Dick and Jane Primers

• First published in the 1930s
• Were in a lawsuit because they are similar to Dick and Dora readers (The Happy Venture Playbooks)
• Began with learning to read using the whole word or sight word reading method
• By 4th Grade, used them for Reading to Learn and content became more important
• Black characters and characters from other races and cultures were not introduced until 1965

20th Century American Children's Literature

•1922 Newbery Medal created
•1930s Dick and Jane first appeared in reading primers
•1932 Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder
•1938 Caldecott Medal created
•1941 The Moffats by Eleanor Estes
•1947 Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle by Betty MacDonald

•1952 Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
•1957 The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
•1962 The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats
•1962 A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
•1963 Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
•1969 The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle
•1970 Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
•1993 The Giver by Lois Lowry
•1999 Holes by Louis Sachar

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

•1900 by L. Frank Baum
•Was not predicted to be a success
•Was published when the manager of the Chicago Grand Opera House committed to making it into a musical stage play to publicize the novel
•Influenced by the stories of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, as well as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Complete story

Information on the 1902 Musical

Library of Congress Wizard of Oz Exhibits

Korean Wizard of Oz

1925 Silent Movie of the Wizard of Oz

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• 1884 adventure story by American author, Mark Twain
• Commonly named among the Great American Novels
• First major American work to be written in vernacular English
• Perennially popular yet often placed on banned book lists for its racial language
• Not written for children!

Source material, analysis, chapter-by-chapter

The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus

•1881 collection of African-American folktales collected by Joel Chandler Harris, a journalist in Post-Reconstruction Atlanta
•Animal stories, songs, and oral folklore
•Similar to Aesop’s Fables and the stories of Jean de La Fontaine
•Uncle Remus is a fictional character who is a kindly old former slave who serves as a storytelling device, passing the folktales to the children around him
•Written in an eye dialect to represent a Deep South Gullah dialect
•Were well received at the time of publication but by the mid-20th century the stereotype of the old uncle and the dialect were seen as demeaning

Little Women

• First published in 1868 and 1869 in two volumes
• Written by Louisa May Alcott, an American author
• Was an immediate commercial and critical success
• Can be read as a romance or as a quest, or both