There are now in Europe about ten thousand public and private vehicles that are self-moving. They are usually called “automobiles.”. . . It is thought that there are now about three hundred such vehicles in this country. The automobile is the coming vehicle. We shall see it in all our cities and along our country roads. They are safe, fast, comfortable, and to use and ride in one is a pleasure we all want to enjoy. . . . We may imagine the child of the twentieth century saying: “Good-by, Mr. Horse! . . . We thank you for all you have done for us. Go back to your farm and live in peace and comfort. Do the work you can do, and please don’t feel offended if we prefer to go to ride without you.”

Those prophetic remarks are from an article titled “The Automobile: Its Present and Its Future” by a writer named Charles Barnard. It appeared in the March 1900 issue of St. Nicholas magazine, the best-known and most respected children’s periodical at the turn of the century.

St. Nicholas was directed toward children ages six and up, but its articles and stories made few concessions to the slower reader. The type size used was small, and the vocabulary — like that in the above excerpt — was by no means limited to simple words. In this, it was typical of the books that were written and published for children in the early years of the twentieth century. Although a few big-city libraries had children’s rooms by this time, no book publisher as yet had established a separate children’s book department. If a manuscript for children came into the house, it was processed by an adult editor, and many books became children’s favorites almost by accident.

The Macmillan Company was the first to launch, in 1918, a department devoted exclusively to the publication of books for children. Heading the department was Louise Seaman, who had previously done publicity on adult books for Macmillan. Before that, Seaman had taught in a progressive school, so she knew how curious children were about the world around them and how things worked. From the start, her list at Macmillan included a wide assortment of informational books. Among them were such titles as Buried Cities by Jennie Hall, Girls in Africa by Erick Berry, and Men at Work, written and illustrated by the eminent photographer Lewis Hine. Seaman’s list reflected her belief that “there is a poetry in jet planes and space ships and atoms.”

Recognizing a new market, many other publishers founded children’s book departments in the 1920s and 1930s. But none of these departments published the nonfiction book that won the first Newbery Medal in 1922: The Story of Mankind by Hendrik Willem van Loon. This title was issued by Horace Liveright, an adult book publisher.

One of the strongest supporters of van Loon’s book was the influential head of children’s services at the New York Public Library, Anne Carroll Moore. In fact, she had been actively involved in its development, for van Loon had shown her his manuscript chapter by chapter as he was writing it. Later Miss Moore commented, “No boy is likely to skip . . . a single chapter of a history which makes the world he lives in seem so spacious, so teeming with human interest.” (She probably singled out boys for special attention because — then, as now — they were often viewed as reluctant readers.)

Today, it’s hard to believe that any young person, male or female, would respond excitedly to van Loon’s five-hundred-page tome. The author’s enthusiasm for his subject can be infectious, and his line drawings — which appear on almost every page — are charming. But other aspects of the book strike a contemporary reader as old-fashioned, if not hopelessly dated. This excerpt from the foreword provides a good example of van Loon’s writing style:

History is the mighty Tower of Experience, which Time has built amidst the endless fields of bygone ages. It is no easy task to reach the top of this ancient structure and get the benefit of the full view. There is no elevator, but young feet are strong and it can be done.

In structuring the book, van Loon follows the standard historical route of his day. He begins the chronicle with Prehistoric Man, then moves on to Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, the Dark Ages in Western Europe, and the Renaissance, and he concludes with the modern era. There is nothing in the book about the history of Africa, and the coverage of Asian civilizations is limited to just ten pages on Confucius and Buddha.

Most surprising of all, for a book of this scope, the original edition contains a “Historical Reading List” at the back, but no index. How did young readers of the 1920s, and later, use the book for research?

The Story of Mankind may have been awarded the first Newbery Medal, but it certainly didn’t start a trend. In the years since 1922, only five other informational books have won the Newbery. And none of them is a history; instead, all five are biographies. The winning titles are: Invincible Louisa, the life of Louisa May Alcott, by Cornelia Meigs (1934); Daniel Boone by James Daugherty (1940); Amos Fortune, Free Man by Elizabeth Yates (1951); Carry On, Mr. Bowditch by Jean Lee Latham (1956); and Lincoln: A Photobiography by Russell Freedman (1988). It’s interesting to note that the five subjects of these biographies were all Americans, and only one of them was a woman.

Children’s nonfiction fared better when it came to the selection of Newbery Honor Books. There have been thirty of those over the years, eighteen of them biographies (including two of George Washington). But the scope of subject matter treated in the Honor Books has gradually broadened. In 1951, Jeanette Eaton’s Gandhi: Fighter without a Sword became the first biography of a non- Western figure to be awarded a Newbery Honor. Science writing received overdue recognition when Katherine Shippen’s Men, Microscopes, and Living Things made the Honors list in 1956. And a book of African-American history entered the winners’ circle for the first time in 1969 when the Newbery committee awarded an Honor to Julius Lester’s groundbreaking work, To Be a Slave.

