and vice-chair of the Section for Library Work with Children, of particular interest because both would have been in leadership positions on the Newbery committee at that time. Irene Smith, who in 1940 was vice-chair of the Section for Library Work with Children and thus chair of the Newbery committee, revealed that she had written to Melcher, assuring him that “this year’s committee will seek earnestly for literary masculinity, but whether or not we shall find it remains to be seen.”(22) (What they found was Daniel Boone by James Daugherty, the 1940 winner. Literary masculinity was, in fact, found in the next four years as well, with Call It Courage, The Matchlock Gun, Adam of the Road, and Johnny Tremain.) A year later, in the May 1941 issue, more letters to the editor were printed under the title “The Newbery Award Again.” Betty Hamilton, a children’s librarian from Atlanta, called Certain on his sexism: “And why do the editor and others complain when a good book for girls wins the Medal? Why shouldn’t a girl’s book win? Don’t girls read?”(23)

The war of words continued for three years and even spilled over onto the pages of other journals. In 1942 the vice-chair of the Section for Library Work with Children, Clara E. Breed, asked for a “Plea for Understanding” in an article about the Newbery Medal she published in Wilson Library Bulletin. She was convinced that there would be less criticism of the Newbery Medal if people only understood the process by which it was chosen (something she explained in great detail) and the original purpose: to select the most distinguished book of the year.

Indeed the complaints about the Newbery Medal usually insist that the medal be something it is not. Elementary teachers say the books chosen are too old, junior high teachers that the books are too young. An author of boys’ books says the books are too feminine and too tender-minded. A parent objects that the selections too often have been books with foreign backgrounds. A school administrator suggests the books would be better made “if teachers, parents, children, and an artist or two were involved in the selection.” Sometimes it seems as if all these people had joined hands and were chanting in unison: “The Newbery books are not popular.” (When has Webster defined “most distinguished” as “most popular”?)[24]

In spite of the fact that the award terms have always made the award’s purpose clear, Breed and others who have come to the Newbery Medal’s defense have had to remind us again and again that it is not an award for popularity. The most recent defense came in 2008 in direct response to Silvey’s article and was pointedly titled “Captain Underpants Doesn’t Need a Newbery Medal.” Its author, Erica Perl, a children’s writer and elementary-school creative writing teacher, would have made Clara Whitehill Hunt proud: “We already have plenty of ways to track the most popular children’s books. Shouldn’t the field’s most prestigious honor aim higher?”(25)

Few librarians today would make the argument their forebears made that “trash reading” is somehow harmful to young readers. We would even hesitate to call popular formula series fiction “trash” these days. Most of us are perfectly comfortable with the idea of Captain Underpants keeping company on the shelves with Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Our attitude toward “popular” books has certainly changed since the Newbery Medal was first created, but our mission to find the most “distinguished book” of the year remains the same.

But why do we bother, when we are constantly reminded by Newbery critics that nobody wants to read most of the books that have won? “Who cares that the books aren’t popular?” asked the ever-provocative Dorothy Broderick back in 1960. She characterized the Newbery Medal as “a means of honoring an author who has offered an important insight in life. This gift of insight cannot be measured by the number of readers. If it can be measured at all, it is in terms of its impact on the few readers of each year or decade who come to it with the back¬ground and intelligence to absorb the author’s statement.”(26)

Has the Newbery lost its way? I don’t think so. It’s just more often than not chosen the road less traveled in its search for distinguished.

Endnotes
1. Silvey, Anita. “Has the Newbery Lost Its Way?” School Library Journal 54:10 (October 2008), p. 40.
2. Melcher, Frederic G., quoted in A History of the Newbery and Caldecott Medals by Irene Smith. Viking Press, 1957, p. 36.
3. Hunt, Clara Whitehill. “Children’s Book Week: A Librarian’s Point of View,” Publishers Weekly 100:1 (July 9, 1921), p. 69.
4. New York Times, November 17, 1920, p. 9.
5. New York Times, November 14, 1920, p. E 17.
6. Hunt, Clara Whitehill. Library Work with Children. Revised. (Manual of Library Economy Number XXIX) ALA. 1924, p. 6.
7. Hunt, Clara Whitehill, quoted in “Children’s Books,” by Wilhelmina Harper, The Library Journal 48:17 (October 1, 1923), p. 807.
8. Hunt, Clara Whitehill, quoted in A History of the Newbery and Caldecott Medals by Irene Smith. Viking Press, 1957, p. 45.
9. Masee, May, quoted in “The Sayers Institute” by Claire Nolte, Library Journal 64:14 (August 1939), p. 588.
10. Hunt. Library Work with Children, p. 7.
11. Breed, Clara E. “The Newbery Medal: A Plea for Understanding,” Wilson Library Bulletin 16:9 (May 1942), p. 724.
12. “Newbery Medal Terms and Criteria,” Asso¬ciation for Library Service to Children website. Retrieved April 27, 2012. www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/newberymedal/newberyterms/newberyterms.
13. Eaton, Walter Prichard. “How Much Red in the Boy’s Book?” Publisher’s Weekly 106:16 (October 18, 1924), p. 1375.
14. Latimer, Louise P. “They Who Get Slapped,” The Library Journal 49:13 (July 1924), p. 625.
15. Pease, Howard. “Children’s Books Today: One Man’s View,” Proceedings of the Institute on Library Work with Children. School of Librarianship/Uni¬versity of California, 1939, p. 7.
16. Melcher, Frederic G. “Men Wanted?” Publishers Weekly 136:1 (July 1, 1939), p. 7.
17. Certain, C. C. “What Are Little Boys Made Of?” Elementary English Review 16:6 (October 1939), p. 247.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. “Open Forum on the Newbery Award,” Elemen¬tary English Review 16:7 (November 1939), p. 283.
21. “The Newbery Award: Open Forum,” Elemen¬tary English Review 17:4 (April 1940), p. 160-162.
22. Smith, Irene. Letter to the Editor in “The Newbery Award: Open Forum,” Elementary English Review 17:4 (April 1940), p. 162.
23. Hamilton, Betty. Letter to the Editor in “The Newbery Award Again,” Elementary English Review 18:5 (May 1941), p. 193.
24. Breed. “The Newbery Medal: A Plea for Understanding,” p. 725.
25. Perl, Erica. “Captain Underpants Doesn’t Need a Newbery Medal,” Slate, December 19, 2008. Retrieved April 22, 2012. www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2008/12/captain_underpants_doesnt_need_a_newbery_medal.single.html.
26. Broderick, Dorothy M. “The Newbery Award Is Not a Popularity Contest,” Library Journal 85:6 (March 15, 1960), p. 1281.

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