Beyond the cover that everyone's talking about, Jill Lepore has a wonderfully thorough feature in the current New Yorker on "the battle that reshaped children's literature."
No, it's not Gossip Girls. Not The Babysitter's Club, not even Anne Of Green Gables (100th anniversary this year, as if you need reminding!) or The Adventure's of Tom Sawyer. Rather, it involved the strange confrontation between E.B. White and wildly influential New York librarian Anne Carroll Moore (she invented the children's library) about a strange little classic character named Stuart Little.
“I never was so disappointed in a book in my life,” Moore declared. She summoned Nordstrom to her rooms at the Grosvenor Hotel, where she warned her that the book “mustn’t be published.” To the Whites she sent a fourteen-page letter, predicting that the book would fail and that it would prove an embarrassment ... Moore’s criticisms were severe: the story was “out of hand”; Stuart was always “staggering out of scale.” Worse, White had blurred reality and fantasy—“The two worlds were all mixed up”—and children wouldn’t be able to tell them apart. “She said something about its having been written by a sick mind,” E. B. White remembered. ...
“It is unnerving to be told you’re bad for children,” E. B. White admitted, “but I detected in Miss Moore’s letter an assumption that there are rules governing the writing of juvenile literature—rules as inflexible as the rules for lawn tennis. And this I was not sure of.” He shrugged it off: “Children can sail easily over the fence that separates reality from make-believe. They go over it like little springboks. A fence that can throw a librarian is as nothing to a child.”
Now, this might just be a humorous little historical aside, much like the stories of the fourth Supreme and the record company that rejected the Beatles. But more rode on this than pride. First of all, a lot of libraries did ban the book, and rather than being universally beloved, it found its critics in, say, Edmund Wilson who "was disappointed that (White) didn’t develop the theme more in the manner of Kafka."
Second, Katherine White--E.B.'s wife and a columnist on children's book--played an interesting role in the story. Third and most of all, the confrontation between Moore and White over the book triggered a--there's no other way to say it, so I'll have to repeat it--revolution in how children's fiction is approached.
One way to read “Stuart Little” is as an indictment of both the childishness of children’s literature and the juvenilization of American culture. Published just a year before Benjamin Spock’s “Baby and Child Care,” E. B. White’s “Stuart Little” might justifiably have been titled “The Birth of an Adult.” That or “Is Childbirth Necessary?” The Washington Post even ran a review in the form of an affectionate imitation of “Is Sex Necessary?,” right down to the idiotic sexologists. (“ ‘Lacks verisimilitude from the very first line,’ said Herr Von Hornswoggle. ‘Man or mouse, homo sapiens or Mus musculus—no little rodent can sail a ship in Central Park lagoon while still teething. Much, much too Jung.’ ”)
Whether Mrs. Frederick C. Little had given birth to a mouse or to a creature that just looked like a mouse was, especially in 1945, poignant social commentary about a culture that refused to look at the facts of life. The one thing Stuart wasn’t was a baby. No bottles, no diapers, no nighttime feedings, no prams, no cribs. No baby talk. From the first, Stuart dressed himself and was helpful around the house. The Littles’ biggest problem was that mice were so badly treated in children’s books. Mr. Little “made Mrs. Little tear from the nursery songbook the page about the ‘Three Blind Mice, See How They Run’ ” ...
... in (Katherine White's) next children’s-books column, she, in turn, vindicated (her husband), lamenting the pitiful state of a literature “careful never to approach the child except in a childlike manner. Let us not overstimulate his mind, or scare him, or leave him in doubt, these authors and their books seem to be saying; let us affirm.”
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