Looking back at the biographies that have won Newbery Medals or Honors brings up a question that has often been raised but never entirely resolved. Should biographies include fictionalized scenes and dialogue in order to interest young readers, or should they hew strictly to the facts?

Author Jean Lee Latham made no bones about where she stood on the matter. In her Newbery acceptance speech for Carry On, Mr. Bowditch, she frankly described her winning book as “fictionized biography.” And as late as 1981, when the sixth edition of Children and Books by Zena Sutherland and May Hill Arbuthnot appeared, that Bible of children’s literature endorsed Latham’s approach: “Perhaps fictionalized biography is the best pattern of biography for young people,” the authors wrote. “There is no doubt that dialogue based on facts, written by a scholar and an artist, brings history to life and re-creates living, breathing heroes, who make a deep impression on children.”

A series of juvenile biographies launched in 1932 had helped to create a climate of acceptance for the fictionalized approach. The Childhood of Famous Americans series enjoyed great popularity in the thirties and for many decades after that. A typical biography in the series was Ethel Barrymore: Girl Actress by Shirlee P. Newman, published in 1966. The copy on the jacket flap calls the book a story, not a biography, and the text bears out that description. It is written almost entirely in dialogue, in short, fastmoving paragraphs. Here’s a sample passage:

Tumbling off the bed, Lionel and Ethel threw their arms about their grandmother’s knees. “Is it time to go, Mummum?” Ethel cried, using her grandmother’s pet name. “Is it time to go and see Mama and Papa on the stage?” “It will soon be time.” Mummum leaned down and hugged them close. Then she pushed them away gently, and smoothed her long skirts. “Are you going to the theater like that, Ethel? What would the newspaper say?” Mrs. Drew held a make-believe newspaper in the air. “Philadelphia, Pennsylvania,” she pretended to read. “Ethel Barrymore, daughter of actors Maurice Barrymore and Georgia Drew Barrymore, went to the theater last night in a long, pink nightie.”

In accordance with the series title, the majority of the book focuses on the subject’s childhood. One hundred and seventy-six of the book’s two hundred pages take the reader up only to Ethel’s stage debut at age fourteen in a play with her grandmother. The rest of the actress’s life is crammed into the next fifteen pages, and the book ends with Ethel’s seventieth birthday celebration, ten years before her death at eighty in 1959.

Stopping before the end of the subject’s life was common in children’s biographies of an earlier time. For example, in Abraham Lincoln, the picture-book biography by Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire that won the Caldecott Medal in 1940, there is no mention of Lincoln’s assassination. On the book’s last page, the president simply sits down to rest in his rocking chair following the end of the Civil War. Such endings were an attempt — which many today would call misguided — to shield young readers from the harsher realities of life and give them a happy ending, no matter what the truth.

Attitudes toward fictionalization had changed dramatically by the late 1980s. Jean Fritz, noted for her lively young biographies of the Founding Fathers, has written: “Once a biographer has collected the facts, it is not a matter of coaxing up a story; it is a question of perceiving the story line that is already there. . . . I need as much evidence as I can get, for I do not invent.”

Russell Freedman, in his Newbery acceptance speech for Lincoln, took an even stronger stand in favor of sticking to the facts and avoiding any sort of dramatization. “Many current biographies for children adhere as closely to documented evidence as any scholarly work,” he said. “And the best of them manage to do so without becoming tedious or abstract or any less exciting than the most imaginative fictionalization.”

Later, referring specifically to Lincoln, Freedman added, “It certainly wasn’t necessary to embellish the events of his life with imaginary scenes and dialogue. Lincoln didn’t need a speech writer in his own time, and he doesn’t need one now.”

I’d venture to say that most writers of biographies for children today — as well as the majority of librarians and teachers who evaluate the books for purchase — would agree with Freedman’s position. As I’ve learned myself from writing biographies, the use of excerpts from a subject’s letters, diaries, speeches, and interviews can give young readers a much clearer impression of his or her personality than any invented dialogue possibly could.

Along with the move away from fictionalization in the 1980s, children’s book reviewers (most notably Hazel Rochman in a Booklist editorial) began to demand that nonfiction authors provide detailed notes on their sources — not just in biographies but in all types of informational books. Some authors resisted, claiming that long lists of sources would put off young readers. But by the 1990s most nonfiction titles included not just source notes but glossaries, tables of important dates, suggestions for further reading, and other kinds of supplementary material. And unlike The Story of Mankind, all informational books, even those for the picture-book age, were now expected to have an index.

The new emphasis on accuracy and completeness was only one of the trends that swept through the children’s nonfiction field in the latter part of the century. After the Soviet Union rocketed a satellite, Sputnik, into space in the fall of 1957, Congress responded by passing the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Among other things, the act provided funds for the purchase of science books by school libraries. This led publishers large and small to initiate new series of science books for all age levels. Among the most creative was the Let’s Read and Find Out series, launched by Thomas Y. Crowell in 1960.

