If anyone has a harder time being taken seriously than genre writers, it's children's writers.
And yet Dr. Seuss wrote a book about racial discrimination and prejudice that was published in 1960 with apparently no controversy whatsoever -- I've never once seen The Sneetches on a "banned/challenged books" list, although The Butter Battle Book and The Lorax came late enough that people had started to notice he wasn't just writing frivolous funny rhyming stuff with no wider significance. He wrote brilliant, incisive social commentary that flew far enough below the radar that it reached the children of the very people he was criticizing, and none of them noticed. (The Sneetches deals with discrimination and segregation. What Was I Scared Of deals with prejudice. And I am convinced that The Zax is actually a metaphore for the U.S. Senate. I haven't been able to come up with a larger significance for Too Many Daves, alas.)
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Date: 2007-10-16 09:41 pm (UTC)If anyone has a harder time being taken seriously than genre writers, it's children's writers.
And yet Dr. Seuss wrote a book about racial discrimination and prejudice that was published in 1960 with apparently no controversy whatsoever -- I've never once seen The Sneetches on a "banned/challenged books" list, although The Butter Battle Book and The Lorax came late enough that people had started to notice he wasn't just writing frivolous funny rhyming stuff with no wider significance. He wrote brilliant, incisive social commentary that flew far enough below the radar that it reached the children of the very people he was criticizing, and none of them noticed. (The Sneetches deals with discrimination and segregation. What Was I Scared Of deals with prejudice. And I am convinced that The Zax is actually a metaphore for the U.S. Senate. I haven't been able to come up with a larger significance for Too Many Daves, alas.)