From: Nancy Feresten <nfereste>
Date: Wed, 3 Apr 2002 16:09:58 -0500

Carol Harris writes:

A compelling discussion as I was a working librarian in the 70's when the famous Childhood of Famous Americans (the orange books) were being discarded. Children loved them but educators decided they were not realistic enough, and painted too rosy a picture of life, "misleading" young readers about the actual lives of famous people.

I read this series as a child--all of them, over and over again. I can still see the shelf in the school library where they were housed, can feel the covers and smell the pages. But they were far beyond rosy; they were fiction, mythmaking. I remember my mother being shocked when I brought home a biography of Virginia Dare, about whom we know nothing beyond infancy. According the the "biography," she had been raised by Indians. I think the real challenge for those of us who introduce children to nonfiction is to make and find books that are as compelling to children as this series was to so many but that don't pretend to be what they're not.

There's another question buried here, though, which is the value of historical mythmaking in children's literature. Not what we're on about right now, I know, but interesting for another time.


Nancy Feresten National Geographic Children's Books
Received on Wed 03 Apr 2002 03:09:58 PM CST