It works because the dolls are characters. Art centered on dolls has a spotty track record. The main problem with the book is its central character: Hitty. But I’ll be the first to tell you: Hitty sucks. The book is competently written, and it’s easy to see how a stereotypical 1930s American Girl® might have liked reading about a doll’s adventures. Hitty was where she really took off-her follow-up book, Calico Bush (lol), was another Newbery nominee. Though not exactly a timely reflection of its moment in history, Hitty’s award fits somewhere in the political narrative of the decade.Īuthor Rachel Field had been writing for six years by the time Hitty was published, starting with poetry collections (which seems like a weird thing lots children’s authors did back then), moving up to children’s lit, and eventually onto more adult fare before her early death in 1942. (The book ends with the titular doll being sold at auction for $50, something like $750 today and likely not within reach of most families by 1930.) But Hitty does represent the first female author to win a Newbery Award, a feat to be applauded ten years after white women finally gained the right to vote in the US. Hitty: Her First Hundred Years, a story told from the perspective of an inanimate doll, doesn’t nod to the brewing national crises, though that’s likely because it was written before things really took a turn for the worse.
In a year when it suddenly became much harder to get your hands on a book, the Newbery likely lost some of its cultural import. Kurt Vonnegut wrote about how his Indianapolis Public School was able to scrounge enough together during those years to keep a student newspaper running, but a lot of public schools just closed, either because they couldn’t afford teachers or because the local economy blew away with the topsoil.
After the US stock market tanked in 1929, the post-war bliss of the 1920s was swiftly replaced by the dusty Depression of the 1930s. The real world hadn’t crashed into the Newbery yet, but 1930 would’ve been the year to do it.
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