Aimed at youngsters in kindergarten through second grade, this series was in many ways the nonfiction counterpart to Harper’s I Can Read series. It combined the work of such outstanding science writers as Franklyn Branley and Paul Showers with the illustrations of topflight artists such as Aliki, Ed Emberley, Nonny Hogrogian, and Paul Galdone. The result was a line of books that combined solid information with lively, colorful graphics, books that entertained young readers even as they educated them.

Before the Let’s Read and Find Out series came along, many nonfiction authors and editors thought the best way to interest youngsters in science was to surround the facts with a fictional framework. The result was the publication of countless books with titles like “Johnny and Janey Visit a Sewage Disposal Plant.” The Let’s Read and Find Out series and others like it put an end to this particular brand of nonfiction hybrid, which usually succeeded neither as fiction nor as nonfiction. But it surfaced again in a fresh and imaginative way with author Joanna Cole and illustrator Bruce Degen’s Magic School Bus series, proving that even an outworn approach can be given new vitality by the right author.

Increased support for school libraries came as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” program of 1964. This new financing benefited all types of children’s books, but nonfiction — and not just science nonfiction — got a large slice of the pie. The Great Society coincided with the rise of the civil rights movement in the United States. The latter movement, in turn, spawned a new interest in black history and the heroic men and women who had played active parts in it. Once again, Crowell led the way with a series of young biographies about prominent figures Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks, and Paul Robeson, written by well-known black authors such as Alice Walker, June Jordan, and Eloise Greenfield.

As federal funds for libraries dwindled in the 1970s and 1980s, children’s book publishers shifted their focus to the bookstore market. To attract consumers, picture books became more colorful and juvenile nonfiction more visual. Some of the new nonfiction titles, like David Macaulay’s imaginative books about construction techniques, Cathedral, City, and Pyramid, were illustrated with detailed drawings. But most of the nonfiction books that caught people’s eyes in the 1970s were produced on heavy, high-grade paper and illustrated with top-quality black-and-white or full-color photographs. So many of these photo-illustrated books were published that they soon acquired a generic name: the photo-essay.

The name might be new, but photo-illustrated fact books had occupied a small but significant niche in children’s literature for many years. Florence Fitch’s One God: The Ways We Worship Him (1944) made effective use of photographs to portray the rituals of the major religions in America. Discovering Design by Marion Downer (1947) introduced children to the similar patterns found in nature and in art. What’s Inside? by May Garelick (1955) depicted the gradual emergence of a gosling from its egg.

The genre came into its own, though, with the publication of such photo-essays of the 1970s as Small Worlds Close Up by Lisa Grillone and Joseph Gennaro, The Hospital Book by James Howe, with photographs by Mal Warshaw, and Journey to the Planets by Patricia Lauber. Books such as these attracted readers with their inviting design layouts and dramatic photographs, then held the reader’s attention with tightly written and sharply focused texts, laced with carefully chosen anecdotes.

The trend toward more visual nonfiction books grew and spread in the 1980s. No longer was it confined to books for younger children; now it extended to books for the elementary and middle school grades. Many of the books were illustrated with contemporary pictures; others, such as Russell Freedman’s Children of the Wild West, with archival photographs. In some cases, such as the popular Dorling Kindersley series on everything from ancient Rome to whales, the visual concepts came first and the texts of the books were often little more than captions.

Planning the illustration approach and researching the pictures became an important part of the nonfiction writer’s job, as I discovered when I was working on Charles A. Lindbergh: A Human Hero. The search for photos to illuminate the airman’s life took me from the Air and Space Museum in Washington to the Minnesota Historical Society in St. Paul (repository of Lindbergh’s boyhood photo albums) to the backroom file cabinets of the Corbis-Bettman agency in New York City. Picture research can be an expensive proposition for the author. Most publishers build an illustration allowance into the contract for the book, but many authors exhaust it and end up digging into their own pockets in order to secure the best possible pictures for their books.

As children’s nonfiction was becoming more attractive, it was gathering more serious critical attention. Milton Meltzer’s article “Where Do All the Prizes Go?: The Case for Nonfiction” (February 1976 Horn Book) helped pave the way. In its wake, new awards were established to honor the creators of nonfiction: The Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for Nonfiction; The Golden Kite Award for Nonfiction, given by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators; and the Orbis Pictus Award, presented by the National Council of Teachers of English. The Washington Post-Children’s Book Guild Award, established in 1977, honors a nonfiction writer for his or her body of work.

Newbery Award committees also showed an increased interest in nonfiction — especially the new brand of illustrated nonfiction. After singling out only one nonfiction title as a Newbery Honor Book in the entire decade of the 1970s, the committees of the 1980s chose three in quick succession: Sugaring Time by Kathryn Lasky and Christopher Knight in 1983, Commodore Perry in the Land of the Shogun by Rhoda Blumberg in 1986, and Volcano: The Eruption and Healing of Mount St. Helens by Patricia Lauber in 1987. These were immediately followed by the 1988 Newbery Medal for Russell Freedman’s Lincoln. It was the first time a nonfiction book had won the coveted Newbery since 1956, thirty-two years earlier.

