Southern Children’s Literature and the de Grummond Collection: An Interview with Ellen Ruffin

The South looms large in American children’s literature. Many classic works for young people are set in the American South and engage directly with Southern history and culture, from Newbery winners such as Lois Lenski’s Strawberry Girl (1945) and Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976) to critically acclaimed crossover works—those written for an adult or general audience that are now sometimes considered children’s literature—like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’s The Yearling (1938) and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), both Pulitzer Prize winners. More recent historical fiction, contemporary realist novels, and dystopias for children and young adults have been set in the South, such as Cynthia Kadohata’s Kira-Kira (2004), John Green’s Looking for Alaska (2005), and Paolo Bacigalupi’s Shipbreaker (2010). These are just a few of the most celebrated children’s and YA titles, but from the earliest years of the Golden Age of Children’s Literature in the nineteenth century, with popular or landmark works like Martha Finley’s Elsie Dinsmore series (1857–1905) and Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), children’s authors have returned to the South over and over again.

What accounts for the prominence of the South in American children’s literature? The Romantic association between children and agrarianism, which figures the child as almost a noble savage recalling an imagined past, and the persistent conception of the South as largely rural have conspired to make Southern landscapes and towns appear as ideal settings for depictions of childhood freedom, adventure, health, or development. The eponymous protagonist of Mary White Ovington’s Hazel (1913) is sent from Boston to live with her grandmother in Alabama to regain her physical health despite the dangers of the segregated South to an African American girl, for instance, and Travis’s experiences on the Texas frontier in Old Yeller (1956) occasion his maturation into young manhood. The historical atrocities of slavery and Jim Crow segregation, which are so central to American history and culture, of course thrived in the South and left lasting scars on the national psyche, as have natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina. Children’s literature, still often perceived as having a didactic mission, has been used to teach child readers about these past events and their contemporary reverberations and uses children and children’s culture to work through national traumas or imagine alternative futures. Moreover, from Virginia Hamilton’s M.C. Higgins the Great (1974) to Carl Hiaasen’s Hoot (2002) and Sherri Smith’s Orleans (2013), the South has been imagined as place to explore ecological dangers and to imagine the child as a possible savior.

The de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection at The University of Southern Mississippi (USM), one of the largest children’s literature archives in North America, is home to original manuscripts and illustrations of more than 1,300 authors and illustrators and an excess of 160,000 published books dating from 1530 to the present. Notable holdings include the literary estate of Margaret and H.A. Rey, creators of Curious George; the manuscripts and art of Ezra Jack Keats, author and illustrator of The Snowy Day; the papers of young adult writer John Green; and the archives of the Children’s Literature Association. Given its geographic location and its active acquisition of materials from around the nation and region, the de Grummond Collection houses many remarkable works of Southern children’s literature. In the conversation below, Ellen Ruffin, de Grummond curator, and I discuss some of these holdings and the fruitful possibilities for exploring the South and Southern culture in the children’s literature archive.

ET:

First, would you tell me a bit about the de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection and how it came to be founded at The University of Southern Mississippi?

ER:

Dr. Lena de Grummond came to The University of Southern Mississippi in 1966 following her retirement from the Louisiana State Board of Education. She had served as the supervisor...