Although Mom can detect the most subtle nuance in painting or prose, she never developed a musical ear. Knowing that, my brother Paul purchased several classical records and proceeded to give her a course in music appreciation. It is not surprising that Mom’s interpretation of music took on a literary dimension. After hearing the first movement of Mozart’s Symphony #40 in G Minor, she knew she would one day use it as a model for a book. Like that movement, her book would have a short opening, a recurrent theme, and a melody that was separate yet intertwined, repeated and extended. The result was The View from Saturday.

Discord, not harmony, motivated Mom to conceive From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. As she listened to Paul, Ross, and me complain about insects and heat during a family picnic, she concluded that her suburban children would never run away from home by opting for a wilderness adventure. Instead, we would seek the comfort and splendor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Although the inspiration for these Newbery books was as disparate as the three decades which separate their publication, their theme is the same. In fact, every one of E. L. Konigsburg’s fourteen novels are about children who seek, find, and ultimately enjoy who they are. Despite this common denominator, E. L. Konigsburg’s writing is the antithesis of the formula book. Her characters are one-of-a-kind. They include Jamie Kincaid, who likes complications and cheats at cards; Ned Hixon, who turns the finding of fossilized sharks teeth into a competition as fierce as Wimbledon; and Chloë Pollack, who learns to put bad hair days and other people’s opinions into perspective.

Mom always lets her characters speak for themselves. At the same time, she persists in having them speak to the core of her readers. Thirty years has not changed the fundamental identity of Mom’s audience–middle-aged children who crave acceptance by their peers as desperately as they yearn to be appreciated for their differences. E. L. Konigsburg’s success can be attributed to the fact that when children read any of her novels, they see themselves, and they laugh.

Since readers recognize themselves in E. L. Konigsburg’s books, they frequently ask how she discovered her own identity as an author. The answer is that her writing career began when she was a graduate student in chemistry.

Both science and art demand discipline and imagination. The laboratory protocol that compelled Mom to log and monitor experiments developed into the self-control she exercises when she forces herself to sit at her desk and write. Conjecturing how molecules fit together during chemical reactions became training for creating character and plot. Indeed, chemistry showed that transcending intellectual boundaries is prerequisite to true discovery. How else did a former student of architecture, Friedrich Kekulé, dream that a snake was biting its own tail, and so discover the ringed structure of benzene?

Today, there is less recognition that skills can be transferred from one discipline to another. The current crop of help-wanted ads demand specialized degrees and mastery of specific computer programs. They don’t mention imagination. It’s a good thing E. L. Konigsburg has found success as an author, because she’s out of sync with today’s narrowly defined careers. She has a terrific sense of design, but what firm would hire a graphic artist who’s never heard of CorelDRAW and has trouble double-clicking a mouse? Mom would also have difficulty as an administrative assistant. She’d comply with requests to organize office records, but nobody else would be able to retrieve them. The process her brain goes through to store and retrieve information is as mixed-up as Mrs. Frankweiler’s files (and uncovers as much treasure).

So the entire Konigsburg family is grateful, truly grateful, that readers and the Newbery Committee admire and recognize E. L. Konigsburg’s talent. By coincidence, my family and I arrived to visit my parents the very day they learned that she had won the 1997 Newbery Medal. She had only five minutes to spend with us before she left to be on the “Today” show in New York. We spent those moments jumping for joy.

While Mom was in Manhattan, Dad answered dozens of phone calls, and the condominium filled with floral arrangements. I was moved by how proud Dad was of her. For forty-five years, he has been her sounding board, and throughout her career, he has been her business adviser. I was also touched by how many well-wishers were friends who had helped our family celebrate the 1968 Newbery. Now, some of their children called with congratulations.

Mom came home, exhilarated from her trip. Soon, she was returning phone calls and writing thank-you notes. She had already returned to being wife, mother, and grandmother. After learning that my thirteen-year-old son was wearing a stocking cap to prevent his hair from curling, Elaine Konigsburg took her grandson to a hair salon and bought him styling mousse. That evening, she heated up the brisket she had made to celebrate our visit. We enjoyed our meal, and I thought about how receiving a second Newbery has made Mom’s life come full spiral. After twenty-nine years, that’s better than full circle.

Laurie Konigsburg Todd, her husband Robert, and son Sam operate a five-hundred-acre farm in upstate New York.  From the July/August 1997 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Early in her life, there was evidence that she would be successful. But nobody would have predicted that she would achieve recognition in the field of children’s literature. Elaine was valedictorian of her class in high school. Subsequently, she was an honor student at Carnegie Institute of Technology, where she majored in chemistry and was awarded the degree of Bachelor of Science. She continued her studies in chemistry in the graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. After a few minor explosions, burned hair, and stained and torn clothes, she began to think about other occupations. Frankly, it seemed like a just end to anyone who would even contemplate writing a thesis concerning the Grignard reaction using heterocyclic compounds of a pyridine base.

Fortuitously, her husband, an industrial psychologist, made one of his many moves. The Konigsburgs left Pittsburgh and a much relieved laboratory staff to live in Jacksonville, Florida. There Elaine taught science to young girls in a private school until 1955, when Paul was born. Seventeen months later Laurie arrived, and in 1959 Ross uttered his first of many sounds of protest. It was wonderful to watch the children develop, but there was a champagne celebration when all three were out of the diaper stage.

