Banning controversial books is a coward’s act. Publishing controversial books can require great gobs of bravery.
There was a time, before Ursula Nordstrom, when children’s books did not discuss race, homosexuality, puberty, divorce or any of the themes that are currently falling afoul of a handful of unimaginative and fearful right-wingers. Before Nordstrom, children’s literature had a tendency toward the moralizing, the saccharine, the didactic — stories that she once described as “neat little items about a little girl in old Newburyport during the War of 1812.” (This Nordstrom quote, and most others in this piece, come from “Dear Genius,” a wonderful book of Nordstrom’s letters collected and edited by Leonard S. Marcus.) Shifting the landscape of children’s literature from bad books for good children to “good books for bad children” required monumental effort, self-interrogation and courage. Nordstrom made it look easy.
Hired as a clerk in 1931 at what was then Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row, now HarperCollins), Nordstrom became an assistant in the department of books for boys and girls five years later. In 1954, she became the first woman elected to the Harper board of directors, and its first female vice president in 1960. She was referred to (and referred to herself) as the Maxwell Perkins of children’s literature. Perkins was an editor who built his career and reputation on seeking out and supporting new writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Wolfe. Over more than three decades, beginning in earnest in 1940, Nordstrom shepherded, chivied and gently bullied some of the greatest works of children’s literature into life. Those books included “Goodnight Moon,” “Where the Wild Things Are,” “Harriet the Spy,” “Little Bear,” “Harold and the Purple Crayon,” “Charlotte’s Web,” “Stuart Little,” “Bedtime for Frances,” “Where the Sidewalk Ends” and “Freaky Friday.”
Nordstrom’s spectacular eye for talent and many “firsts” as a mid-century career woman were not the most remarkable things about her. She believed in truth for children, even when it made adults uncomfortable. She prioritized children’s needs over reactionary parental qualms and rallied a fierce defense of realistic themes in books for young people. Her stance should be recognized, now more than ever, as a model for fighting back against censoriousness, grandstanding and patronizing of children masquerading as protecting them.
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Realism was, for Nordstrom, something children needed and deserved. In a 1964 article, she asked: “Is there a real world where young people always respect their always respectable parents? Where Dick Faversham always asks Patty Fairchild to the Senior Prom? Where Dan Baxter, the bully, and Mumps, his toady, always get their comeuppance?”
Her authors were not required to wag fingers. Think of Harriet, the eponymous spy created by Louise Fitzhugh. This downright unlikeable protagonist snoops and pries, disobeys her parents, documents cruel observations about her closest pals. She doesn’t get much of a comeuppance, either: She is told, after her notebook is discovered by her friends and she is ostracized, that she should apologize but then resume her old habits; she is even instructed to lie. “Harriet the Spy” has often been banned, accused of encouraging children to do all the “bad” things its protagonist does. Harriet is the antithesis of the starched and prim heroines who came before her, those exemplary children loved by Anne Carroll Moore, superintendent of children’s work at the New York Public Library and Nordstrom’s nemesis.
Moore’s influence over children’s book publishing was mighty. Her opinion could turn a book from an unknown to a bestseller, and vice versa. That opinion, however, was usually vastly different from Nordstrom’s; Moore fought epic battles to keep “Stuart Little” and “Goodnight Moon” (both Nordstrom titles) off the shelves of the New York Public Library. Moore once famously asked Nordstrom what qualified her — neither a librarian nor a teacher nor a parent — to publish books for children. Nordstrom replied, “Well, I am a former child, and I haven’t forgotten a thing.”
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Publishing these new kinds of books added many hours to Nordstrom’s job. She stood up to librarians, issued petitions and news releases, wrote back with patience to those readers who sent letters complaining about the uncomfortable feelings books had brought up. She gave the writers of these books an established publisher, exposure to a mainstream audience, generous advances, endless support. And the thing that enabled her to do this, her position of power, hadn’t been inherited; it had been earned.
“I’ve been working,” she wrote in 1974, “for over 40 years and the worst curse I could put on any man is: ‘In your next life may you be born a talented and creative woman.’” The voice of a queer woman was not often heard in the boardroom (then or now), but she used hers to push for books by writers whose voices weren’t normally found in libraries. She thought it was important for children to read books that represented more marginalized points of view. Although Nordstrom was not officially out of the closet (her 1988 obituary in the New York Times described Mary Griffith as “her longtime companion”), many of her cadre of writers, including Fitzhugh, Maurice Sendak, Arnold Lobel (“Frog and Toad”) and Margaret Wise Brown (“Goodnight Moon”), were queer.
