Cross-Writing from the Crosstrees: Travel, Authority, and Juvenile Self-Representation in Barbara Newhall Follett’s The Voyage of the Norman D.

Barbara Newhall Follett (1914–39?) was a prolific child author whose writings criss-crossed between the desires and expectations of children and adults alike. This article analyzes Follett’s travelogue, The Voyage of the Norman D. (1928), which records her trip on a lumber schooner. In an expansive form of “cross-writing,” the juvenile travel writer negotiates imagination and experience, influence and authority, self and self-representation. Follett blends fact and fiction in emulation of her literary models, manipulates and even upsets assumptions about childish inferiority, and performs piratical play. Most importantly, however, she documents travel’s power to validate a maturing writer’s own subjective experience.