Shortly afterwards, Elaine returned to teaching. Her initial thoughts about writing stories for children occurred during this period. Instead, however, she explored her talents as an artist. With a strong desire to excel in any endeavor, she devoted many hours to perfecting techniques. Her efforts were rewarded with prizes in local shows. On a trip to the Grand Canyon, she made friends among the Hopi Indians by sketching their little boys and girls.

In 1962 our family moved to the metropolitan New York area. Elaine took several courses at the Art Students’ League. Her paintings received awards in shows held in Westchester County. As the children grew older and we became more involved with suburban living, Elaine was intrigued with the various forces exerting an influence on us.

In 1966 she began to write her first book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth. Laurie, Paul, and Ross were delighted to serve as models for her illustrations. The five of us danced around the room the following year when the manuscript was completed and accepted by Atheneum.

Even before she received that good news, Elaine had begun writing From, the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Again our children were used as the models for the illustrations. Despite a fracture in her left leg and a series of accidents which resulted in seventeen stitches in Ross’s head, she persevered. Trips to the emergency room in the Port Chester hospital became almost a monthly routine.

Paul reached the age where he was involved in little league baseball, football, and basketball. We attended the games and cheered wildly for his team. If he caught the ball or made a hit, the game was a success regardless of the final score. Not satisfied with superficial knowledge, Elaine studied the official rule books. Serious discussions were held at the dinner table about the merits of a drag bunt and when it was wiser to run and hit instead of hit and run. We even got her to Shea and Yankee stadiums where she let her opinions about the managers’ decisions be known. This furnished the background for her third book, About the B’nai Bagels, which will be published in 1969.

With fond memories, the family left Port Chester in August, 1967, and returned to Jacksonville, Florida. January 13th of the following year proved to be anything but an unlucky day. We were in the middle of moving out of an apartment into our new house when the telephone rang. Amid considerable turmoil, Elaine learned that she had received the Newbery Award. There was much hugging and kissing and shouts of joy with neighbors and friends. And we are pleased that things have not yet settled down.

To date, Elaine has performed in a superior manner as an artist and author. Her accomplishments in those areas, however, are insignificant when compared with her achievements as a mother and wife. She has an excellent sense of priorities and a value system which promotes harmony. As our youngest, who plays a competent game of poker, says, “Don’t bet against her.”

From the August 1968 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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There was a long newspaper strike the first winter we moved into metropolitan New York. Saturday used to be my day off, and I used that day for taking art lessons in the morning and for exploring Manhattan in the afternoon. Our suburbs were New Jersey suburbs then, and my last piece of walking involved a cross-town journey toward the Port Authority Bus Terminal. On one of those Saturdays, as I was in the heart of the theater district, a volley of teen-age girls came larruping down the street bellowing, “The Rolling Stones! The Rolling Stones!” Up ahead, a small bunch of long-haired boys broke into a run and ducked into an alley, Shubert Alley. The girls pursued, and the Rolling Stones gathered; they pushed their collective hair out of their collective eyes and signed autographs.

I told my family about this small happening when I came home, but that was not enough. The next day I wanted to show them an account of it in the paper. But there was no Sunday paper then. It didn’t get written down. I had seen it happen, and still I missed its not being written down. Even now, I miss its never having been written down. I need to see the words to make more real that which I have experienced. And that is the first way I need words. A quotation from my old world of science explains it: ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Each animal in its individual development passes through stages in which it resembles its remote ancestors. I spread words on paper for the same reasons that Cro-Magnon man spread pictures on the walls of caves. I need to see it put down: the Rolling Stones and the squealing girls. Thus, first of all, writing it down adds another dimension to reality and satisfies an atavistic need.

And I need words for a second reason. I need them for the reasons that Jane Austen probably did. She told about the dailiness of living. She presented a picture that only someone both involved with his times and detached from them could present. Just like me. I am involved in the everyday, corn-flakes, worn-out-sneakers way of life of my children; yet I am detached from it by several decades. And I give words to the supermarket shopping and to the laundromat just as Jane Austen gave words to afternoon visiting and worry about drafts from open windows.

Just as she stood in a corridor, sheltered by roof and walls from the larger world of her century, just as she stood there and described what was happening in the cubicles of civilization, I stand in my corridor. My corridor is my generation, a hallway away from the children that I breed and need and write about. I peek into homes sitting on quarter-acre lots and into apartments with two bedrooms and two baths. So I need words for this reason: to make record of a place, suburban America, and a time, early autumn of the twentieth century.

My phylogenetic need, adding another dimension to reality, and my class and order need, making record, are certainly the wind at my back, but a family need is the directed, strong gust that pushes me to my desk. And here I don’t mean family in the taxonomic sense. I mean family that I lived in when I was growing up and family that I live in now.

