ABSTRACT
Young adult literature (YAL), or literature written for readers between the ages of 12 and 20, has been taught in American schools since the 1970s and read by teens since the late 1960s, when books such as S.E. Hinton’s The Outsiders (1967), Ann Head’s Mr. and Mrs. Bo Jo Jones (1968), and Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender (1967) were first published. Today, Newbery, Michael Printz, Coretta Scott King, Pura Belpre, and Américas Award-winning books are regularly taught in middle and high school English classes, and many more young adult novels are available in school libraries. YA books appear on district-approved reading lists, and teachers can either buy or find online multitudes of instructional materials to complement their teaching of books such as Lois Lowry’s The Giver (1993) and Louis Sachar’s Holes (2000). Many books have been published about the teaching of YAL and how teachers can best integrate it into their classrooms, notably those written by Donald Gallo, Virginia Monseau, John and Kay Parks Bushman, and Joan Kaywell. Many more articles by these and other scholars of young adult literature have been published in journals for teachers such as the English Journal, the Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, and the ALAN Review. One could argue that YA literature has finally achieved a sort of acceptance and respect for which it has been searching since the advent of the genre as a viable publishing category in the 1960s.
