If It Weren't for the Honor of It...
In 1953, Charlotte's Web was a Newbery Honor book. Everyone now agrees it's a classic. It came from an established writer, meaning the common wariness about a first book didn't apply. So what title did the Newbery Medal committee think was more deserving that year? I just had to look that up.
Answer: Secret of the Andes, by Ann Nolan Clark.
Highlight the line above or click on the link.
Fairly or unfairly, seeing that Newbery Medal winner took me a back a few summers to when I vacationed with my dad's family. My younger sister, Allison, had a summer reading assignment, with a long list of middle-grade novels to choose from. She'd spent an hour or so in a bookstore comparing all those books--to find the shortest. And what did she end up with?
Shadow of a Bull, by Maia Wojciechowska, weighing in at 176 pages! What is the story in this Newbery Medal winner for 1965? (It's not a good sign when even the publisher's page has nothing to say about it.) Shadow of a Bull follows a Spanish boy conflicted over whether to train as a bullfighter. (Wikipedia offers a slightly longer summary.) It would be hard to find a topic less intriguing to my sister, and I recall that she had a lousy time getting through the book.
Allison would probably have enjoyed reading Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy more. It was eligible for the 1965 Newbery, but not honored. (Back in 2001 E. J. Graff complained at length in a Salon essay.) But for Allison's purposes, Harriet is nearly 300 pages.
Now I get rather bored with any complaints that contemporary prejudices about what's worthy influence which books (or movies, or cheeses, or anything) win awards, rather than (a) what people most enjoy, or (b) what people turn out to most enjoy twenty years later. That's like complaining about the second law of thermodynamics. It's just how the world works.
Nevertheless, it's interesting to consider why Newbery committees thought Secret of the Andes was more worthy than Charlotte's Web, and Shadow of the Bull clearly superior to Harriet the Spy. Both Newbery winners are about boys, for one thing. Did that matter in pre-feminist days? Or do books about contemporary girls get more fondly remembered because there are more women in children's literature?
Actually, I think the significant factor in those two Newbery winners is that they're realistic stories about different cultures. They were multicultural literature before the term was coined. The librarians on those Newbery committees--and many others in mid-century, if we look at the list of honorees--seem to have striven to bring the world to young Americans through books. And what have young Americans ended up preferring instead? Mostly stories about other young Americans.
