NEWBURIED: A New Essay Series

One man's search for greatness at a sixth grade reading level

"Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them."
-Kurt Vonnegut, in a 1973 letter to a school board that burned their copies of Slaughterhouse-Five

"I might as well call you Bridge to Terabithia, because you make children cry."
-Zooey Deschanel in New Girl

My mom used to work as a public librarian. On some days after school, I'd go and hang out in the library while I waited for her shift to end, and while I was there, I'd tear through the books, not thematically or chronologically, but geographically in the library itself, shelf by shelf. The Scholastic paperback monthly series, like Animorphs and Goosebumps, were on one shelf, so I could check out six or seven at a time on my way to running the series. The books of funny essays, 817 in the Dewey Decimal system, were on another frequently visited shelf, and I learned about that shelf by reading my dad's Dave Barry books. And then there was one shelf, all the way in the back of the children's department, that I took a special interest in: the shelf where the library kept all of the Newbery Medal winners.

Every year, the American Library Association chooses another book to receive the Newbery Medal for being the "most distinguished contribution to American literature for children published by an American publisher in the United States in English". Winners become bestsellers, the best winners become staples of middle school Language Arts classes, and authors of winners become celebrities in the industry. That shelf at my library had a poster on the side depicting the cover of every single winner, from the first one in 1922 - Hendrik Van Loon's The Story Of Mankind - to the then-most recent winner in 1996 - Karen Cushman's The Midwife's Apprentice. That shelf was my fifth-grade intellectual Everest. I was going to read every single Newbery medalist. I loved books, and those were the best books (I would later learn that they were not all, in fact, the best books) right there on one shelf! They had medals on the cover and everything!

I didn't end up reading all of the Newbery medalists in fifth grade, because while I loved books, I was also lazy and easily distracted, and I probably didn't need to use the past tense just then. My point is this: it's been 100 years since the first Newbery Medal was awarded, and now I'm 34, and I'm going to read all of them, write about them, and email what I write to all of you. 

It's a big task, but a doable one. Newbery winners - which are overwhelmingly novels, although there have been a few nonfiction winners - are “middle grade” books, the kind of thing you would read during DEAR time in junior high. In terms of vocabulary and structure, they’re easier books than you’d be assigned in a high school English class, and a step down from what we would call “YA” literature today. Not that these are easy books when it comes to subject matter or theme: Newbery winners can often be grade school readers’ first exposure to stories about Jim Crow, or the Holocaust, or the Dust Bowl, or the Black Death, or a story where a main character dies at the end, or a dystopian future that is a not-so-subtle allegory for our world.

The roster of Newbery medalists, as a result, includes some of the most revered works in the history of children's literature, like A Wrinkle In Time, or Roll Of Thunder Hear My Cry, or From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. And it includes works that haven't had the same cultural impact but deserve to be celebrated, like Walk Two Moons, or Joyful Noise, or Dear Mr. Henshaw. And it also includes works that are weird as hell that everyone has forgotten about, like The View From Saturday or The High King or the incredibly-titled Gay Neck: The Story of a Pigeon.

All of this is to say that the Newbery committee is an important arbiter of excellence in children's literature, but definitely an imperfect one. Like most people who give out literary awards, they've only very recently started to process the reality that "people of color also write books, ya know". Plenty of great children's books were never considered for a medal, and plenty never won; Charlotte's Web was a finalist, but lost to a book that I guarantee you have never heard of. Many of the committee's selections have been criticized as, for lack of a better term, pretentious, or better reflecting the literary preferences of the committee more than, say, an eye for anything a child would ever be interested in reading. Related to this, and as I suggested earlier, is the fact that most of these winners are, in fact, huge bummers in terms of what they cover, and it's going to be interesting tracking the body count of human and animal characters, and the overall horrifying experiences described across the first century of Newbery medalists.

But horrifying experiences are also part of living in this broken world, and these books are often how we introduce our children to these experiences for the first time, so we can help them become people who will respond with a sense of compassion and justice. However, one horrifying thing that’s started happening in the past few months is that right-wing activists, often well-funded by shady conservative donors trying to push people’s buttons so they can get their guys to win elections, have been pushing to ban and restrict more books in schools and libraries, to limit what parts of the world and what kinds of people and experiences children can see and learn about and develop compassion for. The American Library Association, one hundred years after they started giving out an award to recognize the best in children’s literature, says that 2021 was their record year for challenges to books, so the time feels right to go back to that shelf in the back of the library, revisit the stories that we recognized as the best for teaching our children about the world, see if they were actually any good, and think about what we want to teach our children now, and why it's important that we teach them those things.

Each essay in this series will cover one of the first one hundred books to win the Newbery Medal. I'm going to go out of order based on when my holds come in at my library, and I'm going to publish sporadically based on how quickly I can read and write while also raising two young kids.  Like every great blogger, I promise to use each book as an extremely flimsy pretext to shoehorn in whatever I actually want to talk about instead, like the reasons why books get banned or the legacy of the author or other better works in the same genre or books from the same year that should have won instead or, in the case of Mrs. Frisby And The Rats of NIMH, the animated film adaptation that haunted my nightmares for years. It promises to be a very fun project, and I hope you enjoy it.

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 first installment will arrive next week and cover the 1978 medalist, Bridge To Terabithia by Katherine Paterson.