Read Mary Poppins, and you get a good glimpse of upper-middle-class family life in England a quarter of a century ago, a family that had basis in fact. Besides Mary there were Cook and Robertson Ay, and Ellen to lay the table. The outside of the Banks’ house needed paint. Would such a household exist in a middle-class neighborhood in a Shaker Heights, Ohio, or a Paramus, New Jersey? Hardly. There would be no cook; mother would be subscribing to Gourmet magazine. Robertson Ay’s salary would easily buy the paint, and Mr. Banks would be cleaning the leaves out of his gutters on a Sunday afternoon. No one in the Scarsdales of this country allows the house to get run down. It is not in the order of things to purchase services instead of paint.

Read The Secret Garden, and you find another world that I know about only in words. Here is a family living on a large estate staffed by servants who are devoted to the two generations living there. Here is a father who has no visible source of income. He neither reaps nor sows; he doesn’t even commute. He apparently never heard of permissiveness in raising children. He travels around Europe in search of himself, and no one resents his leaving his family to do it. Families of this kind had a basis in fact, but fact remote from me.

I have such faith in words that when I read about such families as a child, I thought that they were the norm and that the way I lived was subnormal, waiting for normal.

Where were the stories then about growing up in a small mill town where there was no one named Jones in your class? Where were the stories that made having a class full of Radasevitches and Gabellas and Zaharious normal? There were stories about the crowd meeting at the corner drugstore after school. Where were the stories that told about the store owner closing his place from 3:1 5 until 4:00 P.M. because he found that what he gained in sales of Coca-Cola he lost in stolen Hershey Bars? How come that druggist never seemed normal to me? He was supposed to be grumpy but lovable; the stories of my time all said so.

Where are the stories now about fathers who come home from work grouchy? Not mean. Not mad. Just nicely, mildly grouchy. Where are the words that tell about mothers who are just slightly hungover on the morning after New Year’s Eve? Not drunkard mothers. Just headachey ones. Where are the stories that tell about the pushy ladies? Not real social climbers. Just moderately pushy. Where are all the parents who are experts on schools? They are all around me in the suburbs of New Jersey and New York, in Pennsylvania and Florida, too. Where are they in books? Some of them are in my books.

And I put them there for my kids. To excuse myself to my kids. Because I have this foolish faith in words. Because I want to show it happening. Because for some atavistic, artistic, inexplicable reason, I believe that the writing of it makes normal of it.

Some of the words come from another family part of me. From being a mother. From the part of me that urges, “Say something else, too. Describe, sure, describe what life is like in these suburbs. Tell how it is normal to be very comfortable on the outside but very uncomfortable on the inside. Tell how funny it all is. But tell a little something else, too. What can it hurt? Tell a little something else — about how you can be a nonconformist and about how you can be an outsider. And tell how you are entitled to a little privacy. But for goodness’ sake, say all that very softly. Let the telling be like fudge-ripple ice cream. You keep licking vanilla, but every now and then you come to something darker and deeper and with a stronger flavor. Let the something-else words be the chocolate.”

The illustrations probably come from the kindergartener who lives inside, somewhere inside me, who says, “Silly, don’t you know that it is called show and tell? Hold up and show and then tell.” I have to show how Mrs. Frankweiler looks and how Jennifer looks. Besides, I like to draw, and I like to complete things, and doing the illustrations answers these simple needs.

And that is my metamorphosis; I guess it was really that and not a conversion at all. The egg that gives form to the caterpillar and then to the chrysalis was really meant to be a butterfly in the first place. Chemistry was my larval stage, and those nine years at home doing diaper service were my cocoon. And you see standing before you today the moth I was always meant to be. (Well, I hardly qualify as a butterfly.) A moth who lives on words. On January 13, after I had finished doing my Zorba Dance and after I had cried over the phone to Mae Durham and to Jean Karl, after I had said all the I can’t believe it’s and all the Oh, no, not really’s, I turned to my husband and asked a typical-wife question, “Did you ever think fifteen years ago when you married a li’l ole organic chemist from Farrell, Pennsylvania, that you were marrying a future Newbery winner and runner-up?” And my husband answered in typical-David fashion, “No, but I knew it would be a nice day when it happened.” And it was a nice day. It’s been a whole row of wonderful days since it happened. Thank you, Jean Karl, for helping to give Jennifer and Elizabeth and Claudia and Jamie that all important extra dimension, print on paper. Thank you, Mae Durham and all the members of the committee, for deciding that my words were special. And thank you, Mr. Melcher, for the medal that stamps them special. All of you, thank you, for giving me something that allows me to go home like Claudia — different on the inside where it counts.

Given at the meeting of the American Library Association in Kansas City, Missouri, on June 25, 1968. The Newbery Medal “for the most distinguished contribution to American Literature for children” was awarded to Mrs. Konigsburg for From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (Atheneum). From the August 1968 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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I was out for a run the morning of the 4th when a squadron of Blue Angels came zooming across the sky in formation. The contrast between the Olmsted-ordered beauty of my surroundings (see above, near Ward’s Pond in Jamaica Plain) and the high-tech menace above made me feel like I was in The Giver. So then my thoughts wandered to Lois Lowry’s latest novel, Son, fourth and presumably last in what the publisher is now calling the Giver Quartet.

