Little Cold Warriors by Victoria M. Grieve

Author:Victoria M. Grieve
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.2 Franklin translated American classics into Arabic, including Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. Franklin Book Programs, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library.

Franklin’s most popular nonfiction juveniles included Bolton’s Lives of Girls Who Became Famous and Lives of Poor Boys Who Became Famous, as well as Mama’s Bank Account, the feel-good bestseller published by Katharine Forbes in 1943 about a working-class Norwegian immigrant family trying to achieve the American Dream in early twentieth-century San Francisco. The book touches on themes crucial to Cold War Americanism: class fluidity, assimilation, hard work, the primacy of the nuclear family, and women’s domestic roles. It is not surprising, therefore, that the book inspired a play (1944), film (1948), musical (1979), and the long-running TV show, “I Remember Mama” (1949–57).32

Despite the popularity of juvenile fiction, according to Franklin, “The most popular category of books chosen for publication is popular science—especially science for young people,” which accounted for a remarkable 25% of total Franklin publications.33 Franklin’s most requested juvenile science titles included Bertha Parker’s Basic Science series, Jeanne Bendick’s All Around You, and Richard Bishop’s Stepping Stones to Light. In 1958, two of Franklin’s juvenile science titles—Munro Leaf’s Health Can Be Fun and Bertha Parker’s Sound—won first and second prize, respectively, at East Pakistan’s Book Exhibition. Parker’s Basic Science Series had been nominated by Sukhan, a magazine “comparable to the Saturday Review but Harper-ish too,” for the best Persian children’s book the previous year.34 Franklin’s January 9, 1957, annual report listed 17 juvenile science titles; by 1965, Franklin had published 27 titles from Parker’s Basic Science Series alone in 113 foreign-language editions (Figure 3.3).35

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.