After two decades of innovation in the children’s nonfiction field, the 1990s were largely a time of consolidation. Publishers brought out a number of fine books, but there were no striking new departures in terms of content or form. Russell Freedman received Newbery Honors for two more biographies, The Wright Brothers: How They Invented the Airplane in 1992 and Eleanor Roosevelt: A Life of Discovery in 1994; and in 1996 Jim Murphy was given an Honor for The Great Fire, about the disastrous Chicago fire of 1871. But no informational book of the nineties was awarded the Newbery Medal itself.

All three nineties Honor winners reflected the high standards of design and illustration that had been established for children’s nonfiction in the previous decade. As more and more titles appeared in oversize formats with striking photographs or colorful paintings as illustrations, the traditional boundaries between age groups broke down. No longer did children in the upper elementary and middle school grades reject picture-book nonfiction as “babyish.” Heavily illustrated titles such as Diane Stanley’s biographies of Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, and Leonardo da Vinci; Seymour Simon’s spectacular books about the planets; and my own picture book biographies of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson found as much acceptance from sixth graders as they did from third graders.

There are several possible explanations for this change in attitude. The most obvious is that young people today, accustomed to getting so much of their information from television and the Internet, want the same sort of emphasis on the visual in their books. A second theory is less positive. It suggests that the many youngsters who are not able to read at their own grade level may be drawn to the brief texts in nonfiction picture books, finding them easier to grasp. Whatever the explanation, it seems clear that the trend toward nonfiction picture books for older children will extend into the new millennium.

Another trend that’s likely to endure is the willingness to discuss hitherto taboo topics in children’s informational books. In recent years, nonfiction writers have explored in a frank, thoroughgoing manner such subjects as child abuse, teenage sex and pregnancy, abortion, homosexuality, and substance abuse — despite lingering opposition from groups of various stripes who believe that such books are unsuitable for children and young adults.

I was made vividly aware of this situation a few years ago when I was asked by a Texas school librarian what project I was currently working on. I told her about the book that eventually became When Plague Strikes, a comparative study of three deadly diseases, the Black Death, smallpox, and AIDS. “Oh, good,” the librarian said. “I’ll probably be able to purchase that book for my library because you put AIDS in the context of those other diseases. Given the strong feelings in my community, I couldn’t buy a book about AIDS alone.”

Despite such hurdles, I’m convinced that nonfiction writers will continue to explore controversial subject matter in the twenty-first century. Sensitively handled, these explorations can be an effective counterbalance to all the exploitative programming that is readily available to young people today via television and the Internet. If the opponents of so-called “unsuitable” books could be made to realize this, they might end up embracing the very books they’re now trying so hard to ban.

Another issue under discussion as the new century begins is the long-range impact the Internet will have on book publishing generally, and children’s nonfiction in particular. There are those who claim that the book as we know it cannot survive, and that young people in the future will receive all the information they need from one form of electronic transmission or another, including electronic books. I find this hard to believe, remembering when, not so long ago, various experts predicted that television would soon replace the book.

In fact, television in many instances has whetted the public’s appetite for informational books. One librarian after another has told me that when a television program focuses on a particular subject — say a National Geographic special on elephants — libraries experience a run on books about elephants in the weeks that follow. I have a hunch that something similar may happen in the case of the Internet. After obtaining a summary of the desired information on a screen, the young person will turn to a book for a more in-depth treatment of the subject — a book that does not require an electrical outlet or battery to operate, and that can be transported easily to any place the young person wants to sit and read it.

I began this essay with an excerpt from an article about the automobile that appeared in a 1900 issue of St. Nicholas; I’ll end with an excerpt from another article about the automobile, “A Hundred Years of Wheels and Wings” by Jim Murphy. (The latter appears in my recently published anthology of pieces by various authors, The Century That Was: Reflections on the Last One Hundred Years [Atheneum]).

Like its predecessor, Murphy’s article is filled with intriguing facts and is written in the sort of clear, lively style that has always marked the best informational writing for children. The piece is framed with an account of the doings of an actual Connecticut farmer. Here is how it begins:

In the spring of 1901, Connecticut farmer Abel Hendron hitched his team of horses to the wagon and began the 7.5 mile journey to town to pick up a plow ordered in February. Ordinarily, it could take him anywhere from two to four hours to reach town and come home, not counting stops he mightmake along the way to chat with neighbors . . . .

And here is how the piece ends, some sixteen pages later:

If Abel Hendron took a ride to town today, he would probably drive a pickup truck or an off-road four-wheel-drive vehicle. Few things would slow his drive, certainly not mud or roads so rutted as to be impassable. In all, his travel time for the round trip journey of fourteen miles might be a half hour to forty minutes. . . .

He would probably be startled to learn that the auto had replaced the horse in the lives and hearts of most Americans and that only a tiny handful of determined farmers still used them for work. . . . He might even blink in disbelief if someone told him that tests were being done on cars that moved over roads without wheels. . . . But Abel Hendron considered himself a modern farmer. So he would have driven quite happily into the twentyfirst century, ready for whatever new forms of transportation the future might hold.

