1950: THE DOOR IN THE WALL by Marguerite de Angeli
Robin drew the coverlet close about his head and turned his face to the wall.
The Door In The Wall is fine. It's a story set in medieval England during the Black Death, as a young boy named Robin, separated from his parents, is taken in by a monastery, journeys to another castle, and is able to warn of an impending attack by the evil Welsh so he can save his town. The whole thing is over in 120 pages, about 20 of which are full-page illustrations (also by de Angeli).
To give you an idea of the popularity and enduring cultural impact of this 1950 Newbery medalist, I went to check a copy of this book out of my local library branch, and when the librarian saw that the book did not have a bar code, she checked to see how long it had been since the title's last checkout, stamped "DISCARD" on the inside front cover, and told me "this is yours now". But something caught my eye in the "about the author" jacket copy:
"In 1968 Ms. de Angeli was awarded the Regina Medal by the Catholic Library Association for excellence in writing for young people."
Sorry, she was awarded the what by the who? Let's take a quick look at the Catholic Library Association's website:
"The Regina Medal award, established in 1959 and sponsored by the Catholic Library Association, is administered through the Regina Medal Committee at the will of the Catholic Library Association Executive Board. The only criterion for the award is that of excellence. The Regina Medal is awarded annually to a living exemplar of the words of the English poet, Walter de la Mare “only the rarest kind of best in anything can be good enough for the young,” for continued, distinguished contribution to children’s literature without regard to the nature of the contribution."
That's right: Catholicism gets its own Newbery medal. And you thought I wouldn't be writing about those guys over here.
Now would be a good time to run down some of the other American awards for children's literature. The Newbery is, of course, not the only annual award conferred by the American Library Association; it's not even the only award for children's literature. In an earlier entry I briefly touched on the history of the ALA's Children's Literature Legacy Award, the lifetime achievement award for authors that was first given to Laura Ingalls Wilder, and in fact named after her for decades, until everyone remembered that she was actually kind of racist.
The Newbery is the ALA's oldest award for individual books for children, but mostly (not exclusively) focuses on books aimed at "middle grade" readers, usually in fourth through eighth grades or thereabouts. In other words, the Newbery usually goes to a short chapter book, but there are obviously readers both older and younger than middle grades, and they get their own awards.
The Caldecott Medal, established in the 1930s, is the Newbery for picture books, and is also very old and very famous. You've heard of this one, and even if you haven't, you've heard of the winners: undisputed classics like Make Way For Ducklings, The Polar Express, Jumanji, The Snowy Day, and Where The Wild Things Are. The Geisel medal, named for Theodore "Dr. Seuss" Geisel, was established in 2006 to similarly honor "early reader" books; winners include multiple entries in Mo Willems' hilarious Elephant and Piggie series. The Printz medal was established in 2000 to similarly honor YA lit; Marcus Sedgwick, Walter Dean Myers, and John Green have all taken home Printz awards.
So call those the ALA's "general excellence" annual awards. But the ALA also gives out awards for more specific kinds of excellence. Shortly after the assassination of Martin Luther King, someone in an ALA meeting pointed out that there had been literally zero Black Newbery winners in first fifty or so years of the medal. This led to the creation of the Coretta Scott King medal, first awarded by the ALA in 1970, to recognize the best work of children's literature, by a Black American author, about the Black American experience. Two Newbery medalists - New Kid and Bud Not Buddy - are also King medalists. Given the specific nature of works recognized with the King medal - and given that publishing houses weren't exactly in a hurry to publish a wide range of new Black authors for basically the majority of the twentieth century - several authors have built dynasties out of repeat wins. No author has ever won the Newbery medal more than twice; in comparison, Walter Dean Myers has taken home five King medals and Mildred D. Taylor has taken home four. If the King medal were the college football playoffs, these two authors would be Alabama and, like, a girl version of Alabama. There are multiple triple-medalists as well.
Similarly, the Pura Belpré award, established by the ALA in 1996, recognizes Latino/a authors and illustrators who write about the American Latino/a experience for children; the first Belpré medal went to a book called An Island Like You: Stories Of The Barrio, but the titles got better from there.