I like the book (it will be reviewed in the September issue of the Horn Book Magazine) but I do wonder about the wisdom (aesthetic if not commercial) of going to the same well too often. Any time I speak to an audience that includes library students, I plead with one of them to make a master’s thesis (do library school students still write master’s theses? Masters’ theses?) of the intersection of Newbery attention and sequel publication. There are tons of variables, including the fact that no fewer than five Newbery Medals have gone to books that were sequels to books that had previously won Newbery Honors. At least fifteen Newbery winners have spawned sequels, sometimes where you would expect (as with Susan Cooper’s ongoing Dark Is Rising series, or Cynthia’s Voigt’s further adventures of the Tillerman kids) but often where you would not, as with Julie of the Wolves or The Giver or Shiloh. None of these stories needed to keep going, and one thing I like about all those books is the way they end. Here’s hoping Dead End in Norvelt is true to its title.

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Newbery speculation is alive and healthy, with even the mock awards receiving national news coverage (and with the USA Today reporter who interviewed me also confiding that his fifth-grade son was participating in one). Happily, the growing din of the buzz doesn’t seem to affect the pleasure of the surprise at the award press conference.

Perhaps the least surprising this year was the first honor announced: Thanhha Lai’s Inside Out & Back Again. It received starred reviews in many of the major review publications, was on most of their “best of ” lists for the year, and won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Still, it stretches the Newbery canon both with its form, becoming one of only three verse novels ever to be honored (along with Karen Hesse’s winner Out of the Dust in 1998 and Margarita Engle’s honor book The Surrender Tree in 2009), and with its authorship, as nonwhite and first-time authors still seem underrepresented on the list. Lai’s verse form makes her protagonists’ observations tangible—small moments given as much attention as the large ones, as in real life—providing an engaging lens for a story that is both specific and universal.

Eugene Yelchin’s Breaking Stalin’s Nose, however, took nearly everyone by surprise (its inclusion on The Horn Book’s Fanfare list its only previous major notice). It also extends the Newbery canon by offering a very short, illustrated novel, one that delivers many layers through its prose and plants ideas that unfurl in the reader’s mind long after the narrative has forged its path. Yelchin is an artist, a character designer for animated film (including the Oscar-winning Rango), and has illustrated many picture books, including collaborations with his writer wife. He clearly understands the role that image plays in story, and he uses it to great effect in his intimate and active present-tense narrative.

The story of a family adjusting to a new life in the United States after fleeing Communist Vietnam; and the story of a boy in Stalinist Russia. It’s hard, with this sole pair of honor books, not to notice the Cold War setting of the year’s Newbery Medal winner, Dead End in Norvelt. The week before the Newbery awards were announced, in fact, Dead End had been selected as the winner of the Scott O’Dell Award for historical fiction, casting the book in a new light for me. (Is it “historical fiction”? I guess so…as much as it is “a funny book,” as I heard someone delight moments after the announcements: “Finally, a funny book wins the Newbery!”) Here, the shadow of communism is really setting more than subject, but it makes for an amazing coincidence that’s worth pointing out, if only to understand how truly coincidental it must be. The Newbery committee does not consider the didactic content of the books under consideration. It deliberates on the literary aspects of the works, including “interpretation of theme or concept”… that is, how well the authors deliver their message, rather than the message itself. And every Newbery committee stumbles across pairs of coincidences in its year of reading. (One year when I served there were two titles in which the respective protagonists each lost an arm to a wild animal.)

The stories themselves are all radically different, as are the styles. If Yelchin’s tool is image, as I’ve suggested, then Lai’s is voice, and Gantos’s…well, humor! Yet aside from the noted coincidence, in a year that boasted a broad field of books with a variety of distinguished literary elements, I think these three, and especially the two honors, show particular strength in “interpretation of theme or concept” above the other criteria. Though the number of honor books is up to the discretion of the committee, they must be the next titles in highest total points on the final ballot taken (those who want to understand more of the intricacies of the voting process can Google “Newbery Manual”). So the honors speak directly to what was considered the most distinguished—individual title by individual title—that year. But we also can’t help ourselves in asking what indirect statement they make about the year’s range, and while each year’s set of honors shows us different aspects of “distinguished literature for children,” in this year’s I see a fairly homogeneous concept.

So, what other examples of “distinguished literature” should we not forget from this year? Though it’s impossible to predict the awards, this year was particularly challenging as buzz about the cream of the crop was all over the map.

There were several nonfiction titles strong enough in writing alone that I could have seen them joining the ranks of An American Plague; Claudette Colvin; The Voice That Challenged a Nation; and Hitler Youth…all recent Newbery Honor–winning nonfiction titles. Candace Fleming’s Amelia Lost (one of the winners of the online Heavy Medal Mock Newbery I run with Jonathan Hunt) created a “you are there” immediacy by interspersing the author’s overview of Amelia Earhart’s career (warts and all) with shifting point-of-view asides from those who listened in to the radio reports of her final flight. Karen Blumenthal’s Bootleg took a well-known chapter of American history (Prohibition) and turned it into a riveting political narrative, while Sally M. Walker’s Blizzard of Glass took a neglected chapter of history (the Halifax Explosion of 1917) and made it horrifyingly relevant.

