“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.”

For books that dropped the moral pretense, you have to look somewhere else, somewhere surprising: Harriet the Spy.

Today, Harriet is probably best known for the cute movie she inspired in 1996, starring future Gossip Girl pot-stirrer Michelle Trachtenberg, or more recently, the hip Apple+ cartoon voiced by Beanie Feldstein. But when Louise Fitzhugh published Harriet the Spy in 1964, she was testing boundaries of what was acceptable in books for kids. Harriet M. Welsch was a girl-detective, but she wasn’t pretty and popular and polite like her predecessor, Nancy Drew. No, Harriet was opinionated and curious to the point of being unpleasant at times. She was bossy with her friends, and single-minded in her desire to unearth people’s secrets. “Harriet the Spy was transgressing all over the place,” said Roger Sutton, who was editor in chief of children’s literature magazine and website the Horn Book from 1996 to 2021. “The adults [in the book] weren’t always right. Sometimes you have to lie. She committed all kinds of felonious deeds that did not go punished.”

Fitzhugh’s next Harriet book took even bigger risks.

In 1965’s The Long Secret, Harriet and her attractive but reserved friend Beth Ellen take their spy games to Southampton, where Harriet’s Manhattan-based family is spending the summer. Harriet and Beth Ellen are on the cusp of adolescence; they daydream about what their lives will look like when they become women. The fingerprints of nascent Second Wave feminism tap across the pages (Fitzhugh herself was a queer feminist intellectual, drinking her way through Greenwich Village). Early in the book, Harriet asks Beth Ellen what she wants to be when she grows up. Shyly, Beth Ellen confesses that she doesn’t “want to be anything at all… I want to marry a rich man. I want to have a little boy, and maybe, a little girl.”

Harriet is disgusted by this answer. “You’ll be a very boring person,” she responds in her signature blunt style. “No one will come and see you. I certainly won’t come and see you. I’ll be working.”

Later in The Long Secret, Beth Ellen is acting grumpy and Harriet screams at her on the phone: “WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?”

“I’m—menstruating!” Beth Ellen responds before unceremoniously hanging up.

That weekend, Harriet’s friend from the city, Janie, visits Southampton. No-nonsense Janie wants to be a doctor, or a scientist, which is why she’s comfortable talking about her body’s inner workings to Harriet and Beth Ellen. Janie explains the whole monthly process to the two friends, with Harriet wondering why she hasn’t gotten her period yet. “Now, you know the baby grows inside a woman, in her womb, in her uterus?” Janie asks them. “So, it’s very simple. If you have a baby started in there, the baby lives on the lining; but if you don’t have a baby, like we don’t, then the body very sensibly disposes of the lining that it’s made for the baby.”

Janie’s tutorial lasts a total of six pages and includes medical vocabulary previously unheard of in fiction for children, like fallopian tubes. Fitzhugh and her original publisher, Harper & Row, were bold to include the section, given that referencing female bodily functions in anything but gauzy, euphemistic terms was considered taboo (one popular Victorian-era nickname for the uterus was “mother room”). Indeed, the New York Times review of The Long Secret reverts to whispery language around the subject, even as it celebrates the book’s candor. “The Long Secret, moreover, observes in so many words that being twelvish entails, for a girl, a few more changes than children’s books have hitherto cared to recognize—heaven knows why,” the reviewer writes.

Heaven knows why. That’s what Judy thought, too. Why couldn’t children’s fiction tackle complicated or even controversial subjects?

Her revision of Iggie’s House did enough to convince Jackson and Verrone to sign her. Silsbee said Jackson knew that the finished book still “wasn’t up to what became her standard… but [he] just knew there was something there, and had to publish the book to get to know her.”

Iggie was published in the spring of 1970, and the critics were underwhelmed. Kirkus Reviews, the industry’s book reviewing mainstay, described a hapless yet well-intentioned Winnie—who among many gaffes, introduces her new friends, the Garbers, as being “from Africa,” even though they’ve just moved from Detroit—as “the bumbling, besieged liberal at age eleven.” Ultimately, the reviewer found Winnie’s book-long crusade to garner support for Grove Street’s integration to be “occasionally forced… loose though not slack—in fact evanescent except for the rueful truth.”

Blume has since distanced herself from Iggie’s House. In an afterword to a recent edition of the novel, she says that at the time she wrote it, she “was almost as naive as Winnie is in this book, wanting to make the world a better place but not knowing how.” She explains that she had been moved by the race riots in Newark, which occurred in the summer of 1967, and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Iggie’s House is flawed but it was progressive for its time in two ways: it deals with the real discriminatory practices of redlining and blockbusting, and it lets us watch as Winnie slowly calibrates her own moral compass, in a process that’s sometimes painful. When her parents don’t take an immediate stand against racism, she’s deeply disappointed. And when the Garber kids don’t really want to be Winnie’s friend, despite her best intentions, she’s angry and confused.

Jackson saw genuine possibility in the writer behind Iggie’s House. And by the time Bradbury inked the deal to publish it, Judy had already shared some details about a new project that was keeping her busy. “Judy was in my office one day and she said, ‘I’ve written most of another book,’ ” Jackson, who died in 2019, said in Presenting Judy Blume. “ ‘It’s about a young girl who talks to God as if he’s her friend.’ ”

When he read that manuscript, he knew he wasn’t crazy. Many years later, he’d say of the money he and Verrone scraped together to buy the ad that brought in Blume: “It was the best $5,000 we ever spent.”