Just as we will move into the future, ready for whatever new forms the transmission of information will take. Among them, I’m convinced, will be an old familiar form — the children’s nonfiction book. The best of these books will embody the same qualities that the finest children’s nonfiction titles of the past have possessed: a topic of interest to young people, explored in depth, and presented with verve and imagination.

And it looks as if nonfiction will be accorded more recognition in the twenty-first century than in the one just ended. Starting in 2001, a major new award, the ALSC/Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Award, will be presented annually to “the most distinguished American informational book for children published during the preceding year.” Named for Robert Sibert, founder of the Bound-to-Stay-Bound prebindery which is funding the award, the Sibert joins the other major children’s book awards administered by ALSC, including the Newbery and the Caldecott.

It may take a while for the Sibert to achieve the name recognition and prestige that surround the Newbery (whose criteria, incidentally, remain open to works of nonfiction). But even now, in its infancy, the new award is an encouraging indication of the support that exists in America for the writing and publishing of quality children’s nonfiction.

James Cross Giblin is the author of twenty nonfiction books for young readers, the most recent being The Amazing Life of Benjamin Franklin (Scholastic). His article is adapted from a talk given in a Children’s Literature Assembly workshop at the 1999 National Council of Teachers of English conference in Denver, Colorado. From the July/August 2000 Horn Book Magazine.

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Sometimes you think you’ve finished the research for a key section in a nonfiction book, and then something occurs that makes you realize you’ve got it all wrong. This happened to me recently in connection with a book I’m working on about silent screen star Lillian Gish and her discoverer and director, D.W. Griffith.

The two met in 1912 when nineteen-year-old Lillian and her younger sister Dorothy came to the Biograph movie studio in New York City to visit their friend and fellow actress Mary Pickford. She introduced them to Griffith, who invited them to audition for a new short film, a melodrama titled An Unseen Enemy that he was rehearsing later that day. He explained that they would play orphaned sisters trapped in their home by thieves out to rob the family safe.

Gish in her autobiography and Griffith in his unpublished autobiographical notes recounted in detail what happened during the rehearsal. At one point, to get the young actresses in a suitably terrified mood, Griffith without warning shot off a live pistol over their heads. Apparently they performed to his satisfaction because he cast both of them in the movie and told them to report back to the studio the next day. Gish and Griffith then go on to describe in lesser detail the finished film.

I decided to use the story of the rehearsal and the eventual film as examples of how movies were made in the early days. I didn’t take into account the fact that because they were silent, movies then had no written scripts, only story outlines, and these often changed during the course of filming. I tried to see the movie, but it didn’t appear in any of the compilations of Griffith’s Biograph shorts that I located. Not until November 2010, during a MoMA retrospective on Lillian Gish, was I finally able to view An Unseen Enemy in an “incomplete print.”

It was complete enough, however, to show me that my synopsis of the story was seriously inaccurate. When I got home, I made notes of all the differences. Now I could rewrite the episode, confident that the plot was correct. And I wouldn’t have to face the communication that every nonfiction writer dreads — the sentence in a review or the letter from a reader that points out a major error in the book’s content.

James Cross Giblin’s latest book is The Rise and Fall of Senator Joe McCarthy (Clarion). From the March/April 2011 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Several years ago, I asked an author about the snappy dialogue in his nonfiction picture book about a poet. He said the words were a combination of excerpts from the poet’s autobiography and some things the author “rather assumed.” The book, he continued, got “whacked in a couple of reviews.”

It wasn’t because the book was badly written. It was because it contained fabricated dialogue but was presented as nonfiction. This was a classification malfunction.

Early drafts of my nonfiction picture book Boys of Steel: The Creators of Superman did not contain dialogue. An editor I’d queried suggested I add some, but the word whacked had spooked me into feeling that any dialogue could nullify the nonfiction status. So I resisted.

Soon, however, I grew curious. I went back through the text and found instances where I could replace exposition with a punchy quotation from one of the published interviews from my source material. As luck would have it, these happened to occur fairly evenly throughout the manuscript.

That editor did not end up acquiring the book. And the one who did, Janet Schulman, felt that picture book biographies do not need dialogue. I told her I used to feel the same way, but now that I’d tried it, I liked the outcome. So Janet obliged me, and the dialogue stayed.

Avoiding the trap of making up quotations is not the only nonfiction dialogue danger. While doing market research for Boys of Steel, I came across reviews dinging eight nonfiction picture books for lack of attribution in the back matter. (This was in terms of both quotations and facts in general.)

Still seeing whacked warning signs, I asked Janet if the acknowledgments in the book could include the following: “All dialogue is excerpted from interviews with Jerry and Joe” (referring to writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman). At first, she didn’t think it was necessary. To try to validate my request, I referenced the eight tsk-tsk reviews I’d found and the poet-profiler’s unpleasant experience in the dialogue trenches. Janet kindly obliged me again.

