“Dear Miss Daly”: 1940s Fan Letters to Maureen Daly and the Age-Grading and Gendering of Seventeenth Summer

This article positions fans’ letters to Maureen Daly, author of Seventeenth Summer, against 1940s book reviews and analyses, pinpointing the moment when Seventeenth Summer became age-graded and gendered as a “girls’” text. It investigates how fans uphold and challenge such categorization, ultimately suggesting that men’s focus on Seventeenth Summer evinces a dissatisfaction with wartime masculinity that the critics’ simple categorization of the text as a “girl’s junior novel” cannot incorporate. By relying solely on scholarly criticism as it has been passed down to us, we lose insight into a readership that complicates the seemingly straightforward history of young adult fiction.