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The outsiders, Fat Freddy, and me. (The Sand in the Oyster).

Article Excerpt
Incredible as it sounds, at least to me, I have been involved with young adult literature for thirty-three years now, which makes me and the genre almost exact contemporaries. It began in 1967-68, and I began working with it in 1970. This entitles me, I suppose, to call myself a YA matriarch--or at least an old crock. Matriarchs get to ramble on about the olden days, so that's what I'm going to do here--share with you some of my personal memories of those first beginnings of library work with young adult literature, as well as some things I found out while researching Two Pioneers of Young Adult Library Services, my book about Mabel Williams and Margaret Edwards.

You've all heard, I'm sure, endless versions of that lecture that goes, "In 1967 sixteen-year-old S. E. Hinton founded young adult literature with the publication of The Outsiders." The lecture goes on to say that Go Ask Alice showed how popular YA books could be; Forever ... showed how sexy they could get; and The Chocolate War showed how good they were to become. Like most historical generalizations, these are true, but in retrospect there are a lot of yes, buts. Certainly The Outsiders was responsible for instigating a whole new vision of relevance in books for teens, but it wasn't alone in that magic twelve-month span. There was also Paul Zindel's The Pigman; Robert Lipsyte's The Contender; Gary Paulsen's first YA novel, Mr. Tucket; and the book that at the time everybody thought was the most controversial and important book of the year, Ann Head's Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones. A year later came Zindel's shocker, My Darling, My Hamburger; Vera and Bill Cleaver's enduring favorite, Where the Lilies Bloom; and the first YA novel to deal openly with homosexuality, John Donovan's I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.

What caused this sudden explosion into being of a new literary genre? There had been isolated precursors--Seventeenth Summer in 1942 and Catcher in the Rye in 1951--and the authors of what were called "junior novels" were getting just a little braver and more real. But there was nothing in the literature that would have forecast a trend.

However, it was the end of the sixties, and the times they were a-changin', and the social and political climate was exactly right for the birth of exciting new ideas and new literary forms for young people.

It all began for me one fateful evening when I reluctantly went to the movies to see the Beatles in A Hard Day's Night. I went into that theater a nice middle-class housewife and came out a hippie. A couple of years later I was a divorced...

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