Congratulations to Jerry Griswold on the revised edition of Audacious Kids: The Classic American Children’s Story.  Here’s what the New York Times wrote when it was first published:

“Lucid and persuasively argued.  Indeed he manages that difficult thing in writing about children’s literature.  He manages to provide the reader with an interesting new intellectual angle on these books, without condescending to his material or diminishing its elusive and potent magic.”

The publication of the volume is particularly relevant at a time when we hear howls of despair about the rise of YA literature and register deep anxieties in the media about adults reading books about children or (gasp!) for children.  Here’s an excerpt from Griswold’s new preface:

In the afterword [to Audacious Kids], I considered phenomena appearing in the late 1980s and early 1990s and predicted the rise of a second Golden Age of children’s books akin to the first Golden Age described in this study.  I foresaw the return of times when children’s and adult publishing would merge, when juvenile books would head the bestseller lists, when the interests of kids would take the main stage, and when divisions between old and young would begin to dissolve in shared cultural interests.