Dust Off the Gold Medal

The oldest and most prestigious childrens literature award, the Newbery Medal has since 1922 been granted annually by the American Library Association to the childrens book it deems "most distinguished." Medal books enjoy an outsized influence on American childrens literature, figuring perennially on publishers lists, on library and bookstore shelves, and in school curricula. As such, they offer a compelling window into the history of US childrens literature and publishing, as well as into changing societal attitudes about which books are "best" for Americas schoolchildren. Yet literary scholars have disproportionately ignored the Medal winners in their research. This volume provides a critically- and historically-grounded scholarly analysis of representative but understudied Newbery Medal books from the 1920s through the 2010s, interrogating the disjunction between the books omnipresence and influence, on the one hand, and the critical silence surrounding them, on the other. Dust Off the Gold Medal makes a case for closing these scholarly gaps by revealing neglected texts insights into the politics of childrens literature prizing and by demonstrating how neglected titles illuminate critical debates currently central to the field of childrens literature. In particular, the essays shed light on the hidden elements of diversity apparent in the neglected Newbery canon while illustrating how the books respondsometimes in quite subtle waysto contemporaneous concerns around race, class, gender, disability, nationalism, and globalism.