A Certain Slant of Light

As the Newbery Project draws to a close, I’ve been preparing some posts about my reading, and I thought I’d start out by answering a few… well, I can’t exactly call them “frequently asked” questions, as the only one people have actually asked is the one about dead dogs. But, anyway, these are questions with important background information.

What is the Newbery Award, anyway?

Every year since 1922, a committee of librarians has selected “the most distinguished contributions to American literature for children” to receive the Newbery Award. The first prize winner gets the Newbery Medal, while the runner-ups have since the 1970s been called Newbery Honor books. It’s the most prestigious writing award for American children’s literature. (The counterpart award for illustration is the Caldecott.)

What’s the Newbery Project?

The Newbery Project started when I was about eleven and decided to read all the books that had won the Newbery Medal. (The Newbery is the highest award in American children’s literature. It was first awarded in 1922 and has been going strong ever since.) The project eventually fizzled out, as children’s projects do, but in my mid-twenties I resurrected it and completed it.

Then it occurred to me that I could extend the project to include all the Newbery Honor books, which is the name given to the books that are the runners-up to the big medal. A few years, there were no runners-up, and some years there were as many as eight. Most years there are three to five runners-up. I had read a pretty good number of them as a child, so I had about 240 Newbery Honors books left to read.

Two hundred and forty books! Who wants to read two hundred and forty books about dead dogs?

(For my non-American readers, the Newbery award is famous in America as the dead dog award, because there have been a few very famous winners featuring the tragic death of pets and/or best friends. Bridge to Terabithia may have been partially responsible for the fizzling of the first go-round of my Newbery project.)

Actually, the dead dogs are fairly recent. The first dead dog in a Newbery winner appeared in Fred Gipson’s Old Yeller in 1957, but that was an outlier. Until 1970, pretty much everyone lives, both dogs and relatives. After 1970 it’s open season on friendly animals and sickly grandparents until the 2000s, at which point the Newbery awards focused more intently on dead relatives.

Two hundred and forty books is still nuts. Why did you do this to yourself?

Because I love children’s books and history, and it turns out that reading the Newbery books are a fantastic way to explore both. The Newbery committee has consistently selected a lot of historical fiction and historical nonfiction (especially biographies) since the beginning, and of course the earlier books are fascinating historical artifacts in their own right at this point.

Are there any overarching themes among the Newbery books?

Beyond history in general, the Newbery awards are particularly interested in American history and more generally the construction of American identity. There’s also an ongoing interest in the history of liberty, the latter of which means, for instance, that two separate William Tell retellings have won Newbery Honors.

There’s also a strong and ongoing interest throughout the history of the award in tales of children from around the world. This reflects both children’s tastes (before children’s literature became its own category, travel narratives were a recognized favorite reading material for children), but also a reflection of the ideal of the “Republic of Childhood,” popularized in American literature by Mary Mapes Dodge in St. Nicholas Magazine, which argues that children in all times and all places are similar to and interested in each other, purely by virtue of their shared childhood.