before Harry Potter and Captain Underpants

8/13/08: Today I interviewed LEONARD MARCUS, probably THE leading historian of American children’s literature. He had been a guest before talking about his wonderful history of Golden Books (you know: Scruffy The Tugboat; The Little Engine That Could). His new, much more ambitious book, MINDERS OF MAKE BELIEVE, details the complete history of children’s lit in America from the landing of the Pilgrims to Harry Potter. This is a much more complicated and involved history than I imagined, because for many decades it wasn’t even clear there should be a special children’s literature. When in 1887, Minerva Sanders (gotta love that name!) decided to create the first reading room in her library for children in Brookline Massachusetts, there was actually protests! “What? Children will be in a library with all those adult books!” (read: Flaubert). More typically, prissy adults were afraid of loud and dirty children disturbing their quiet as a mouse literary reverie.  So began a long and involved battle involving librarians, forward-thinking publishers (many of them women) and progressive educators to create a body of work known as children’s literature. It’s quit a story. Be sure to listen to the ON-LINE version of the interview, which has 15 more minutes of conversation in which Leonard talks about finally bringing racial diversity to children’s books and what brought that about.Mark