Judy (and Sandy) had the housewife’s blight, all right. And who could blame her? While Gloria Steinem was publishing her explosive 1963 two-part series “A Bunny’s Tale,” about working as a cocktail waitress at the Playboy Club in New York City, Judy was making pot roast. While Friedan was promoting her book and gathering ground for women’s liberation, Judy was tidying up the living room, driving the kids around, folding stack after stack of warm laundry. Randy and Larry grew from babies to toddlers to elementary schoolers, and Judy had more time on her hands—but she didn’t know what to do with it. The truth was, she found tennis and golf boring. She couldn’t stand the country club husbands, and their wives were somehow worse: catty and small-minded.
She needed a project. Something creative to pass the time.
As a girl, Judy had wanted to be a famous actress like Esther Williams or Margaret O’Brien, a child star turned ingénue. Growing up in the diverse city of Elizabeth, New Jersey, Judy—or “Judie” as she spelled it back then—was a cheerful, if somewhat high-strung kid. Her brother, David, who was four years older, made fun of her for being jumpy and liked to toss a sheet over his head like a ghost and sneak up on her. It was easy to get her to scream—she was always anticipating danger.
Her early childhood was defined by World War II. Born Jewish in February 1938, Judy couldn’t remember a time without Hitler. Hitler, shouting sharply in German, was on the radio while the family ate dinner together at the dining room table. Hitler, with his Brylcreemed hair and bristly patch of a mustache, stomped through the newsreels that played when they went to the movies. Judy’s father, a dentist named Rudolph Sussman, volunteered in town as an air-raid warden. Her mother, a housewife named Esther, or “Essie,” knitted khaki sweaters for the boys overseas.
It was a frightening time, but Judy always had a place to stash her anxiety. Her dolls starred in elaborate dramas. She lived in a modest, two-story house on a residential street, and she spent hours bouncing a ball against the brick, making up stories. As she got older she took ballet lessons, acted in plays, sang in the school chorus, and joined the yearbook committee. She was always reading—her first favorite book was Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans, which she took out over and over again from the local library branch. Then she graduated to Nancy Drew and eventually J. D. Salinger.
As an adult, Judy was missing a creative outlet. Washing dishes at night, she hummed along to the radio, thinking she might try her hand at songwriting. Quickly, the notion passed—John Lennon she was not. Then she turned her attention to arts and crafts. She bought yards and yards of colorful felt, fashioning it into splashy pendants to hang on children’s walls. Much to Judy’s delight, her local Bloomingdale’s agreed to stock them and they sold for $9 apiece. She made over $350 (around $3,200 in today’s dollars) before that enterprise got squashed by yet another malady, when her fingers started peeling because she developed an allergy to fabric glue.
Another idea came to her soon after. Reading bedtime stories to her kids, she wondered if she could be a children’s book author and illustrator. She’d play around with words in her head—a little verse here, a mellifluous phrase there—and chuckle, imagining herself as the unlikely Dr. Seuss of suburban New Jersey. Her maiden name had been Sussman, she noted. Seuss, meet Suss. Was it a sign?
Probably not, but Judy started jotting down her ideas anyway. They came alive in colored pencil with simple, homespun drawings. Okay, she conceded, maybe she’d need to work with an artist. But when she wrote, she felt the zap of something familiar from her girlhood: something electric and joyful. A distant, yet sacred, creative force welled up inside her. She wrote one story, called “You Mom, You?” about a mother patiently explaining to her two young kids that she had once been just a silly child herself. The tots—enthralled by their mother’s recollections, told in rhyme—are shocked by her playful history lesson.
Judy was proud of her short manuscripts and bound them with brass fasteners. She started researching where she might submit them: small children’s book publishers and Parents magazine. One afternoon, she checked the mail and discovered a continuing education brochure from her alma mater, NYU. One class, offered on Monday nights, felt like it had been included just for her. It was called Writing for Children and Teenagers.
