Increased high school attendance, economic prosperity, and the invention of the car all contributed to the creation of the “teenager”—a new age-social group between children and adults in midcentury America. As such, a new genre was created to cater to teenage tastes in movies, music, and literature. Many trace the beginning of the young adult genre to the 1940s, with the publication of Seventeenth Summer by Maureen Daly (1942). The book follows 17-year-old Angie as she falls in love for the first time, goes on dates, and navigates her local social scene. It was among the first books to be written and published for a teenage audience.

The Young Adult Library Services Association was established in 1957. They coined the term “young adult” in the 1960s to “represent the 12-18 age range” in literature (Strickland, Ashley. “A Brief History of Young Adult Literature.” CNN, 15 April 2015). Authors in the genre began to explore more realistic, often darker content in the 1960s and 1970s with books like The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath, The Outsiders (1967) by S. E. Hinton, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (1970) by Judy Blume, and The House on Mango Street (1984) by Sandra Cisneros.