Though I’d lobbied to insert that disclaimer, even I was surprised when it was singled out in the very first review (Booklist): “A bibliography and assurances that ‘all dialogue [was] excerpted from interviews’ puts factual muscle on the narrative.” Janet graciously joked that I should now blog about how something my editor initially dismissed became a focal point of the first review. (So I did.)

Avoiding made-up dialogue and citing sources are straightforward obligations. A trickier prospect is addressing the authenticity of dialogue not in and of itself but rather with respect to context.

Technically, no nonfiction book is pure nonfiction. Even if every word of every quotation can be corroborated, the bugaboo is the placement of those quotations.

In other words, while a quotation may be “real,” it may not necessarily have been spoken at the chronological moment it appears in the book’s narrative. That makes many lines of dialogue at once true and false. Let’s call them nonfictionesque.

I ran into some nonfictionesque problems in Boys of Steel. Consider this passage about Jerry:

“He had crushes on girls who didn’t know — or didn’t care — that he existed. ‘Some of them look like they hope I don’t exist,’ Jerry thought.”

This is how the statements appeared in the source, a published interview with Jerry:

“I had crushes on several attractive girls who either didn’t know I existed or didn’t care I existed. As a matter of fact, some of them looked like they hoped I didn’t exist.”

(Side note: How could a writer read that and not put it in his book?)

I had to change the tense of the original lines, and I tightened them, too. However, that did not change the meaning; while it took a few nonessential words out of Jerry’s mouth, it did not put words in.

Writers of nonfiction must often make such judgment calls. History is heavy with what people did but comparatively scant on precisely what people said. Therefore, when writers do find a lively statement in a primary source, to my mind readers benefit by allowing the writer a pinch of leeway in how he incorporates it. So long as it’s cited, far better to tweak a tense than dispose of a gem altogether for fear of the fury of the fact checker. This further informs a definition of nonfictionesque.

But what of the context? Yes, Jerry did say the quotation above, but it was in an interview decades after the fact, not in the 1930s, which is when I positioned it in my narrative. That is one reason why I used the word thought instead of said. It was my inexact way of accounting for the time discrepancy. What’s more, to quote Jerry in such a case, I must trust Jerry’s recollection — but our memories are notoriously unreliable. What we say can melt from memory faster than an ice cube left in the midday sun.

So, strictly speaking, my lines count as nonfiction only if you accept my functional and stylistic tweaks…and if you tolerate the shift in the timeline…and if you trust that Jerry’s recollection is consistent with how he truly felt all those years earlier.

We weren’t there when Babe Ruth kept hitting or Rosa Parks kept sitting or Betsy Ross allegedly got to sewing. And sometimes the star of a particular true story did not record his or her take for posterity. In cases like that, we must turn to those who were closest to the action, if possible. History is written not only by the winners but also by the witnesses — people who were not famous and who probably never dreamed they’d be quoted in the future. (If only more of them had kept journals — and more of the journals that were kept had survived.)

While any given action can be described in any number of equally passable ways, there’s only one way to accurately transcribe someone’s spoken words. Best-case scenario: it’s done immediately after the words were spoken. And even then it may be a word or two off, even if the speaker himself is the one transcribing — and even if it’s recorded electronically. Did Neil Armstrong say “one small step for man” or “one small step for a man”? Millions were listening, yet the debate has raged for nearly five decades.

When writing nonfiction, my goal is to let my subjects speak for themselves to whatever extent possible and to source every statement — practically every sigh — mercilessly. Pure nonfiction may be unattainable, but writers owe it to readers to come as close as possible.

From the May/June 2013 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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As an author of nonfiction, I confess I sometimes feel like the mama rabbit, stuck in a tight, dark spot, constrained by my craft. We nonfiction writers are considered…well…educational. Boring. Outside our tight quarters, the baying and shouting and enthusiasm goes to the fiction writers.

But look at what has happened in the past few years. In 2009 three of the five finalists for National Book Awards for Young People’s Literature went to nonfiction…

…and one, Charles and Emma, went on to receive a 2010 Michael L. Printz Honor Award and was named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize;

…and the winner of the 2009 National Book Award, Claudette Colvin, went on in 2010 to earn a silver Newbery Honor sticker;

…and three out of five finalists for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize were nonfiction, and the winner, my book, Marching for Freedom, was the dark-horse champion of School Library Journal’s Battle of the Kids’ Books;

…and the Coretta Scott King Author Award went to a picture book biography, Bad News for Outlaws;

…and you may think I am done, but I am not, because in 2010 Jim Murphy became the first-ever nonfiction author to win the Margaret A. Edwards Award for a “significant and lasting contribution to young adult literature.”

In this amazing, starry, silver-and gold-stickered time, I’d say we were well on our way to outnumbering ’em. I’d like to talk about how we do it, because actually there is a method to our madness.