Judy signed up and started riding the bus from Scotch Plains into the city every week. Even the commute down to the West Village was fulfilling. There was something about taking herself into Manhattan that seemed both delightfully grown-up and reminiscent of her unencumbered college years. Seeing the steel frame of the George Washington Bridge rise up from the road, the silvery skyline shooting out in the distance, it was like she was traveling to another world, one shimmering with artistic potential.
In class, Judy was one of just seven students. The teacher was Lee Wyndham, a published children’s book author, syndicated reviewer, and Russian émigré who wore flamboyant hats with feathers. Wyndham took a traditional view of children’s literature—that all stories should have a good, clear-cut moral with no questions left unanswered in the end—but she also encouraged her pupils to play. Eager to find her own voice, Judy experimented with different perspectives, toggling between first and third person, and an array of narrative forms. She started carrying around a green-gray three-ring binder, which she used to take notes in class and scribble down any new ideas that came to her. On the inside cover Judy wrote down her address, as well as a phrase indicating the item’s growing significance: Reward if found.
Between her lectures on everything from craft to writing strong cover letters to go with manuscript submissions, Wyndham consistently gave Judy warm, positive feedback. She was frank with the aspiring author, telling her that realistic writing, as opposed to fantasy, was her strength. Wyndham likely empathized with Judy; she also didn’t start her professional career until after she had a family. When the class ended, Judy signed up to take it again. She had already started working on a full-length manuscript, about a young white girl whose sense of injustice is inflamed by her community’s racist response to a Black family moving into town.
As Judy wrote, she was also sending out her stories. The first rejection stung. “I went in the closet—I didn’t want the kids to see me,” Blume told CBS Sunday Morning in 2015. “I went in the closet and I cried.” Over time, however, her skin grew thicker. Eventually, by the late 1960s, she’d been rejected by every major publisher, from Harper & Row to Houghton Mifflin to Random House and Pantheon. But she had made progress, too. She sold a short story, called “The Flying Munchgins,” to a children’s magazine, about a little boy named Leonard who discovers a society of mysterious creatures—the Munchgins—living in the dirt. He traps them in a box and shows them off to his older brother and sister who, unimpressed, inform him that they’re nothing special: just plain old ladybugs.
For another story, called “The Ooh Ooh Ahh Ahh Bird,” Judy received $20—and a celebratory red rose from Wyndham.
“She was wonderfully supportive,” Blume said of Wyndham at a 2015 book event hosted by the Arlington Public Library in Virginia. “She was wonderful to me, always,” Blume recalled of her teacher, who died in 1978, even though she admitted Wyndham did not always approve of her tendency to leave the task of untangling moral complexities up to the reader.
Wyndham’s support meant everything to her, especially because she felt she had so few others in her corner when it came to her writing. John wasn’t bothered by her new passion, but he had trouble seeing it as anything more than a hobby. “He thought it was better than shopping,” Blume said. He’d joke to their friends, “All I have to do is buy Judy some paper and pencils and she’s happy!” At one point, John sent a few of her drafts to his friend who had worked in book publishing. That guy was discouraging to the point of rudeness. In so many words: pack it up sweetheart and go back to baking.
Judy didn’t want to bake. She wanted to invent things—to dream. Then one day her dreams took root. In 1969, she received a phone call from an editor at Reilly & Lee, a Chicago-based publisher that had previously rejected her work. They said they wanted to publish her manuscript for The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo, about second-grader Freddy Dissel, an aggrieved middle child who is sick of wearing his older brother Mike’s hand-me-downs and being told to play nicely with his annoying baby sister, Ellen. When Judy hung up, she raced into the basement where Larry was having a playdate and started tossing the children’s Silly Sand—the sloppy 1970s precursor to today’s wet and pliant kinetic sand—into the air in celebration. “Larry’s mother is crazy!” the friend later told her parents, according to a 1981 Scholastic mini-biography called Judy Blume’s Story.
