Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Humanities/2018 September 6

= September 6 =

Young Adult Fiction
What is the first book to be categorized as Young Adult Fiction?206.188.44.157 (talk) 22:07, 6 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Well, here's a beginning. In the Oxford English Dictionary Online, the phrase "young adult" as an adjective is defined as "Of or relating to a young adult; (now) esp. designating or relating to fiction, films, television programmes, etc., intended or suitable for adolescents in their mid to late teens".  They cite 5 examples of the phrase being used, dated 1826, 1865, 1942, 1983, and 2012.  The 1826 and 1865 cites are about "young adult age" and "young adult population", but the 1942 cite refers to books being selected "for the ‘Young Adult’ collection" of a library in Illinois.  So whatever books were first "categorized as Young Adult", they must have been published before 1942.


 * Of course, if you're specifically talking about categorization by publishers and bookstores rather than libraries, it's possible that that happened later. --76.69.47.228 (talk) 01:12, 7 September 2018 (UTC)


 * Does our article on Young adult fiction answer this? "The modern classification of young-adult fiction originated during the 1950s and 1960s, especially after the publication of S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967). The novel features a truer, darker side of adolescent life that was not often represented in works of fiction of the time, and was the first novel published specifically marketed for young adults as Hinton was one when she wrote it."    Ghmyrtle (talk) 07:52, 7 September 2018 (UTC)


 * The earliest specific book I could find was Call of the Land by Harold Sherman, published in 1948 and described as a "young adult novel" by Wisconsin Library Bulletin the same year. --Antiquary (talk) 09:15, 7 September 2018 (UTC)