Young Adult Fiction - The Young Adult Problem Novel

The Young Adult Problem Novel

Recently the term problem novel has been used used to describe young adult literature that deal exclusively with an adolescent's first confrontation with a social or personal problem. (See also the Social novel and Social protest novel). The term was first used this way in the late 1960s with reference to contemporary works like The Outsiders, a coming-of-age novel by S. E. Hinton, first published in 1967. The adolescent problem novel is rather loosely defined. Rose Mary Honnold in The Teen Reader's Advisor defines them as dealing more with characters from lower-class families and their problems and as using "grittier", more realistic language, including dialects, profanity, and poor grammar, when it fits the character and setting. Sometimes, the term problem novel is used almost interchangeably with "young adult novel", but many young adult novels do not fit these criteria. The term is increasingly used in a negative fashion, and is rarely used by children's literature journals such as The ALAN Review.

J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye (1951), often considered one of the progenitors of modern young adult literature, is sometimes considered a problem novel, because it is popular with adolescent readers for its themes of teenage confusion, angst, alienation, and rebellion. S. E. Hinton's The Outsiders (1967) and Paul Zindel's The Pigman (1968) are problem novels written specifically for teenagers. However, Sheila Egoff notes in Thursday's Child: Trends and Patterns in Contemporary Children's Literature that the Newbery Award winning novel It's Like This, Cat (1964) by Emily Cheney Neville may have established "the problem novel formula." Go Ask Alice (1971) is an early example of the sub-genre and is often considered an example of the negative aspects of the form (Although the author is "Anonymous", it is largely or wholly the work of its purported editor, Beatrice Sparks). A more recent example is Adam Rapp's The Buffalo Tree (1997).