Green Kangaroo, in which Dissel goes from feeling like he will “always be a great big middle nothing” to getting the starring role in the school play (the titular green kangaroo), is not even close to Blume’s best work. But it offers up hints of the humor and empathy that would eventually distinguish her as a writer. Judy was paid $350 (roughly $2,800 today) for the book, and when the mailman—who had grown accustomed to delivering rejections—came by with the check, the pair danced across the lawn together.
The publisher matched Judy with an artist, Lois Axeman, who provided the book’s illustrations, though the pair never actually met. Judy dedicated her debut to John, Randy, and Larry.
When Green Kangaroo was published in the fall of 1969, her local newspaper, the Central New Jersey Courier News, did a small story on Judy. In an article titled “Mom Keeps Busy Writing Books for Little Children”—Keeps busy! Honestly!—the Scotch Plains resident and former Brownie troop leader shared that she was shopping another short manuscript, about a boy who swallows his brother’s pet turtle, and already had a contract to publish another book, which she had completed in her writing class at NYU. The novel, called Iggie’s House, featured a young protagonist named Winnie Barringer, who sought to befriend her new Black neighbors.
“The more I write, the more controversial I’m getting,” Blume told the reporter mischievously, adding that she intended to dedicate her next book to Wyndham.
She revealed that Iggie’s House would be published by Prentice Hall, based in nearby Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. What Judy didn’t say was that—when it came to putting her more cutting-edge ideas out into the world—she had found her perfect, fearless shepherd.
Chapter Two Kiddie Lit
“It was the best $5,000 we ever spent.”
There’s one word people use to describe Richard “Dick” Jackson: “charming.” As an editor for major houses like Macmillan and Doubleday, he knew how to work the room at a book party, flatter a sensitive writer’s ego, and make even the stuffiest librarian smile. Jackson had practiced his people skills growing up among Detroit’s upper crust as the son of a Hudson Motor Car bigwig, then moved east to attend Yale Drama. After graduating in 1957 he was drafted and did a two-year stint in the army. When he moved to New York and his acting career flopped, he enrolled in a master’s program in publishing at NYU in 1962.
In 1968, Jackson co-founded his own company, called Bradbury Press, with his friend Robert “Bob” Verrone. The gregarious Verrone had been working at Prentice Hall at the time, and the pair opened up a small office within Prentice’s sprawling North Jersey compound near the Hudson River.
“These two guys sort of considered themselves pirates, because they had gotten out of big publishing,” remembered Peter Silsbee, a Bradbury Press author who first met Jackson when he landed a job as his assistant in the early 1980s.
Jackson and Verrone set out to shake up the world of children’s books. Back then, picture books were the name of the game: colorful, cozy reads that taught young readers life lessons. Verrone, who had what Silsbee called “an antic sense of humor,” thought books for this age group could be more fun. Meanwhile, Jackson was lit up by an emerging area of the business: novels for readers ages eight to twelve, or the pre-teen set.
Middle grade didn’t really exist as a publishing category until the 1970s. And of the novels for older children that got printed, the vast majority were fantasy stories. Think of E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web, which came out in 1952 and put serious conversations about death into the mouths of talkative animals. Roald Dahl’s books, such as James and the Giant Peach (1961) and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964), were gorgeous, but absurdist. Then, in 1962, there was Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time, a brilliant intergalactic battle between good and evil.
The exception was Beverly Cleary’s work, which featured ordinary children. Cleary dominated the children’s market and Jackson wanted to publish more books like hers: “Books about real kids for real kids,” Silsbee said of his onetime boss’s mission. “He really hated anything remotely didactic… he wanted books that kids would pick and would just feel like they were a part of.” Cleary had won over young audiences with her lively stories about middle-class white children, mostly living in the Pacific Northwest, where she had grown up. Young readers couldn’t get enough of Henry Huggins (1950), Ellen Tebbits (1951), and Beezus and Ramona (1955), about nine-year-old Beatrice “Beezus” Quimby weathering the high jinks of her spirited younger sister. The pair starred in a wildly popular follow-up in 1968 called Ramona the Pest.
