Still, in the interval between The Wizard of Oz and the First World War, America
seemed settled in a pastoral bliss. To be sure, plucky girls faced problems: Baum’s
Dorothy and (later) his Princess Ozma wrestled with aunt-like witches in a place far from
Kansas, while heroines in Kate Douglas Wiggins’s Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (1903)
and Eleanor Porter’s Pollyanna (1913) dealt with witch-like aunts in New England. Still,
it was a Green and Pastoral World that was the setting for these books.
Another nature, however—one red of tooth and claw—could be glimpsed elsewhere: in
boys’ books published on the eve of war; in novels that eschewed the feminine and
boasted of a gritty, dog-eat-dog, Darwinian-survival-of-the-fittest kind of realism; in Jack
London’s books, for example, The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1905).
Atmospherically, then, the pre-war world of 1913 seemed poised somewhere between
Igor Stravinsky’s fey ‘Rites of Spring’ and D.H. Lawrence’s feral Sons and Lovers; or,
analogously, the world of American juvenile literature was atmospherically poised
between Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden (1911) and Edgar Rice
Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1914).
The Modern Period (after 1914)Across the Atlantic, in 1916, James Joyce published an account of a hyperesthetic Irish
youth named Stephen Daedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The same year,
on the western side of the Atlantic, Booth Tarkington published Seventeen, his story
about an awkward Indiana adolescent named Sylvanus Baxter. The next year Dorothy
Canfield Fisher published her novel about a neurotic Vermont child in Understood Betsy.
Each of these books can serve as heralds of a particularly twentieth-century
phenomenon in American children’s literature— the ‘YA’ or young-adult novel that
features adolescents suffering maturation or puberty. We might say, in fact, that these
three begat: Holden Caulfield (in J.D. Salinger’s 1951 Catcher in the Rye), M.C.Higgins
(in Virginia Hamilton’s 1974 M.C.Higgins the Great), Jody Baxter (in what may be the
most remarkable Y.A. novel of the twentieth century, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s 1938
The Yearling), Harriet (in Louise Fitzhugh’s 1964 Harriet the Spy), a dozen heroines in
Judy Blume’s books (1970 et seq.), and countless other pubescent solipsists.
Beyond the literature of brooding teens, regional and historical fiction also found its
markets. A Will Rogers lookalike (Will James) published his paean to the American
Cowboy in Smoky, the Cowhorse in 1926. In the midst of the Depression (1929–1939),
Laura Ingalls Wilder offered her own histories of midWestern pioneer prowess in her
successful Little House books (1932 et seq.). Akin to these is Lois Lenski’s Strawberry
Girl with its remarkable portrait of backwoods life in the Florida scrub country. Other
examples of historical and regional fiction might be found Esther Forbes’s story of
colonial America in Johnny Tremain (1943) or, even later, in Scott O’Dell’s account of
Indian or Native American life off California’s coast in Island of the Blue Dolphins
(1960).
Other children’s novels were an admixture of realism and fantasy. Many examples
might be pointed to, but three volumes stand out above the rest. E.B. White’s Charlotte’s
Web (1952), a story of a friendship between a pig and a writer, is a near-perfect
children’s book and written in a familiar tone of voice that is at once wise and witty and
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