The
roots of young adult go back to when "teenagers" were given
their own distinction as a social demographic: World War II. Seventeenth Summer, released by Maureen Daly in 1942, is
considered to be the first book written and published explicitly for
teenagers, according to Cart, an author and the former president of
the Young Adult Library Services Association. It was a novel largely
for girls about first love. In its footsteps followed other romances,
ands sport novels for boys.
The
term young adult was coined by the Young Adult Library
Services Association during the 1960s to represent the 12-18 age
range. Novels of the time, like S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders, offered a mature contemporary realism directed at adolescents. The
focus on culture and serious themes in young adult paved the way for
authors to write with more candor about teen issues in the 1970s,
Cart said.
The
first golden age is associated with the authors who the parents of
today's teens recognize: Judy Blume, Lois Duncan and Robert Cormier.
The young adult books of the 1970s remain true time capsules of the
high school experience and the drama of being misunderstood. Books
like Cormier's The Chocolate War brought a literary sense
to books targeted at teens.
But
once these books devolved into single-problem novels --
divorce, drug abuse -- teens grew tired of the formulaic stories. The
1980s welcomed in more genre fiction, like horror from Christopher
Pike and the beginning of R.L. Stine's Fear Street series, and adolescent high drama a la Sweet Valley High, while the '90s were an eclipse for young adult. With fewer teenagers
around to soak up young adult lit due to low birth rates in the
mid-1970s, books for tweens and middle-schoolers bloomed. But a baby
boom in 1992 resulted in a renaissance among teen readers and the
second golden age beginning in 2000, Cart said.
"When
I was a teen in the '90s, there were probably three shelves of teen
books I wanted to read," said Shannon Peterson, president of the
Young Adult Library Services Association. "Now, I feel like it's
evolved from three shelves to whole hallways of books."
The
book world began marketing directly to teens for the first time at
the turn of the millennium. Expansive young adult sections appeared
in bookstores, targeting and welcoming teens to discover their very
own genre. J.K. Rowling's well-timed Harry Potter series
exploded the category and inspired a whole generation of fantasy
series novelists, Cart said. The shift led to success for Stephenie
Meyer's Twilight vampire saga and Suzanne Collins'
futuristic The Hunger Games.
But
why did paranormal and dystopian tales connect so well with teens?
"Just
like adolescence is between childhood and adulthood, paranormal, or
other, is between human and supernatural," said Jennifer
Lynn Barnes,
a young adult author, Ph.D. and cognitive science scholar. "Teens
are caught between two worlds, childhood and adulthood, and in YA,
they can navigate those two worlds and sometimes dualities of other
worlds."
