Newbery Book discussion
      (© 2000)

     The last time I remember enjoying a literary book was tenth grade English (we’re talking 1965). As a science teacher and technology nut, I read voraciously, but, except for an occasional mystery or a Tom Clancy (the epitome of tech), I read only non-fiction. Naturally, I viewed the reading of Newbery award books with mixed emotions—as a budding librarian I wanted to be familiar with such things, but the prospect of having to read “literature” was distasteful. So, I decided to “organize” my reading by creating a database of the 336 Newbery Award winner and honor books from 1922 through 2000, 79 years worth of awards.

     The textbook, Literature for Today’s Young Adults, chose the year 1967 as the time of a significant change in both the style of young adult literature and in the increased number of authors specializing in young adult literature. I backed that up a bit and chose 1960 as a significant date, because it is around the time that American culture changed from predominantly agrarian and industrial to predominantly service and administrative, and significantly higher numbers of high school graduates were entering college instead of jobs. It was also the beginning of an era of social awareness and unrest in the U. S. Sorting the Newbery database in different ways, I could see a few patterns related to this date.

     About 90% of the Newbery books are fiction. Only 12 books are non-fiction dealing with history or science, the only winner being the very first in 1922, and only three non-fiction books have been honored since 1960, the latest an art book in 1970. Of the 22 biographies, only three are winners, and only four post-date 1960 (two in the 80s and two in the 90s). Clearly a non-fiction or biography book must be exceptional in order to receive consideration by the Newbery award committee, but there seems to be a reluctance on the part of recent committees to consider non-fiction, perhaps due to a lack of quality among authors of children’s and young adult non-fiction since 1960, but I suspect two other reasons: the almost fanatic emphasis by librarians on getting kids to “love to read” with their nearly total focus on fiction, and a general lack of knowledge by committee members and librarians, usually with English or elementary education backgrounds, about subject-oriented literature, a conclusion also intimated by the Literature for Today’s Young Adults textbook.

     Grouping the books by decades, I noticed the 20s and 30s contained many books related to another country or culture: England, South America, China, India, Poland, Japan, Bulgaria, Hungary, Scandinavia; this did not surprise me, as these were years of heavy immigration into the U.S. and, while other books deal with cultural and ethnic issues, these early years really focus on the “melting pot” culture of America. The 40s and 50s, pierced by war and Communist-mania, are loaded with historical and biographical books about American icons -- multiple Washingtons and Lincolns, along with Roosevelt, Johnny Tremain, Thomas Paine and others -- and there is a distinct focus on Americana exemplified by the Laura Ingalls Wilder books of the American Midwest and books by Lois Lenski on sub-cultures in various U.S. locations. The stories from the 20s through the 50s focus almost entirely on rural or small town life, and seem geared predominately toward the late elementary child.

     The trend beginning in the 60s is for books more related to middle school and high school years rather than the late elementary years, and more focus on personal issues and social interaction. The 60s and 70s also brought new focus to the African-American experience, and nearly every year has a book related to historical or contemporary Black culture, many of them contributions by African-American authors. The Newbery awards of the past two decades, the 80s and 90s, show a remarkable variety of race and ethnicity, age and culture, and a return to the inclusion of biography. The above analysis tells me that early Newbery awards may have tended toward the indoctrination of very young minds, but that the Newbery committees have gradually become more attuned to what is meaningful to youthful readers and now promote reading that will make youth think more deeply about themselves and their place in society.

     Of course, there is only one winner chosen each year, and since the sixties, fewer books were named each year as honor books, with 150 books named as honors during the 39 years before 1960, and 107 in the 41 years since then. Three years in the 20s had no honor books chosen, and the remaining five had 16 honor books. The 30s had 52 honor books, the 40s had 40, and the 50s had 42, but since 1960, the number of honor books for each decade is exactly 26. The usual number of honor books is two, three or four, but 15 of the 17 years with 5 or more honor books predate 1960, 1972 and 1983 being the exceptions.

     A reasonable conclusion is that, though more children and young adult authors have entered the field since 1960, the Newbery committee has decided to restrict the number of honor books and so preserve the distinction of having received the Newbery award. I thought it would be interesting to know if being honored by the Newbery committee ensures that a book will remain popular. An initial search of a public library OPAC and Amazon.com’s wonderful database produced these results: while all the Newbery winners are readily available both at a library and to purchase, most of the honor books before 1960 are out of print, and some of the authors who had honor books but no winners were not even listed in the databases. This gives more credence to the conclusion that the Newbery committee wants to choose a few high-quality books that will withstand the test of time and the changes of American culture. Such a conclusion gives added weight to my next examination, that of the specific authors who have received winning and honorable Newbery awards.

