85
Children’s Literature in the USA: A Historical
Overview
Jerry Griswold
Before 1800It is only by contrivance that we can divide what is a seamless thread and declare some
arbitrary episode the Alpha—the moment when children’s literature began in the USA.
Were the legends and oral stories of its aboriginal peoples (Indians or Native Americans)
the first stories? If Ernesto Rodríguez—a Spanish soldier stationed in Santa Fe, New
Mexico, in 1625—told his daughter an anecdote from Don Quixote, would that be the
first children’s tale? Even if America’s early history is reckoned by the fact that it was an
English colony, and even if the search for an origin is limited to stories in print, it is
difficult to discover a discrete beginning because, along with shiploads of furniture and
material goods of all kinds, religious refugees and spiritual colonists brought with them
or had imported texts of all kinds—English chapbooks, alphabet books, books of
manners, Isaac Watts’s poems, the fairy tales of Perrault, the fables of Aesop, stories of
Cock Robin and Dick Whittington, etc.
Even so, among the earth-changing events that occurred in the first half of the
seventeenth century—the announcement of Galileo’s heliocentric conclusions in his
Dialogue in 1632, the founding of Harvard University in 1636, and the publications of
Descartes’s summary cogitations in his Discourses in 1637—among these events one is
not likely to find the publication of John Cotton’s Spiritual Milk for Boston Babes (1646).
None the less, though it was printed in London, this slender volume was probably the
first book especially prepared for North American youth. Part catechism and part
schoolbook, Cotton’s work was part of a genre that eventually reached its apogee in The
New England Primer, America’s most popular educational text, more than six million
copies of which were printed between 1680 and 1830. This genre’s yoking of church and
school—that is, education as salvation and vice versa—is suggested in The Primer’s
alphabet, which begins: In Adam’s fall,/We sinned all.
Milton’s Adam, however, fell in Paradise Lost in 1667. Ten years later, mapping a way
to regain paradise, the ambulatory John Bunyan issued the first part of Pilgrim’s
Progress. Understanding these two books, one would understand the flavour of the first
work actually printed in America for minors: Cotton Mather’s wonderfully titled A Token
for the Children of New England; or some Examples of Children in whom the Fear of God
was remarkably budding before they dyed; in several parts of New England (1700).
Mather’s funereal work is an anthology of biographies of woebegone but pious ephebes,