Classic Teen Reads

It’s hard to believe, in this age of Twilight, The Hunger Games and a million imitations thereof, that books for teen readers haven’t always been so plentiful. Though coming-of-age stories and novels told from an adolescent point of view have been written and published throughout the history of modern literature, it wasn’t until the 1950s and ’60s that teens were considered an important demographic for booksellers. And it wasn’t until the 1970s and ’80s that the YA genre as such took hold. So it’s important now, to revisit and remember the books that laid the foundation for our current YA publishing boom.

Whatever their subject matter, the classic teen reads from previous eras are the stories that spoke convincingly about the particular struggles of growing up. An early progenitor was Betty Smith, the social observer who catalogued her own urban childhood in the enduring A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Written in 1943 but set in the early century, it captured the difficulties of girlhood as a second-generation American. In the 1960s came Madeleine L’Engle, who unleashed her loveably rebellious Meg Murry on the world. A Wrinkle in Time and its quintet of fantasies gave teen readers a new kind of heroine — one who was smart and fearless, if a bit awkward.

In the early 1970s, Judy Blume broke new ground with her honest portrayal of Margaret Simon, a precocious preteen with a fixation on bras and periods. Decades later, countless homages, including a middle-aged comedienne’s memoir, would demonstrate its cultural impact.

Blume clearly understood that the search for identity is a perennial theme in real life as well as fiction, and it’s central to the great early YA books. Katherine Paterson’s Sara Louise, narrator of Jacob Have I Loved, is a kindred spirit of Margaret and Meg, a misfit struggling to redefine herself on her own terms. Likewise, Kit Gordy, the hapless boarding school student of Lois Duncan’s spooky Down a Dark Hall must speak out to save herself and her friends’ impressionable minds before they can be colonized by supernatural forces. Then, of course, there’s Nancy Garden’s 1980 landmark Annie on My Mind, which was way ahead of its time in its sensitive, almost matter-of-fact treatment of a budding lesbian relationship and a coming-out journey.

Despite their historical details, these books will inspire nods of uncanny recognition in today’s readers, because they get the gist, the pure essence of teenagehood so right. Whether you read them by flashlight under the covers or you simply never got to them, it’s time to rediscover the classics of teen fiction.