Readers of the Wall Street Journal’s Review section may remember an explosive essay that ran in its pages in 2011: “Darkness Too Visible,” by the paper’s children’s books columnist, Meghan Cox Gurdon. In that essay, Gurdon surveyed an array of popular books published in what’s called the YA category, or young-adult literature. That today’s books should address the thornier topics faced by tweens and teens—puberty, divorce, alienation, bigotry, cruelty—is neither surprising nor objectionable. But many young-adult books published these days, Gurdon found, immerse their young readers in lurid and appalling stories of savage violence, sexual deviancy, rape, drug addiction, and worse.
For suggesting that these subjects may normalize the sickening and offensive in ways writers don’t anticipate, Gurdon was predictably attacked on social media, accused of philistinism and preachiness by young-adult authors, and held up to nasty ridicule on book-industry blogs. Less predictably, perhaps, the American Library Association (ALA) issued a prolix statement accusing Gurdon of misrepresenting the facts and of “encourag[ing] a culture of fear around YA literature.”
If this latter point makes you think the ALA is run by a lot of effete progressives, you would not be wrong. This week, the Association for Library Service to Children (ALSC), a division of the ALA, decided to change the name of its biannual Laura Ingalls Wilder Award. The prize, which dates from 1954 when Wilder herself was given the award, “honors an author or illustrator whose books, published in the United States, have made, over a period of years, a substantial and lasting contribution to literature for children.”
Alas, our modern Pharisees have caught up with the great memoirist and chronicler of the northern Midwest. The ALSC explains: “Wilder’s body of work continues to be a focus of scholarship and literary analysis, which often brings to light anti-Native and anti-Black sentiments in her work. . . . ALSC recognizes the author’s legacy is complex and Wilder’s work is not universally embraced.”
Having read all her major books, The Scrapbook has trouble recalling much in Wilder’s books that could be called “anti-Native and anti-Black,” but that is probably because we only read the books; we didn’t mine them for hints of regressive opinion. We wonder, though, if any author outside Shakespeare is “universally embraced.” We’ll only suggest that, outside the ranks of YA lit professionals, Wilder’s work is about as universally embraced as any author’s could be. That is the case because her books—Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy, Little House on the Prairie, By the Shores of Silver Lake, and others—are little masterpieces of efficient prose and subtle storytelling.
Oh well. She failed to anticipate the hypersensitivities of postmodern America, so her name must not be honored. Perhaps if she had put more hyperviolence and addiction and sex crimes into her stories . . . But we’re fairly certain that people will still be buying and reading Wilder’s books when the ALA and the ALSC have been forgotten.