Some of the other best candidates last year were challenged by the Newbery criteria’s focus exclusively on text, and by the “apples and oranges” problem that makes books with more text stand out better than books with less, although quantity is clearly not supposed to enter into it, according to the terms. Among my favorites:

Drawing from Memory by Allen Say. In a book that defies categorization, it is the interplay of text and illustration, of pacing, and rhythm, and shifts in tone of both, that makes it distinguished. Few ALA award criteria celebrate this kind of artistry, even though it epitomizes a wholly realized book. Happily, the Sibert committee did recognize it with an honor.

Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature. Yes, Joyce Sidman won a Newbery Honor last year for a similar book, Dark Emperor & Other Poems of the Night, but this one is distinguished for different reasons, and in any case each year’s committee doesn’t concern itself with anything else but its year’s books. There are 153 words in Sidman’s main text, and they do triple duty in providing information, a comforting laptime story, and toothsome poetry.

Brock Cole is undersung for his picture book texts, as his divine illustrations play equal part in the storytelling. Read The Money We’ll Save aloud to hear the artistry in his perfectly timed narrative rhythm and humor. A familiar plot shape gets a vaudevillian twist cued exactly to its audience’s appreciations.

There were many other exemplary books this year with a more “traditional” Newbery cast and clear literary merit. Was A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness felled by eligibility issues? His text stands out as one of the most technically adept of the year. Did Franny Billingsley’s Chime just not cut the committee’s interpretation of a book for “children…up to and including age 14”? It might not be a “children’s” book when it comes down to it, but it certainly has an extraordinarily well developed magical setting. Was Jennifer L. Holm’s simultaneously hilarious and chilling The Trouble with May Amelia just one of those “love it or hate it” titles that depends upon that year’s committee makeup to sway it one way or the other? It’s hard to find a lazy word in her short and zinging novel.

Or, perhaps, did we all just talk some of these (and others) up too much? It gets harder every year to see past the public excitement during award season. We’re discussing the literary merits of the year’s best books: this is good! But it’s challenging to remember that the committee reads further and deeper than any of us.

This year, however, I do think we may have publicly exhausted the merits and faults of one book: Gary D. Schmidt’s Okay for Now. Bizarre cover-art resemblance to the winner’s aside, this title was probably the closest thing to a “shoo-in” we could have had this year, next to Inside Out & Back Again. So when I saw Lai’s name on the screen at the press conference (the honors are generally announced alphabetically by author), I was pretty sure we’d see Schmidt’s. I had been wowed by his ability to establish setting without ever overtly showing it, and by the fullness and breadth of his characterization and the genuineness evoked by his narrator. Doug’s voice carries just enough teenaged bluster that we have to sometimes read between the lines, making him more true-to-life than most protagonists we met last year. And in a year in which several short texts stood out, Okay for Now took its readers further, word for word, than any other novel of its heft. Schmidt’s prose is distinguished. It’s also, somehow, in its enthusiasm, sloppy. While no Newbery winner is flawless, a preponderance of eyebrow-raisers in a plot not only makes consensus challenging but also, at some point, makes a book less distinguished. With Okay for Now ranked number one on the Goodreads Newbery poll right out of the gate and probably the most publicly discussed contender, the buzz did get snarly around this one, especially when it garnered no award seals at all. But buzz is flighty…once we’re each over any mild embarrassment in having been so off-target in our predictions, it’s easy to return to the delight of the committee’s selection of its winner.

Dead End in Norvelt was not unnoticed before the announcements, with three starred reviews, a Horn Book Fanfare citation, appearances on Kirkus and PW’s “best of” lists, and the Scott O’Dell Award. But it looked like a hard sell for committee consensus simply because it is so outlandish. Here we have a fictional Jack Gantos, reputably more or less the real one, but amped up in parts for comic or tragic effect. The twelve-year-old Gantos sees fully that adults are as off-base and weird as kids, and this, appropriately, scares him. Wildly aimed humor and nosebleeds seem to be his coping mechanisms…as if he has to fail at things spectacularly, or at least make a mess of them, in order to see the world clearly: probably a habit learned by trying to please such temperamentally mismatched parents. The even odder Mrs. Volker somehow makes a balancing trio of role models for Jack, and provides some of the best center-stage humor in the book. (“I want you to take a sleeve of Thin Mints and line them up on the edge of the kitchen counter and then when I’m hungry I can just bend over and sweep a cookie into my mouth like I’m scoring a goal in hockey.”) It is historical fiction, and a funny book, and somehow, strangely, a cautionary tale. Gantos uses the historical backdrop to reveal the at-odds views of his parents, allowing him to develop his character’s political perspective simultaneously with the personal. His father desires “progress” but feels challenged by threats real or imagined, while his mother cherishes the socially progressive values of the founders of her hometown. When Mom tries to barter with the doctor, when Dad determines to build a bomb shelter…Gantos is at once embarrassed, proud, and intrigued. He lights a path for his fictional self, and for any of his readers who care to follow, to become an ethically confused, emotionally sound, and ultimately thoughtful adult.