Since 2004, the ALA has awarded the Schneider Family medal for "artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences". Disability is broadly defined for purposes of the award, which is given each year to one book for young readers, one for middle grade readers, and one for YA readers. One thing I like about the Schneider medal is that the formal criteria includes that "books with death as the main theme are generally disqualified," in an apparent attempt to keep the medal away from obvious "bummer lit," counter to the trends of every other literary award ever given since the invention of moveable type.
The "Stonewall Book Award-Mike Morgan and Larry Romans Children's & Young Adult Literature Award" is a very long name for what the ALA used to call - this is true and I love it - The Gay Book Award ("Oh my goodness, my book won an award!" "Oh yeah? Yeah? Your book won an award? What award did it win? Did it win the, uh, the, the, uh, the, uh, the, the Gay Book Award?"). The Stonewall medal has been around since the seventies but only started recognizing children's literature in 2010 for excellence in writing about the LGBT experience. Winners have often served as readers' and classrooms' first exposure to LGBT narratives, although the 2017 medalist was Rick Riordan's Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Hammer of Thor, which is readers' and classrooms' first exposure to a race against the clock to stop the evil machinations of the trickster god Loki. Presumably Riordan's book won because one of the characters is genderfluid, but that character is also Loki's child and I honestly don't think it should count if you're literally a god.
The ALA’s Odyssey Award was created in 2008 specifically to award excellence in children’s audiobook production. Sadly, because the award was so recently created, it did not have a chance to honor the greatest audiobook series of all time, Hank The Cowdog by author John R. Erickson, a cowboy who wrote silly stories about a talking dog as a side job and then founded his own publishing company and recorded all of the audiobooks by doing all of the voices and singing all of the songs himself.
These aren't even close to all of the ALA awards. There are more awards given for nonfiction, for adult fiction, for works in translation, for books about library history or library science, and many more. But the above awards often set the gold standard for what public and school libraries try to carry and buy copies of. If you were a librarian going "crap, I need to have better representation of Black authors in my library" - and it's safe to assume that some librarians have said this in the past few years - you'd start with something like the list of King winners and finalists. That's the gold standard.
But then there are a whole bunch of other awards for children's literature, given by a whole bunch of other people who aren't in the ALA.
There are several other awards that are functionally identical to the Newbery - that is, they are for general excellence in American children's literature, recognized annually - awarded by other bodies, usually other trade associations or universities. These include the Walden medal (from the National Council of Teachers of English), the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award (from the education school at UW-Madison), the E.B. White Read Aloud award (from the Association of Booksellers for Children), the Kerlan Award (from the University of Minnesota), the Golden Kite Award (from the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators), and the Ezra Jack Keats Award (from the University of Southern Mississippi). The latter award notes on its website that it is "the only award that celebrates books that embrace all ethnic and social groups", which feels like a pointed critique of the Newbery itself. But none of these guys can compete with the Newbery, still the oldest and most prestigious award in American children's literature. If you had heard of any of them before reading this piece, I'd be very impressed, since I hadn't heard of any of them and I'm writing the actual newsletter.
There are also genre-specific awards to recognize excellence in children’s literature. These include the Scott O’Dell Award for historical fiction, the Andre Norton Nebula Award for sci-fi and fantasy, the Pat Conroy Southern Book Prize for…uh, books about the south, and the Orbis Pictus Award for children’s nonfiction. Other awards on this list include the Eleanor Cameron “Golden Duck Awards” for sci-fi, which I’m noting here because the inaugural winner was a book that remains one of my favorite novels of all time, Bruce Coville’s My Teacher Glows In The Dark, the novel that introduced me to science fiction’s moral side. I’m also noting the Bram Stoker Award for outstanding horror for young readers, since the Horror Writers Association created the award in 1998, gave two of those awards to Harry Potter novels, nominated a third Harry Potter novel for an additional award, and then realized a “horror for children” award was kind of a stupid idea and abandoned the award within a decade of coming up with it.
We’re nowhere near the end of the list of children’s literature awards. Awards are also given by foundations to recognize children’s literature with a good message, like the Josette Frank Award to “honor a book of outstanding literary merit in which children or young people deal in a positive and realistic way with difficulties in their world and grow emotionally and morally”, or the Jane Addams award - named for the famous Chicago activist and social worker - given to a children’s book that “most effectively promotes the cause of peace, social justice and world community”. The Phoenix Award is given to a children’s book published twenty years earlier that did not win any major awards at its initial publication, which is not a social justice cause but did finally allow Andrew Clements’ Frindle to take home an award.