Although many have joyfully attached a gay subtext to “Frog and Toad,” it was the 1969 publication of John Donovan’s “I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip” that brought one of the first explicit mentions of same-sex attraction into young-adult literature. The story, about 13-year-old Davy Ross and his encounters with a male schoolmate, also included an alcoholic mother and divorced parents, themes then still new in books aimed at teens.
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“I have been waiting a long time,” Nordstrom told Donovan, “for a manuscript that includes ‘buddy-love problems.’” She knew backlash would come — same-sex sex wouldn’t be decriminalized in New York state until 1980, and it wasn’t until 1973, four years after the publication of “I’ll Get There,” that the American Psychiatric Association removed “homosexuality” from the DSM’s list of mental illnesses — but she spent considerable effort preparing the ground for the book’s reception. She even wrote to the director of the Gesell Institute of Child Development at Yale, asking for a blurb: “Of course I want to do everything we can to get it past the adults and to some young readers who may read it with some recognition and some relief. It breaks my heart to think how such an experience can torture a boy. Forgive the emotional tone of this!” (She got the blurb.)
It is precisely the bypassing of adults that is the purported objection of book banners today. Sexuality, menstruation, racism — these are, the challengers suggest, things to be learned about from parents. Books about and by LGBTQ+ people and people of color make up the vast majority of targeted books.
Publishing such books meant blowback, but that was a price Nordstrom was happy to pay. “I am sure that this is going to be an interesting experience we are about to have, you and us,” she wrote to Donovan. “But if it helps even a few tormented youngsters feel a little less frightened all the problems will eventually seem insignificant.”
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Those “tormented youngsters,” which must have included her younger self, were always her primary concern. Nordstrom once rebutted a Harper’s salesman, who asked if Ruth Krauss’s “How to Make an Earthquake,” full of tips for mischief, could be edited to please book buyers who worried that it would encourage children to behave badly and disobey their parents. “Krauss books,” Nordstrom wrote, “will not charm those sinful adults who sift their reactions to children’s books through their own messy adult maladjustments,” and “if we want to publish Ruth Krauss AND WE DO we have to publish 100% pure Krauss.” She paid some of her writers a yearly allowance, and bestowed contracts and advances on people who wandered into her office with nothing more than a fresh idea. “Some mediocre ladies in influential positions are actually embarrassed by an unusual book and so prefer the old familiar stuff which doesn’t embarrass them and also doesn’t give the child one slight inkling of beauty and reality.”
Misplaced moral panic has enjoyed a resurgence in the last few years. On July 1, a law took effect in Florida that could ban teaching in school about the menstrual cycle before the sixth grade. Nordstrom published Fitzhugh’s “The Long Secret” in 1965; it was a companion to “Harriet the Spy.” Here, readers found the first mention of periods in the young-adult genre. Nordstrom wrote: “I remember clearly the day I read the manuscript of ‘The Long Secret’ and came upon the part devoted to Beth Ellen’s first menstruation. I wrote in the margin, ‘Thank you, Louise Fitzhugh!,’ for it seemed to me it was about time that this subject, of such paramount importance to little girls of Beth Ellen’s age, was mentioned naturally and accepted in a children’s book as a part of life.” 1965 seems simultaneously very early and very late for menstruation to have made an appearance in kids’ books, but for today’s crusaders there is, apparently, no good time. “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” Judy Blume’s beloved classic about puberty, released five years later and almost immediately banned from many school libraries, remained on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 most banned/challenged books throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.
Nordstrom published Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen” in 1970, and the book has occupied a more or less permanent position on “most banned books” lists ever since. The illustrations of a naked young boy named Mickey on a nighttime adventure were the subject of many letters addressed to the department of junior books at HarperCollins, but it wasn’t until Nordstrom heard that a librarian had carefully painted a diaper on Mickey that she issued a news release, declaring, “This behavior should be recognized for what is: an act of censorship by mutilation rather than by obvious suppression.”
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Another reader of “In the Night Kitchen,” who clearly leaned more toward the obvious suppression method, burned the book in protest and wrote to tell Nordstrom so. She wrote back: “I assume it is the little boy’s nudity which bothers you. But truly, it does not disturb children! … Should not those of us who stand between the creative artist and the children be very careful not to sift our reactions to such books through our own adult prejudices and neuroses? … I think young children will always react with delight to such a book as In the Night Kitchen, and that they will react creatively and wholesomely. It is only adults who ever feel threatened by Sendak’s work.”
And threatened they have remained. “In the Night Kitchen” was removed from a Texas library last year. We know exactly what Ursula Nordstrom would have to say about that.
Nell McShane Wulfhart is a journalist and the author of “The Great Stewardess Rebellion: How Women Launched a Workplace Revolution at 30,000 Feet.”
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