In my whole year of reading, Dead End achieved two of my favorite literary effects. It actually delivered on its preposterous hints of murder…which seem so clearly to have been laid as a comic red-herring that when it turns out there had been a murderer afoot killing little old ladies, the reader guffaws, thereby becoming more outlandish and inappropriate than the characters in the book (they are horrified). He also wrote my favorite ending of the year, a flying leap that could have been the mother of all belly flops but isn’t, because he pulls himself together with a tiny bit of empathy and wisdom at the last possible minute (actually, perhaps a minute past the last one)…thereby assuring us that we’re not unredeemable, ourselves.

Like an ill-advised combo of pizza toppings that turns out to be fabulous, Gantos’s startling blend of humor and humility shoots high and, well, gives us something to remember. Which—his readers will recall—is his point.

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Photo (and cake): Mary Wong

Roger Sutton’s Live Five interviews and blog posts about them—videos coming soon! (We’ll let you know when they’re up.)

Profile of Newbery Award winner Jack Gantos by editor Wesley Adams.

Profile of Caldecott Award winner Chris Raschka by his wife Lydie Raschka.

Ashley Bryan’s 2012 Coretta Scott King—Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech.

Kadir Nelson’s Coretta Scott King Author Award acceptance speech and profile of Kadir by publisher Donna Bray.

Shane W. Evans’s Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award acceptance speech and profile of Shane by his friend, actor Taye Diggs.

My Favorite Newbery/Caldecott Matching Game: Medalists reveal their choices.

The Search for Distinguished: K. T. Horning revives a decades-old Newbery debate.

2012 Mind the Gap Awards: The books that didn‘t win.

Caldecott 2012: “everything…which is yes” by Joanna Rudge Long.

Newbery 2012: “The Year in Words” by Nina Lindsay.

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That "Gantos boy," in full Norvelt mode.

Jack Gantos knocks people out with his comedy. Literally. I know of two speaking gigs where he has done so. In each instance, Jack was riffing away in the spotlight at the front of a school auditorium, wowing the crowd with a spoken rendition of his short story “Purple” from Jack’s New Power: Stories from a Caribbean Year, the second book in the cycle featuring his alter ego, Jack Henry.

In gory detail, this story depicts the character’s battle with a nasty plantar wart on his foot. Blood is gushing from the get-go, starting with the headless-chicken chase in the opening scene — so you have some idea of what you are in for. I know how it is for an audience huddled in a darkened auditorium with Jack up there swinging his cat: you can’t believe what you’re hearing, but you can’t stop listening, either.

As Jack the speaker got to the crowning (and gushing) moment, where kid Jack is gripping and ripping the wart from his foot with a pair of rusty needle-nose pliers, there came a crash from the back of the room heard over the howls and laughs of the rest of the audience. Both times, it was the sound of a squeamish kid fainting dead away, slumping to the ground from his or her seat.

That’s what I call powerful storytelling. And these were just listeners. There’s no telling how many readers have been knocked for a loop by this guy.

I know I was, when I first read him. In August 1992, his agent kindly sent me the manuscript for Heads or Tails: Stories from the Sixth Grade, the first Jack Henry book. I say “kindly” because I was just a toothless minnow in the food chain at FSG and have no memory of how she got my name. Jack had been writing picture books up till then, mainly the Rotten Ralph series, and this was his first longer work of fiction for middle-graders.

I still remember gut-laughing my way through his manuscript — and doing so every time I reread it. For me, as for many, the tears from laughter flow even more freely than the blood in Jack Gantos’s pages. From that first laugh onward, I knew this was an author I had to carry the torch for.

I also remember the day when our first review came in, a starred one by Michael Cart in School Library Journal. Cheeze-us-crust! It was a whip-smart analysis with a snappy sentence that nails the all-important aspect of so many of the characters Jack has created: “[Jack Henry’s] a survivor, an ‘everyboy’ whose world may be wacko but whose heart and spirit are eminently sane and generous.”

Jack Gantos writes for the “everyboy” in all of us, regardless if we are boy or girl. His books are all about heart and heartlessness, spirit and the absence thereof, sanity and insanity. His kids are often appealingly hapless yet heroic in unexpected ways, wacky blends of ordinary and extraordinary. They are adolescents still insulated in their own unique, somewhat cracked view of the world. They are smart kids and suckers at the same time, hopeful, bursting with schemes that are off the wall and ill advised, but they are never afraid to press ahead (Joey Pigza and the pencil sharpener, anyone?). They are often placed in extreme situations by the people who are supposed to protect and guide them, and so they frequently become more grown-up than the adults who rule their lives.

To get a handle on what makes Gantos tick, all you need to do is crack the spine on any of his books, because he has thrown gobs of his own history and personality into his protagonists. His personal story is always the clay with which he works.

This is true of the audacious self-portrait he paints in his YA memoir Hole in My Life. It’s the story of how he screwed up big-time as a young man by agreeing to help transport two thousand pounds of hashish to New York City. He got caught, went to prison, and found his way out, in large part because of his dedication to going to college and becoming a writer.

