40
Children’s Book Publishing in the USA
Connie C.Epstein
The first books specifically intended for children produced in the USA were largely
devoted to the teaching of proper morals. Catechisms that pointed out duties and
prepared the young for a proper death, they have been described by one historian as
published in the ‘gloomy tradition of the Puritans’. Some publishers managed to lighten
their juvenile offerings with titles such as John Newbery’s Goody Two-Shoes obtained
from England, but as copyright was virtually non-existent they were almost entirely
pirated editions. Not until early in the nineteenth century did a broader-based literature
for children begin to develop with the publication of Peter Parley’s Tales of America in
- Written by Samuel G.Goodrich, the many Peter Parley books that followed told
adventurous tales about figures in American history, selling a total of seven million
copies by the time of the Civil War in 1860.
As the country gradually recovered from the war, which ended in 1865, juvenile
publishing entered a sustained period of growth that saw the emergence of a number of
influential writers. A Boston schoolteacher named William Taylor Adams took the pen-
name of Oliver Optic and began to write adventure story series in groups of six titles
each, achieving annual sales of 100,000 copies until his death in 1897. Daniel Lothrop
(still a distinguished name in American publishing) started his career as a publisher in
1868 and established the business primarily with books that appealed to children.
Perhaps the most successful of them was the beloved The Five Little Peppers and How
They Grew written by his second wife under the pseudonym Margaret Sidney in 1880.
At Appleton, another leading nineteenth-century children’s book publisher, an editor
became interested in some poems and legends written in black dialect that were
appearing in the Atlanta, Georgia, newspaper the Constitution. Approaching the writer, a
staff editor by the name of Joel Chandler Harris, the Appleton editor arranged for the
publication in 1880 of Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings and thus was credited with
discovering a classic.
Some have called these years a flowering of American children’s literature because of
the number of enduring books, still being read, that were produced at this time. In 1866,
the editor of the popular children’s magazine St Nicholas, Mary Mapes Dodge, wrote
Hans Brinker or The Silver Skates and set new standards of excellence. In 1868, Louisa
May Alcott started what has turned out to be a long-lasting American tradition of
realistic family stories for children with the publication of Little Women. In 1876, Mark
Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer appeared, and this picture of a boy growing up in
a small mid-Western town soon came to define boyhood for the nation at large.