     Through the years, several authors have received a Newbery award—either winner or honor—more than once, and, in fact, of the 336 Newbery awards given since 1922, less than half are single-book-author awards. Seventy authors—about 1/3 of the total authors—account for over half the 336 Newbery awards and 28 authors have had an award book at least three times. I have created three tables reflecting the awards of these 28 authors.

     Five authors have had two winning Newbery books, and three of them have an additional honor book:

     Eleven authors won the Newbery award once, and also had at least two honor awards. One author had one winner and four honors, five authors had one winner and three honors, and five authors had one winner and two honor awards.

     Finally, there are 12 authors who, though never winning the Newbery award, have had at least three books named as honor books, one with 5, two with 4 and nine with 3 honor books:

     Browsing these tables produces some interesting conclusions: 61% of the 28 authors and about 64% of the books were awarded before 1960. The single winner/multiple honor book authors are fairly balanced between pre- and post-1960, but the contrast between the multiple winners and the multiple honors authors is startling. Of the double winners, only 2 of the 13 books predate 1960, and of the multiple award authors, 9 of the 12 authors and 31 of the 40 books predate 1960.

     There are several speculations that can be offered from these tables. One: since there were fewer authors writing for children and young adults before 1960, there were fewer quality books and authors to choose from, thus a good author was more likely to appear frequently during the pre-60s decades. Two: while it was easier to appear on the Newbery list multiple times before 1960, no doubt because more books were honored each year, it was more difficult to be a winner. Three: four of the multiple honor book authors in table #3 wrote strictly biographies or histories (Eaton, Foster, Colum, Judson), and while the early Newbery committees diligently honored them, they did not choose biographies as winners, with the exception of Meig’s 1934 winner (table #2—and her honor books are not biographies). The appearance of Russell Freedman’s win in 1988 and honors in 1992 and 94 shows a returned interest by the committee to honoring biographies. Four: the multiple winners of post-1960 years must reflect authors of a particularly outstanding caliber; the increased quantity of young adult authors after this time did not necessarily guarantee quality, and the Newbery committee rewarded certain characteristics that appeared consistently in these authors’ books.

     After such analysis, I decided my time would be well spent by reading all of the multiple winner books, the winners from the single winner/multiple honor authors and a small selection from the multiple honor authors, looking for clues to why they were chosen.

     As I read books by each multiple-award author, I discovered the same thing: the first sentence or two places the reader immediately into the setting, the action, or the mind of the main character. To all of the beginnings, one asks why? and then is impelled to keep reading to find the answers. My favorite first lines are And Now Miguel’s “I am Miguel. ” (remind anyone else of “Call me Ishmael”? ) and Jacob Have I Loved: “As soon as the snow melts, I will go to Rass and fetch my mother.” ( reminding me of DuMaurier’s Rebecca). The funniest is Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth: “I first met Jennifer on my way to school. It was Halloween, and she was sitting in a tree.” What a great beginning!

     I also noticed certain passages would make me stop and ponder what I had read—this had happened to me, or I’d had such a feeling, or I’d often wondered about this. I do not consider myself a simpleton, so for these “children’s books” to seize a 50-year old graduate student’s mind, they must have something that transcends age and time and level of education. For example, in Paterson ’s Jacob Have I Loved, Sara Louise looks up the Bible passage, Romans 9:13, from which the title of the book is taken and realizes:

The speaker was God. I was shaking all over as I closed the book and got back under the covers. There was, then, no use struggling or even trying. It was God himself who hated me. And without cause. … God had chosen to hate me. And if my heart was hard, that was his doing as well. (p 159)

     All of us, at one time or another, have felt forsaken by whatever “absolute authority” we believe in, whether God, parent or the world in general. But we gain hope knowing someone else (the author, through Sara Louise) has also felt this way, and by following along on Sara Louise’s journey to her answer, we gain confidence and slowly come to our own realization about where we fit into the scheme of things.

     In addition, these stories touch on issues that all people, young adults and “old” adults, are confronted with in our society. Halfway through E. L. Konigsburg’s Jennifer, et al., as Elizabeth has become friends with Jennifer, we get a surprise: “I knew it was Jennifer’s mother because she was the only Black mother there” ( p 56 )—a subtle and interesting literary technique given the situation in the late 60s when the book was published and honored. I also found interesting Speare’s technique in The Bronze Bow ( published 1961, winner 1962 ): hatreds are placed in a non-contemporary context, so the stereotype, built from a single incident, is enough removed that we really “see” it for what it is. ( There is an interesting Star Trek episode of the late 60s, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” that uses the same technique with two beings from another planet in the distant future. )

     In E. L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, I found a profound statement that summarizes the impact of these multiple winning authors:

I think you should learn, of course, and some days you must learn a great deal. But you should also have days when you allow what is already in you to swell up inside of you until it touches everything. And you can feel it inside you. If you never take time out to let that happen, then you just accumulate facts, and they begin to rattle around inside of you. You can make noise with them, but never really feel anything with them. It’s hollow. ( p 153 )

     So, those authors who have had multiple winning and honor award books have the seven characteristics of the best modern young adult literature, as discussed in the Literature for Today’s Young Adults textbook, but they have more: they immediately capture the reader’s attention and, while they deal with emotions that are important to young adults, they force us to meditate upon what is inside us, allowing us to embed our new-found realizations into our hearts, to remain there long after the book is finished. Not only are these books “the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children,” but they are significant contributions to the realm of human writing—they are “classics.” And that is why they must have been chosen.