It’s called narrative nonfiction, sometimes called creative nonfiction, or literary nonfiction. I think the term creative nonfiction is misleading — we don’t create anything that isn’t there already, and literary sounds pretentious to me. So I prefer narrative nonfiction. It boils down to this: making sure we are telling a story. The author of narrative nonfiction uses all of the best techniques of fiction writing: plot, character development, voice, and theme.

Nonfiction often gets accused of just being about plot. But here’s that famous quote by Nabokov (himself paraphrasing E. M. Forster) that shows what we are striving for: “The term ‘narrative’ is often confused with the term ‘plot,’ but they’re not the same thing. If I tell you that the king died, and then the queen died, that’s not narrative; that’s plot. But, if I tell you that the king died, and then the queen died of a broken heart, that’s narrative.” So narrative nonfiction takes people, places, and events, builds bridges between them, gives them meaning and emotional content. Without making anything up.

We begin with an idea that smacks us in the head.

Here’s how Deborah Heiligman got smacked for Charles and Emma. Her husband, Jon Weiner, who writes about science, said to her: “You know, Charles Darwin’s wife was religious. She loved him very much, and she was afraid that he would go to hell and they wouldn’t be together for eternity.”

“Literally,” Deb said, “had fireworks gone off at that moment, I would have not been surprised.” She knew she had a book to write and headed for the library, where she checked out a two-volume book of letters collected by the Darwins’ daughter, Henrietta. After reading the two volumes straight through, she tackled the autobiography Charles Darwin wrote for his children and grandchildren.

Then she wove the strands together:

One of the great things about doing primary source research for Charles and Emma was that I got to put together pieces of a puzzle. For example, I could read a letter that Charles wrote on a particular day, and then I could go online and see what Emma wrote in her diary for that day or week. I could figure out what Charles was concerned about scientifically and what was happening in his very busy family life at the same time.

Two lives, imbued with meaning and emotion, delivered to the obsessed researcher.

In 2000, Phillip Hoose was researching his book We Were There, Too!: Young People in U.S. History when he came across a mention of Claudette Colvin. He did some snooping around and found that, indeed, Claudette Colvin had refused to give up her seat on a bus nine months before Rosa Parks, and a year later she and three other women sued the city of Montgomery and the state of Alabama, challenging the laws that required segregated seating on the buses.

“Is Claudette Colvin still alive?” he asked himself.

He found her. It took more than four years before she agreed to talk with him.

In an interview on PBS’s Newshour after winning the National Book Award for Claudette Colvin, Hoose said about the book: “In addition to what happened, it was as much about how she felt and why she did things…how her friends took it, how her parents took it,” he said. “So it was this story not only of historical events, but of a girl’s journey through those.”

Being a primary source junkie myself, I e-mailed Phillip Hoose and asked why he wanted to write about Colvin. “In book after book she was portrayed as this mouthy, undisciplined, kind of loose teen from the wrong side of the tracks. Claudette was always compared unflatteringly and, I thought, unfairly, with Rosa Parks. As I read those books I yearned for her side of the story.”

He went on to say:

When I know I’ve found a story to tell I let the flood tide run in me for a day or so and just let myself be soaked with love for the idea. In those dawning hours I’m blindly in love with the idea…Then I sleep on it. I try to put it away for a little bit…I am so excitable that I know I need a day. If my idea can survive those stages, I explore it with all I have.

As for me, I stumbled backward into writing Marching for Freedom. I read that Pete Seeger had been on the 1965 march from Selma to Montgomery, and I casually went online to see if I could find any images. That’s when I found Matt Herron’s photos of the march, including one he’d taken of Seeger.

Unlike Heiligman’s fireworks, I always get a feeling of utter silence, that the earth has stopped turning, just for a nanosecond.

Within days I was ensconced in Herron’s studio, looking through his archives (I had discovered that he lived about thirty miles away). I also started sniffing around through secondary sources, getting a feel for time and place, for the politics of the era. I cruised bibliographies, acknowledgments, footnotes. I call this “reading around” because it sounds like “sleeping around” and I like the slightly pejorative ring, and because I’ll read anything at this point, good, bad, or ugly. I’m getting my feet under me.

I also began looking for more photos and reading photo credits. I wanted to go deeper than the mainstream, well-publicized photos.

Searching out primary source materials, I found a 1965 New York Times article interviewing some of the kids who were there, protesting, marching, singing, going to jail, getting beat up, and getting up the next day and doing it all over again. I picked up the phone and started calling people with the same names in Selma, Alabama. In the end, I interviewed about six of these people, now in their late fifties to mid sixties.

So what do authors of narrative nonfiction do with all the information we’ve collected? Let’s take as our starting point some famous lines from an unlikely source, The Cat in the Hat:

“Look at me!

Look at me now!” said the cat.

“With a cup and a cake

On the top of my hat!

I can hold up TWO books!

I can hold up the fish!

And a little toy ship!

And some milk on a dish!”

That’s exactly what my brain looks like when it is stuffed full of research. I’m precariously holding a whole lot of things, very, very carefully and enthusiastically, and I’m scared to death it will all come crashing down around my feet.