But no awards are more adorable than the awards given by the children themselves. School districts collect annual ballots from their middle-grade students and bestow their own state-sponsored medals on works of literature that those students loved reading the most. These awards include the Rebecca Caudill Award (Illinois), the Indian Paintbrush Award (Wyoming), the Sequoyah Award (Oklahoma), the William Allen White Award (Kansas), and the Golden Dome Award (Vermont), the latter one being the only medal awarded by children that had to be renamed because its original namesake (Dorothy Canfield Fisher) was likely part of a eugenics activism movement in the 1920s. There is no question that young readers have a full range of awarding bodies that they can get recommendations from, including students just like them, across all genres and types of books.
And then the Catholics get their own award.
The first thing I had to check was whether the Catholic Library Association was some sort of weird right-wing group on a crusade to keep children from reading Gay Books. Thankfully, they do not appear to be this (if they were, they'd have to go in the other newsletter). The "Catholic" in CLA doesn't modify "Association", it modifies "Library"; that is, the CLA is an extremely specialized trade group for people who work or deal with extremely specialized libraries in parishes or seminaries or other Catholic institutions.
So why are they giving out awards for excellence in children's literature? I'm not really sure, and there doesn't seem to be a reason beyond "they wanted to", which is as good a reason as any. The CLA's Regina medal could be a medal for excellence in writing about Catholicism, or writing stories that exemplify Catholic teaching, or broadly recognizing Catholic authors. The Door In The Wall isn’t a theological treatise, but it is about a boy convalescing with monks in pre-Reformation England, so Catholicism is definitely part of the setting. And the Regina medal was definitely for Catholicism in 2022, when the CLA awarded it to Sophie de Mullenheim, who is the author of, among other works, The Catholic Faith from A to Z and In The Shadows Of Rome: The Phantom of the Colosseum.
There are some other obvious picks who have won the Regina medal in the past, like Madeleine L’Engle, who was not Catholic but wrote many brilliant and thoughtful works drawing from her Christian faith. Or Tomie dePaola, who wrote many wonderful picture books drawing from Italian and Irish folktales, including ones about Catholicism, the saints, and the original Catholic idiot Big Anthony. Look at him. How is he possibly going to get out of this one, you should have listened to Strega Nona, you dumbass:
Still, most of the time, the Regina medal doesn’t seem to be about Catholicism at all. For example, the Regina medalist in 2015 was Judy Blume, who is obviously widely beloved and celebrated. It's unlikely the CLA recognized her as their favorite Catholic author of 2015, because Blume is Jewish. It's unlikely the CLA recognized her for her general religious piety, given that Blume is, by her own admission, not very religious and more culturally Jewish. It's unlikely that the CLA recognized her for proselytizing Catholic teaching, given that Blume famously writes stories in which [now imagine my voice getting very low and distorted like the bad guy in Saw] teens have premarital sex. And then there are plenty of other winners that are just good children’s authors who didn’t write about Catholicism at all, but wrote good children’s books, like Gary Paulsen or Kevin Henkes or Beverly Cleary or Christopher Paul Curtis (obviously, there is heavy overlap between Regina recipients and Newbery recipients/honorees).
But, as we saw above, “the only criteria for the award is that of excellence”. So it’s just the librarians from all the Catholic institutions getting together and being like “have you guys read Tiger Eyes and Superfudge? I know those books are decades old but I think the time is right to give Judy Blume the Regina medal”. Personally, I think this is great, and more people should do it. Make up your own medal in your household! Everybody else gets to do it! Have the kids draw up a certificate and write a letter to the author! Post the list somewhere so your friends can start a newsletter and read all the books you awarded and kind of ramble for 2,000 words every week! Kid books are fun!
Again, to recap: The Door In The Wall is fine and I guess I own a copy now.
Newburied is a series by Tony Ginocchio on the history of the Newbery Medal and a whole bunch of other stuff related to it. You can subscribe via Substack to get future installments sent to your inbox directly. The next installment will cover the 1931 medalist, The Cat Who Went To Heaven by Elizabeth Coatsworth.