Not all adolescents took part in the community-building institutions that sought to shape their development, such as the aforementioned scouting movements and their religious counterparts, youth ministry groups. The explosive growth of “youth culture”
after the turn of the century was a thinly-veiled attempt to control juvenile downtime and shape minds that were largely understood to be vulnerable, and it took many forms. But publishers had been catering to youths for a long time, even if they did not yet have the impressively well-funded marketing departments to clearly demarcate texts for children and texts for adults. Curation of youth taste had long been a project for publishers, from the penny dreadfuls of the 1830s, to the adventure novels and travelogues of the 1850s and 1860s, to the dime novels of the 1860s and 1870s. Most readers by the 1890s had been raised on (and, in turn, raised their children on) popular prototypical American young adult novels such as Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), Horatio Alger’s Ragged Dick series (1868-1908), and most recently Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).7 Pulp publishing, established in 1896 with the creation of the Argosy Magazine, challenged the extant literary tradition of the mid-to-late-19th century with cheap, disposable, often illustrated, lurid short stories. The first color pulps came in 1903 with The Popular Magazine, which
7 In this list, I consciously exclude the influence of the “Golden Age” British novels for children, such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty (1877), Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883), and Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894). One could argue for their inclusion, but I contend that American publishing for young readers is dominated by a fascination with adolescence and rebellion in ways that British fiction never truly replicates. I suppose it makes sense given the relationship between Britain and its former colonies.
published literary authors like H. Rider Haggard (She, 1886) and established nonliterary authors like Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian, 1932).
Pulp fiction publishing became so expansive and pervasive in culture that, to compensate, writers of juvenile fiction had to participate in it or write away from it, to the upper classes. Booth Tarkington’s sardonic Penrod series (1914-1931) and Seventeen (1916) shifted literary tastes in the juvenile novel up the economic ladder, settling in the upper-middle-class with Alice Adams (1921) and Gentle Julia (1922). At the same time, cheaper publication methods enabled an explosion in serial novels, especially those aimed at young people. Called the Rockefeller of literature by Fortune magazine and raised on Alger and William T. Adams’s rags-to-riches novels, Edward Stratemeyer created the enormous Stratemeyer Literary Syndicate in 1905. The Syndicate is credited with the creation of some of the longest-lived children’s literature series, including The Bobbsey Twins (72 volumes, 1904-1992), Tom Swift (more than 100 volumes, 1910-2007), The Hardy Boys (more than 100 volumes, 1927-present), and Nancy Drew (more than 100 volumes, 1930-present). Straddling the line between children’s (Bobbsey Twins) and adolescent literature, the Stratemeyer Syndicate paved the way for the chapter-book craze that has characterized publishing for youth readers in the 20th century.
Pulp magazines saw a dramatic deterioration in sales, driven by paper shortages and consequent higher prices. Taking their place at newsstands in the postwar 1940s were youth-centric nonliterary magazines, such as Teen and Seventeen. These “slicks”--so-called for their glossy photo paper--took over the market quickly as they appealed to newly-affluent middle-class readers. Slicks producers, including Harper’s, Vanity Fair, Vogue, and The Saturday Evening Post, extended their reach into teen publishing to fill
the void left by pulp magazines immediately following World War II. Produced almost purely by adults for an adolescent audience, these publications nevertheless affected a kind of authenticity through the use of still-powerful mechanisms, such as surveys of
“real teens” and focus-pieces on popular careers at the time, such as nurses and
mechanics. Inevitably, these works sought to shape teen fashion, musical tastes, leisure-time activities, and indeed sexuality and behavior. In keeping with the restricted moral values of the time, the publications suggested demur behavior by girls toward their men--and indeed, always men. Seventeen, Teen, Girls’ Life, American Cheerleader, Sassy, men--and Young Miss dominated the scene, although new magazines sprung up nearly monthly to compete for the newly-affluent postwar teen dollar. Slicks for boys ranged from hobbyist magazines, such as Popular Mechanics, to story magazines including Weird Tales and Boys’ Life. Around sixteen, most boys “graduated” to Hot Rod and Gentlemen’s
Quarterly and Esquire. Guys were told to act tough but have a sensitive side, to be a little rebellious but respectful of her parents, to pay for the date, and be otherwise a courtly lover. No aspect of their lives and leisure went undiscussed.
When not being discussed in the voluminous pages of teen magazines, Hollywood films were happy to help as purveyors of “good teen behavior.” Sensationalist films of the 1930s (Wild Boys of the Road, 1933; Reefer Madness, 1936) contrasted with the deliriously popular, straight-laced Andy Hardy films (1937-1946) in a tug-of-war between anxiety about teenage foolishness and the Hardy family’s moral absolutism.
However, this was just a precursor to the true explosion of teen anxiety sensationalism that was the middle of the 20th century. Films of the 1950s depicted the dangers of unchecked juvenile delinquency, teen pregnancy, disrespect for authority, and deviance
from the norm. These films included mainstream titles such as The Wild One (1954), the aforementioned Blackboard Jungle (1955) and Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and The Delinquents (1957), as well as B-movies like Glen or Glenda (1953) and Teenagers From Outer Space (1959). All manner of poor teen behavior was on display, from transvestism to casual necking. As Kent Baxter reminds us in The Modern Age: Turn-of-the-Century American Culture and the Invention of Adolescence (2008), any notions of adolescent nature that come out of the 20th century are reflections of cultural anxieties, namely that the youth of the time faced no true, catalyzing rites of passage that would usher them into adulthood (12). The proliferation of these depictions in the 1950s is therefore the crystallization of years of building concern, rather than a sudden attempt to make sense of a wild demographic. Rather, the confluence of various media formats at this time, including film, print culture, and literature, suggests a large-scale, calculated attempt to reinforce cultural attitudes about the potential--and its inherent dangers--of adolescence. For Burnham and Hall, youth without cultural rites would be aimless, but through their aimlessness, with the proper tutelage and enforcement, they could be driven (naturally, evolutionarily) to purification. For midcentury critics, youth without morals would eradicate American society. Youth culture, imposed from above and in various realms--educational, moral, commercial, familial--therefore sought to encapsulate, divide, gauge, and control the forces that would shape the next generation of Americans.
It may seem as though the newsstand, with its slick magazines and pulpy comic books, or the cinema, with its flashy displays of teenage bad boys and hot rodders, dominated teen culture in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. But let us not forget that those
“floppies” (as they were sometimes called then on account of their less than rigid literary
qualities, not to mention their physical properties) and “movies” were the targets of significant ire from adult interlocutors (as we shall see shortly in the discussion of morals). Parents still thrust good, old-fashioned books on their kids. As subsequent chapters will show, books from this period have significant relevance in the history of how young adult literature became a dominant market force, but they remain
understudied in part because of the midcentury hullabaloo about loose leaves and loose morals. Texts like Caddie Woodlawn (1935) would serve as dramatizations of the teenage girl’s place in the economic and social systems of the United States during and after the Great Depression, while comic books like Captain America Comics would inculcate male readers into the nationalist system of self-sacrifice via military service or participation in a culture of surveillance and self-policing. Even books that took a satirical stand against the commodification of alienation, such as J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye (1951), would ultimately fall victim to the very commodification it fought against, becoming a unifying voice of the adolescent it sought to mock.