What nonfiction writers have to do is find a structure for our material.

Charles and Emma opens with Darwin writing his list: to marry or not marry. With each item on his list, Heiligman fills us in on his life, the state of science, pressing social issues of the time. We can sense the quiet of Darwin’s rented room on Great Marlborough Street as well as the grit and smoke of the London streets outside.

The opening launches us, expectations aroused, into the book with the chapter-ending sentences: “But he had one other fear, a fear that he could not bring himself to write down. The issue was too big. He would have to talk to his father.”

Brilliantly, brilliantly woven.

All this careful crafting is glued together by passion: for our subject, for our craft, for our readers. As we writers of narrative nonfiction work with draft after draft to make a clear, clean manuscript, we not only strive to do justice to our topic, we choose every word as carefully as any poet or fiction writer. We weight the resonance for each word, searching for those rich with meaning and emotion. These just-right words, strung together one after another, give us the queen’s broken heart, and win over our readers’ hearts in turn.

With a little luck, we’ll outnumber ’em yet.

From the March/April 2011 issue of The Horn Book Magazine.

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Deadly!:

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Dangerous Creatures on Earth appeared first on The Horn Book.

Nic Bishop returns with his always-amazing photographs in Nic Bishop Snakes. The text describes snake behavior, physiology, and eating habits. Seemingly impossible-to-get shots of the sinuous, scaly animals feature gorgeous colors and a clarity that allows details such as the edges of scales and the flexing of musculature to be examined. In a riveting note at the end of the book, Bishop reveals the lengths he went to to get his perfect shots (including a bite from a brown tree snake that left some of the snake’s teeth buried in his hand). (5–8 years, Scholastic Nonfiction)

With field guide–like pages, informational sidebars, and clear illustrations highlighting physiological features, Unusual Creatures: A Mostly Accurate Account of Some of Earth’s Strangest Animals has all the trappings of a conventional science text. But in these fifty profiles of fascinating animals (alphabetical from axolotl to yeti crab), author Michael Hearst playfully tweaks the style, adding humorous quizzes, witty asides, and even the occasional verse; his appreciation for the quirkiness of nature shines through. (7–10 years, Chronicle)

Deadly!: The Truth About the Most Dangerous Creatures on Earth pulls no punches — this is gory-but-fascinating information about the ways in which animals cause lasting harm or death to other animals, including humans. Author Nicola Davies balances spectacle and science, providing accounts rich with factual detail and admiration for the diversity and realities of life. Neal Layton’s cartoon illustrations skillfully lighten the tone, as animals in the throes of death or dismemberment provide humorous asides and jokes. (7–10 years, Candlewick)

In The Story of Silk: From Worm Spit to Woven Scarves, part of the Traveling Photographer series, photojournalist Richard Sobol follows the creation of silk from start to finish in the Thai village of Huai Thalaeng. From the arrival of tiny silkworm eggs to the growth of silkworms in baskets full of mulberry leaves, the cooking of cocoons, and the weaving and dyeing of cloth, Sobol captures the process in lively writing and abundant color photographs. (7–10 years, Candlewick)

For even more animal nonfiction, see our recent review of the Bats! Furry Fliers of the Night app (7–10 years, Bookerella/Story Worldwide).

From the April 2013 issue of Notes from the Horn Book.

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Miss Moore Thought Otherwise:

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Courage Has No Color, the True Story of the Triple Nickles:
America’s First Black Paratroopers

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I hope everybody is getting some use out of our latest newsletter, Nonfiction Notes from the Horn Book. I’ve been thinking about NF a lot since ALA, where I spent two solid days talking to publishers about what they were planning for the coming year(s). Along with inflicting upon the world way too many books about bullying, they are more justifiably concerned with how to respond to the new Common Core State Standards. Should they be publishing more nonfiction? More teacher guides? How can they convince the lazier and/or busier and/or confused schools that the “exemplary texts” appended to the standards are, just as they say, examples, not required reading?

The thing is that aside from making sure they are publishing a healthy amount of nonfiction (because the CCSS require a lot of nonfiction reading), publishers aren’t really the target here. Teachers (and the librarians who support them) are. If you read the CCSS, you will see that its directives aren’t so much about what kids should read but how they should read. Even when I read the CCSS’s “Publishers’ Criteria” [PDF], I see an awful lot of verbose waffling (“texts” [ed. note: GROSS] should be short except when they’re long; texts should be difficult except when they’re not) without any real guidance.

The CCSS themselves offer exciting opportunities, no question. I would really enjoy, for example, asking kids to “compare and contrast a firsthand and secondhand account of the same event or topic; describe the differences in focus and the information provided” But that’s a job for the classroom and the library, not a publishing house. Unless, and again GROSS, you decide the world really needs a new series called FirstHand/SecondHand that saves time for the teacher at the expense of the library’s budget. Shoot me now.

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Hand in Hand:
Ten Black Men Who Changed America

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