But the picture-book character Rotten Ralph is just as autobiographical. He’s the naughty red cat who embodies kid-id in everything he does, causing upheaval and trouble on every page. It can’t be all coincidence that Gantos wrote the first Rotten Ralph story just a short while after earning his release from prison, expressing a wish-fulfillment for any pent-up soul: wouldn’t it be great to not be afraid to push a few buttons, test some boundaries, and screw up now and then, always with the security of having somebody there like Ralph’s owner Sarah to catch you when you go too far?

Jack Henry and Joey Pigza are two other characters also prone to testing boundaries, and they share a lot more with the author than a four-letter first name. The author disguise may be thinner with Jack Henry, but both characters embody their creator’s indomitable spirit and refusal to follow a straight and narrow path. Jack Henry is a kid whose frequent setbacks never stop him from striving to get out of whatever compromising situation he’s painted himself into, even if it means getting stained head to toe with gentian violet as treatment for blood poisoning brought on by self-surgery with rusty pliers. Joey Pigza is a boy whose three main challenges — his mom, his dad, and his ADHD — run him ragged but never wear him out. He and aspiring-author Jack Henry are hilarious observers of the world around them; in their narrations, they persistently capture those special little details that put a whacked-out magical spin on things.

In Dead End in Norvelt, the author certainly puts a whacked-out magical spin on his western Pennsylvania childhood, transforming it into an amazing tapestry. The real Jack Gantos is very much that “Gantos boy” in the book in many biographical particulars, but not all. Jack grew up in Norvelt, was an awful nosebleeder, worshiped Eleanor Roosevelt, had a dad who snagged a Piper J-3 Cub airplane in a poker game, and knew a woman who was the direct inspiration for the amazing Miss Volker. But there’s a whole lot of stuff that’s made up. What’s fact and what’s fiction isn’t important. All that matters is that it’s all believable in one way or another, starting with the comedy.

One of many LOL moments in Norvelt comes in the opening pages, when Jack has been loaned out by his mother to help an elderly neighbor. On first arriving at her house, Jack witnesses Miss Volker boiling her hands in a pot on the flaming stove and then — as if that’s not bad enough (and “bad enough” is never enough with Gantos) — pulling her cooked hands out and, apparently, chewing off her skin. Cue fainting kid! In some kind of meta-moment, Jack Gantos the author uses his faint-inducing powers to zap his fictional self, knocking Jack Gantos out.

When the real Jack brings fictional Jack back to life, he doesn’t let the flesh-eating old biddy scare his boy off. He stays put. He recognizes a good thing when he sees it. He senses in an instant that this old gal, completely certifiable in some ways, is his ticket to knowledge and adventure. Especially since he’s been grounded for the summer and has nothing better to do.

It’s not all just fun and games with the real Jack. He loves to double you up, if not knock you out, with his outrageousness. And then when he’s got you right where he wants you, he uses the humor to push you into thinking differently about something. It can be a simple thing, such as the importance of not letting the embarrassment of being painted purple get the better of you. But it can also be something darker and deeper, up to and including that darkest and deepest of subjects, mortality.

In the first pages of Norvelt, young Gantos is playing war with his father’s souvenir Japanese sniper rifle. Some bloody funny things result right away, of course, and it’s the first of many moments where death and dying are dealt with in an almost playful manner. After all, it’s a novel about history, in which death and dying go hand in hand with dates and dictators.

But then comes a classic Gantos jolt. In the closing act of the book, that same rifle reappears, and a death happens that is shocking and sad and anything but playful. A confession: at first, I tried to talk Jack out of killing the deer after already bumping off all those poor elderly Norvelters—but he knew better and convinced me that there needed to be one serious death in the book. Not only does it give young Jack a chance to show off what he’s learned from Miss Volker about writing obituaries, but it makes all the other deaths in the book so much more resonant.

Publisher John Newbery — another guy who liked to surprise his audience — had a thing for the work of funny writers. One of the first books he brought out, way back in 1740, bore a title that began Miscellaneous Works Serious and Humerous (the silly spelling is his, not mine). He also published eighteenth-century wag Samuel Johnson, and the books he created for children were far more entertaining than such things had ever been before. So Mr. Newbery would have been amused and gratified to know that the ninety-first medal handed out in his name has been given this year to one of the most seriously “humerous” writers at work today.

Jack Gantos’s book Dead End in Norvelt won the 2012 Newbery Medal. Read his acceptance speech in the July/August 2012 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

The post Jack Gantos: Seriously Funny appeared first on The Horn Book.

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.

The post The Search for Distinguished appeared first on The Horn Book.

As Bertha Mahony Miller might have said:  WTF?

Was this a sequel to our newly-crowned Newbery?  If so, how come we’d never heard any advance word about it? The confusion continued when we lifted out the next book:

Fortunately, we then found the paperwork that accompanied these books, sent by a new publisher, Hexwood Books.  According to their press release:

Newbery winners? 

Critics, librarians, and teachers love them.

Kids?  Not so much.

As demonstrated by the popularity of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilght” series, kids today want to read stories about sexy vampires…stories about fangs poised above the neck of a young innocent…stories about blood slowly seeping into the bodice of a white ruffled nightgown.  Our new series, “Vamped-up Newberys” will satisfy both young people and their teachers – featuring the plots  and characters of your favorite award-winning novels, slightly altered to include today’s most popular subject matter among young people: vampires!