Chapter Three Pre-Teen Girls

“Always in love”

There’s nothing remarkable about Margaret Simon. She is eleven years old, an only child who has just moved from New York City to the (fictional) suburb of Farbrook, New Jersey. She likes boys, wants to impress her friends, and is impatient to grow her hair longer. She finds adults and their preoccupations a bit funny, like when it’s humid outside, she catches her mother sneakily trying to sniff her own armpits. She is neither shy nor especially outgoing. She’s being raised in a dual-faith household, which in practice means a no-faith household, because the topic of religion is so fraught. As a result, it’s up to her to figure out her own private understanding of God.

All of these details add up to a portrait of a regular adolescent girl. And that’s what makes Margaret Simon special. She isn’t remarkable—but she is real.

Letters to Jackson from 1969 reveal that while Judy was excited about publishing Iggie’s House, the project that had captured her imagination was her as-yet-untitled novel-in-progress. Unlike Iggie, which took a child’s view of a contemporary social issue, “Margaret Simon”—as Blume referred to the draft manuscript—was born from Judy’s own memories. “In Margaret, I decided I’m going to write about what sixth grade was really like for me,” she told the Daily News in 1976. “The personal parts about Margaret were true.”

Judy turned eleven in the winter of 1949, four years after the war ended with a cataclysmic blast on the other side of the world and well into the Truman presidency, when everyone in America was just trying to go back to normal. Well, not exactly normal—the post-war economy was booming. The middle class had gotten a buff and a polish. Families of four or even five could thrive on one income, which meant kids were liberated from hovering psychic burdens like work and the draft and could concentrate on being children for a little bit longer than previous generations. That’s how the adolescent, focused on school and socializing, was born.

As a child, Judy was daddy’s little girl. Her parents, Rudolph and Essie, both grew up in Elizabeth and met when they were finishing high school. They married young, him dark-haired and dapper, her slender, serious, and blond. They stayed in town, where they had lots of family living nearby. Essie, an introvert who loved books, was a guarded person, keeping her feelings under wraps. Rudolph, on the other hand, was dynamic—he was funny and charming. He owned his own dental practice and was widely admired within the community. Judy thought of him as a natural philosopher who just happened to fix teeth for a living.

Her father was her go-to parent for comfort and affection, the one who indulged her in round after round of hide-and-seek, took her temperature when she was sick, and soothed her during thunderstorms (one boom was enough to send her leaping across the room). She rewarded him with a special nickname: Doey-Bird. Every night before bed, she gave him his “treatment,” which was a series of kisses and hugs, always doled out in the same pattern. Blume described it in her 1977 autobiographical novel, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself, as “a sliding kiss, three quick hugs… finished with a butterfly kiss on his nose.”

The Sussmans were Jewish, so Margaret’s struggle with religion—in which she seeks out both Jewish and Christian experiences as part of a yearlong project to clarify her faith—wasn’t Judy’s. But when it came to Margaret’s secret, intimate relationship with God, that was all her. From the first page of the book, Margaret whispers a prayer, as if conjuring an imaginary friend.

“Are you there God? It’s me, Margaret,” she begins, as she does with every quiet appeal to God throughout the novel. “We’re moving today. I’m so scared God… Don’t let New Jersey be too horrible. Thank you.”

Judy spoke to God, too, mostly as a way of coping with her anxiety about her father’s mortality. He was ostensibly healthy, but much of her childhood was shaped by illness and death. Not just the Holocaust, though whispers about the camps made her shudder. With many generations of family around, there were inevitably a lot of funerals, followed by intense, seven-day shivahs. She was terrified Rudolph was going to die young—at the age of forty-two, to be exact. He was the youngest of seven children and two of his older brothers, also dentists, had unexpectedly passed away at that age. Please, she prayed to whoever might be listening, not Doey, too. Sally has the same fear in Sally J. Freedman: “Let Doey-Bird get through this bad year… this year of being forty-two… we need him God… we love him,” Sally begs in her bed at night. “You wouldn’t let three brothers die at the same age, would you? But somewhere in the back of her mind she remembered hearing that bad things always happen in threes.”

Her fear of something happening to Doey was so overwhelming that Judy became compulsive. “I made bargains with God,” Blume wrote in her 1986 collection of children’s letters, Letters to Judy: What Kids Wish They Could Tell You. “I became ritualistic, inventing prayers that had to be repeated seven times a day, in order to keep my father safe and healthy.”

She also felt like she needed to keep her worries to herself. Her brother, David, was the problem child, so she felt pressure to be perfect, fulfilling Rudolph and Essie’s expectations for both of them. From a young age, David was brilliant but inscrutable. He was rebellious—once, he got sent home from kindergarten after kicking his teacher in the stomach. When Judy was going into third grade, David developed a kidney infection so persistent that Essie moved the three of them south to Miami for the year, hoping the sea air would cure him. It worked, but it also meant that Judy only saw her beloved father on holidays, when he could get away from the office and fly down.

More and more she learned to hide things from her family. Essie needed her to be easy, talented, popular, happy—and so Judy learned to give her just that.