Innocent Hearts: The Child Authors of the 1920s

One of the best sellers of 1919, both in England and America, was a novel written, it was claimed, by a child of nine. This was Daisy Ashford's The Young Visiters, an engagingly comic tale of how Mr. Salteena, "an elderly man of 42" with "wiskers which were very black and twisty," became a gentleman but lost Ethel Monticue, a young girl of seventeen, to his friend, Bernard (23). The deliberately artless manner of writing, complete with misspellings and missing punctuation, constantly reminded the reader that the author was a child. Nevertheless, The Young Visiters attracted attention in large part because of the witty introduction by Sir James Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, that famous exemplar of eternal childhood. Embellishing the photograph of Daisy Ashford as a little girl which appeared at the front of the book, Barrie described the young Daisy as "the blazing child" knocking off her masterpiece with "an air of careless power" (vii, x). She was, in his view, an artless but sharply observant child, recording with glee the foibles of the adults around her.

While some accepted this view of Daisy, finding her a second Marjorie Fleming, there were skeptics. Many readers were not swayed by the artless writing, the photograph of Daisy, or even by Barrie's assurance that the book was "the unaided effort in fiction of an authoress of nine years" (vii). They were convinced that it was actually written by Barrie himself. Still, the questions about its authenticity were good-humored and all agreed that the book—no matter by whom it was written—was great fun.

The popularity of The Young Visiters opened the eyes of publishers to the possibilities of books written by children. Child authors became almost a fad, and by the end of the 1920s at least eighteen books by eleven young authors—most of them American—had been published, although none of them achieved the popularity of Daisy Ashford's book. Only once since then—in the 1950s—has there been anything like this interest in children as authors¹. While The Young Visiters showed how the youth of the author could be exploited, it also demonstrated that there was a price to be paid for such exploitation. Mixed with the fascination with the young author's ingenuousness was the suspicion that it was all faked, that the book had not been written by a child at all. This suspicion was to arise about the work of several of the child authors who followed Daisy Ashford, but those about whose innocence there could be no doubt were the ones who captured the hearts of readers.

America had been as captivated in 1919 by Daisy Ashford as England had been, and it was here that young authors (and their publishers) most eagerly sprang forward to take advantage of the interest aroused by The Young Visiters. While there was controversy about the authenticity of the work of some of the American children, a few produced the purest, most appealing of all these juvenile works—works to which American readers especially seemed to respond wholeheartedly. Both the skepticism about and the fascination with the child authors were founded in a commonly held view of childhood, a view which an examination of the work of the scribbling children who came after Daisy Ashford makes clear.

First off the mark were three young Americans whose works were published in 1920. The first of these was an eleven-year-old Chicago boy, Horace Atkisson Wade, who was headlined as "A Rival to Daisy Ashford" ("Chicago Produces"). His adventure novel, In the Shadow of Great Peril, was so frenetic that no one could doubt that it was written by a boy for other boys. Nevertheless, there were misgivings about the next American rival of Daisy Ashford. She was Opal Whitely, a young woman from Oregon, whose diary—supposedly written at the age of six and seven—began appearing in The Atlantic Monthly in March 1920 as "The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart." Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, believed Opal's story that her...