I've heard the title, but never read the book. Your account makes it sound interesting, though perhaps a little more realistic than my usual taste in reading.
One of my memorable encounters with a book defending individualism in the early sixties was Edgar Z. Friedenberg's Coming of Age in America, which was educational sociology. It had a thesis that made sense to me: That the United States had the peculiar custom of trying to train young people to be citizens of a free society by putting them in institutions that systematically denied and repressed all the rights of such citizenship, to the point where most of them couldn't even imagine anything else. But what I found more striking was the method, which involved exposing a lot of high school students to fictional vignettes about an imaginary high school (called "LeMoyen High School," which I didn't get as a joke back then!) and asking them to select responses. An especially vivid one concerned the son of a successful lawyer who became a close friend of the son of a criminal, and
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Gosh, I haven't thought of Harriet the Spy in years, but I must have read it many times over because I can still remember so many details, like the holes in Sport's socks and Miss Golly persuading Harriet to take dancing lessons by pointing out that girl spies have to be like Mata Hari. It's a wonderful book. I remember being smitten by how very different it was from English children's books - the other American book I remember loving was From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankwheeler. That and Harriet the Spy both seemed like windows onto a strange and alien world.
Definitely alien to me as well. New York is nothing like living in an area where the largest nearby city is Flint, Michigan. :D
I loved From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler (and almost everything else by e.l. konigsburg), but didn't get around to reading Harriet the Spy until I was an adult and thus too old for it to have a real impact.
I loved the book too- partly for Harriet, partly for the foreignness of a child allowed to roam city streets on her own! (Sufficiently far-removed mundane settings are indistinguishable from fantasy?) It was too sad to read often, though, because of Ole Golly leaving. I hadn't remembered the cruelty of the children particularly, presumably because, as for you, it just was so obvious that children do behave that way that it made no impression. Does Dot in the Arthur Ransome books read true as a young writer to you?
Dot shows up in later books in the series- Winter Holiday, Coot Club, and The Picts and the Martyrs. I really like the way she takes her experiences and transmutes them for her writing.
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One of my memorable encounters with a book defending individualism in the early sixties was Edgar Z. Friedenberg's Coming of Age in America, which was educational sociology. It had a thesis that made sense to me: That the United States had the peculiar custom of trying to train young people to be citizens of a free society by putting them in institutions that systematically denied and repressed all the rights of such citizenship, to the point where most of them couldn't even imagine anything else. But what I found more striking was the method, which involved exposing a lot of high school students to fictional vignettes about an imaginary high school (called "LeMoyen High School," which I didn't get as a joke back then!) and asking them to select responses. An especially vivid one concerned the son of a successful lawyer who became a close friend of the son of a criminal, and ( ... )
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I loved From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler (and almost everything else by e.l. konigsburg), but didn't get around to reading Harriet the Spy until I was an adult and thus too old for it to have a real impact.
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(Eric Carle has a museum? Odd.)
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Does Dot in the Arthur Ransome books read true as a young writer to you?
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