     Moving on to reading the single winner/multiple honor authors, I could see the change in American culture reflected by the Newbery committee selections. The five selections from the 30s and 40s were charming historical explorations: a biography of Louisa May Alcott, an Hungarian origins fable, a young troubadour of the Middle Ages, the backwards rural culture of Florida , and the beginnings of world-famous Arabian thoroughbreds. Most of the books chosen during this early Newbery period are rather lengthy—over 250 pages for many of them—and while the reading level is late elementary, the historical settings are very believable and informative. The age of the protagonists was about 9-13 and, though they lacked some of the punch of the double winners, they keep the reader engaged and provide some simple transitions or realizations for the characters. Again, it was easy to see why these quality books were chosen as winners.

     It’s no wonder that American youth became hooked by rock and roll in the 50’s. The two reading selections from that decade were so trivial and boring that I couldn’t even finish them. One of them managed to put me to sleep three times in the first hundred pages. Since one author had 5 award books and the other had four, I can only surmise that the Newbery committees of the fifties surely reflected the blandness and shallowness of the 50s culture. I realize that Charlotte’s Web (which I have never found stimulating) is from the 50s, as is The Door in the Wall, Old Yeller, and two of the double winner books previously mentioned, but these are probably the exceptions to what appears to be a dreary decade of choices (and not, surprisingly, two authors whose books are no longer available).

     The three post-60s books are similar to the double winners in two ways: more introspective characters who come to have more control over their decisions if not their destinies, and many are much shorter than previous Newbery books, 200 pages or less. Virginia Hamilton is especially noteworthy as an African-American author whose consistently good books in the 70s and 80s, four of them on the Newbery list, bring a much-needed perspective on the African-American cultural experience. She is the only African-American author to appear more than once or twice on the Newbery list, but further examination shows a number of single- and double-award African-American authors. These single winner/multiple honors group of authors give satisfactory reading that renewed my respect for the Newbery book awards. Next, I turned my attention to the multiple honor group.

     Of the 12 authors in the multiple honor table, two were not in the public library database, and three others wrote biographies exclusively. Laura Ingalls Wilder from the 40s and Gary Paulsen within the past two decades continue to be popular among young people, as do books for younger children by Colum from the early Newbery period. A book by the Buffs from 1954 was stilted, confirming my opinion of books from that decade, but a selection from 1972 by Snyder was quite engaging. These authors seem to have produced worthy books which are “a good read,” but which lack a certain dynamic tension that makes for a winner. Multiple award authors from the post-1960s would be good additions to libraries, but pre-1960 multiple award authors should be examined carefully and individually, if, in fact, their books can be obtained at all.

     Newbery award winners, with few exceptions and especially since 1960, are indeed distinguished contributions to children’s literature, especially for the middle school student. Honor books of authors who appear on the Newbery list more than once during this period are also worthy titles to circulate at this level. The elementary librarian can easily include nearly all of the pre-1960 winners as appropriate literature for that age group, and can include some of the post-1960 winners and award books with careful consideration of the age-sensitive material.

     At some point, I will return to my database and look at those authors who have received two awards, either a winner and an honor or two honors. I suspect any winner/honor authors since 1960 will be as excellent as the other winning authors listed here, and, in fact, many of them appear on the Honor List in the Literature for Today’s Young Adults textbook. The pre-1960 winner/author authors and the double honor authors will have to be read and considered on an individual basis, as the quality among them is less than consistent, especially for today’s young reader.

     Finally, authors who have never had a book selected for a Newbery award deserve mention. Judy Blume is one of our most prodigious and popular authors, but none of her books have ever been chosen for the Newbery list, in spite of the appearance three times by Beverly Cleary, a writer of similar style ( I’m sure others will disagree) and popularity. Robert Cormier is another whose books have never been awarded, probably because they contain such controversial material. S. E. Hinton, William Sleator and Paul Zindel do not appear on the Newbery list, yet some of their books are consistently studied in late elementary and middle school classrooms across the country. So, while the Newbery award list can be an excellent tool for librarians to use when making collection decisions, it must be used carefully and in addition to other sources.