The first five volumes in the series are based on the 2012 winner DEAD END IN NORVELT, last year’s winner MOON OVER MANIFEST, 2007’s THE HIGHER POWER OF LUCKY, JACOB HAVE I LOVED (1981) and that classic from 1945, JOHNNY TREMAIN. 

Take a look at this series.  Share the novels with a kid you love.  Then tell us what you think.  We’d love to hear from you!

Passing the volumes around the office, we began to compare the “Vamped-up” editions with the original books.  Although a good 80% of the content – prose, characters, dialogue – is virtually identical between original and “altered” versions, each of the Hexwood Books has been modified to somehow include vampires.

Remember the sibling rivalry between Sara Louise and Caroline in Jacob Have I Loved?  It’s still there, but now the sisters are feuding vampires:

Johnny Tremain is now a Revolutionary War lad with iron-enriched blood being fought over by two covens of  beautiful and sexy vampires:

And “Lucky” is now “Sucky,” a young vampire who wants to change her ways:

As an example of how the texts have been “vamped-up,” here are the opening paragraphs of the original Higher Power of Lucky:

Lucky Trimble crouched in a wedge of shade behind the Dumpster.  Her ear near a hole in the paint-chipped wall of Hard Pan’s Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, she listened as Short Sammy told the story of how he hit rock bottom.  How he quit drinking and found his Higher Power.  Short Sammy’s story, of all the rock-bottom stories Lucky had heard at twelve-step anonymous meetings – alcoholics, gamblers, smokers, and overeaters – was still her favorite.

Sammy told of the day when  he drunk a half gallon of rum listening to Johnny Cash all morning in his parked ’62 Cadillac, then fallen out of the car when he saw a rattlesnake on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

 Here are the same paragraphs in the Hexwood edition:

Young vampire Sucky Trimble crouched in a wedge of shade behind the Dumpster.  Her  pointy ear near a hole in the paint-chipped wall of Hard Pan’s Found Object Wind Chime Museum and Visitor Center, she listened as Short Sammy told the story of how he hit rock bottom.  How he quit drinking blood and found his Higher Power.  Short Sammy’s story, of all the rock-bottom stories Sucky had heard at twelve-step anonymous meetings – alcoholics, gamblers, smokers, and reformed vampires – was still her favorite.

Sammy told of the night  when  he drunk a half gallon of plasma listening to Johnny Gash in his parked ’62 hearse, then fallen out of the car when he saw a fellow vampire on the passenger seat biting his dog, Roy, on the scrotum.

Finding the entire “Vamped-up” enterprise a little . . . bizarre, I made a call to Peyton Millman, publisher of  Hexwood Books.  Here is part of our interview:

RS:  WTF?

PM (chuckling): You’re not the first editor from a review magazine to call today, Roger.

RS:  I’m almost at a loss for words.  Many, many Newbery winners are popular and very much loved by children.  Did you really think this kind of gimmick was necessary?

PM:  Well, it appeared to us that there was quite a gap between the books kids are SUPPOSED to read and what they WANT to read.  Why not make the books more appealing–you know, add some chocolate frosting to the Brussels sprout to make it go down a little better.  And what better way to do it than with  vampires?

RS:   I don’t know how you were allowed to alter the texts of copyrighted works.

PM:  We’re marketing these books as parodies…satires.  And the right to parody is protected by law in this country.  If not, what would happen to shows like Saturday Night Live and publications such as Mad Magazine?

RS:  Does that include the right to use the original dustjacket illustrations with only slight variations?

PM:  Let me ask you a question:  when Saturday Night Live spoofs a movie, don’t the performers dress up just like the characters in that movie?  Well, we’re dressing up our books the same way.  And  we make it very clear that these books are satires.

RS:  Where is that made clear?

PM (chuckling):  On the inside back panel of the dustjacket in a very readable six point font.

RS:  Aren’t you worried that some people will buy your editions thinking they are getting the original Newbery winner?

PM (chuckling):  It happens, it happens.  In fact, based on recent sales, it seems to happen a lot.

RS:  So this has been a successful venture?

PM:  We’re already preparing several more volumes in the Vamped-up series for publication:  Bitty, Her First Hundred Thousand Years; When You Leech Me; It’s Like This, Bat; and we’re doing a Christopher Paul Curtis double volume containing Blood, Not Bloody and The Watsons Go to Transylvania, 1363.

RS:  Any plans to branch out?

PM:  Absolutely.  We’re ready to reach out to a younger audience with The Bat in the Hat and Good Bite Moon.  Instead of “an old lady whispering hush,” she’ll be “an old lady who makes your blood gush.”

RS:  That’s disgusting.

PM:  And of course my dream is to vamp-up the  Laura Ingalls Wilder books with Ma and Pa as nomadic vampires.  Now we  know why Pa always called Laura “half-pint.”

The “Vamped-up Newbery” series will NOT be reviewed in the  pages of the Horn Book Magazine, but the books will be available at most retailers beginning April 1.

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