To find the next Cleary, Jackson and Verrone resorted to unconventional measures. They dug deep into their pockets and spent a precious $5,000 to take out an ad in Writer’s Digest. It said they were seeking “realistic fiction” for eight- to twelve-year-olds. Soon, a manuscript arrived in the mail by way of an aspiring writer with no agent. Jackson picked it up, hoping to uncover treasure.
The book, called Iggie’s House, was unpolished. The young characters were one-dimensional and the villain—an unapologetically bigoted local mom who rallies the town to reject and harass the new neighbors—was particularly overdrawn. Still, Jackson saw something in it. Among other things, he noticed that the author had a knack for capturing children’s voices, with an impeccable ear for dialogue. Years later, Silsbee recalled him saying that the original manuscript for Iggie’s House “wasn’t very good… but there was something there.”
So Jackson took a chance. He picked up the phone and called this untested writer. A woman answered, and her voice lifted when he introduced himself and explained why he was getting in touch. He could see she lived in New Jersey—would she be able to come by the office sometime soon?
Judy Blume could barely wait to get out her response.
“The day he called and said he’d like to meet me and talk about the manuscript was the most exciting day of my life,” Blume later told Publishers Weekly. The morning of their appointment, she was so nervous her stomach lurched. She took a pill to try to settle it, which helped, but then the medicine dried out her mouth. Generally, her health had improved since she’d started writing, but a meeting with a real editor was stressful enough to throw her body back into crisis mode. Judy hopped into the car, hoping she wouldn’t have to do too much talking.
When she arrived at Prentice Hall, Jackson—who was stylishly dressed and bore more than a slight resemblance to the freshly minted talk-show host Dick Cavett—greeted her warmly. Judy was taken aback by his good looks; he was “a stunningly beautiful man,” she told the New Yorker. He led her to his cramped office, his desk piled high with stacks of manuscripts. Jackson confessed he wasn’t sure about publishing Iggie’s House yet, but he had some questions. The protagonist, for instance—who was Winnie, really? Beyond getting to know the new kids in town, what else did she want?
Judy wrote down everything he said. An hour and a half later, she had promised to revise the book for Jackson, in the hopes that Bradbury would give it a home.
Books in the swinging sixties were getting bolder. Just as there wasn’t a defined middle grade category yet, there also wasn’t a market around what we now know as young adult books, or reads just for older teenagers. There were books that starred teens, like The Catcher in the Rye, but Salinger’s cantankerous 1951 manifesto was packaged as an adult novel. Then came The Outsiders.
Published in 1967, The Outsiders is widely considered to be the first young adult (YA) book. It was written by a teenager named Susan Hinton: her pen name was the gender-ambiguous S. E. Hinton, because her publisher thought no one would believe a girl wrote it. The novel focused on white-on-white grievance in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Its protagonist, fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis, identifies with the “greasers”: a group of underprivileged and all-but-unsupervised kids who overcompensate for their low social status with style and swagger. The greasers can’t stand the “socs”—snotty rich kids who drive Mustangs and wear madras shirts—and the feeling is mutual. Late at night, the town becomes a war zone, fueled by class resentment. Among all the typical high school trip-ups, including drinking, depression, and teen pregnancy, the greasers have to worry about getting slaughtered by their rivals after the sun goes down.
The Outsiders pushed the envelope with its gritty subject matter, but still adhered to the industry’s unwritten rule that books for young readers had to teach morals. For all its thundering violence, The Outsiders has an obvious, virtuous heartbeat. “Don’t be so bugged about being a greaser,” Johnny, the novel’s much-abused sacrificial lamb, tells Ponyboy in a letter. “You still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want. There’s still a lot of good in the world.”
