Top 100 Children’s Novels (#16)

The dumbwaiter. Ole Golly. The boy with the purple socks. And, and, and… Someone on Facebook said this week that Harriet the Spy was her Catcher in the Rye. Mine, too. – Els Kushner

Harriet’s family wasn’t anything like mine, but I still recognized her as a kindred spirit when I was a kid. She was curious about things, and she didn’t know when to stop. I loved following her around as she found her way into people’s lives and wrote about what she saw. My heart broke when the other kids turned on her, especially when they created a Harriet-hating club—every child’s worst fear taken to an extreme. How real that bath felt to me after she ran home, covered with ink! And yet, she survived. I figured maybe I could, too. I still write in notebooks. – Kate Coombs at (Book Aunt)

Confession: I haven’t read this book since I was a kid. And yet, I still can remember reading it. I can remember the way it made me feel empowered (me a geeky, shy girl always on the fringe of the classroom). I can remember wanting to be as brave, as reckless as Harriet. Another book that was so battered from rereads that it didn’t make it past high school. – Melissa Fox (Book Nut)

WHY? Because it is my favorite book ever written. Because I felt like Harriet a lot of the time and because I know that many of you do, too. Because every time I read it I am impressed at its utter subversive nature. – Walter M. Mayes

Harriet made me want to write everything down, and once I did, I then fretted over who would find my notebook and how I might be tortured if my "real" feelings were discovered. – Dr. Patricia M. Stohr-Hunt, Chair, Education Department, University of Richmond

Heart, heart, heart. This might have been why I became a journalist. – Madelyn Rosenberg

The kid emotions and interactions are perfect. Plus, who didn’t read this and then go around with a black composition notebook writing about people? Wait. I still do that. Huh. – Jacqui Robbins

"Harriet, you are going to have to do two things, and you don’t like either one of them: 1) You have to apologize. 2) You have to lie . . . But to yourself you must always tell the truth."

I probably should have cut down the testimonials more than I did, but they just seemed so heartfelt that I just couldn’t do it.

Any summaries I find of this book tend to sound a little trite, so I guess I go with the one on the book itself. "Harriet M. Welsch is a spy. She’s staked out a spy route, and she writes down everything about everyone she sees – including her classmates and her best friends – in her notebook. ‘I bet the lady with the cross-eye looks in the mirror and feels just terrible.’ ‘Pinky Whitehead will never change. Does his mother hate him? If I had him I’d hate him.’ Then Harriet loses track of her notebook, and it ends up in the wrong hands. Before Harriet can stop them, her friends have read the always truthful, sometimes awful things she’s written about each of them. Will Harriet find a way to put her life and her friendships back together?"

You can get quite a bit of backstory on Harriet the Spy from the letters of her editor Ursula Nordstrom. In Leonard Marcus’s Dear Genius: The Letters of Ursula Nordstrom we learn that "Prior to the publication of Harriet, LF [Louise Fitzhugh] had been known as the illustrator of a send-up of Eloise called Suzuki Beane, by Sandra Scopperttone." I have searched in vain to see a copy of Suzuki Beane for years, by the way. Apparently there is a copy lurking within my library. Someday I shall request it and see what all the fuss was about.

In a letter to Charlotte Zolotow, Nordstrom mentioned the beginnings of Harriet the Spy in this way. "Anyhow, if you hadn’t called my attention to that Fitzhugh unpublishable picture book we would never have drawn Harriet the Spy out of Louise." She related the full story of Louise’s life and writing in a later letter to Joan Robbins. You see Zolotow, then a senior editor at Harper, had showed Nordstrom some sample pages from Fitzhugh of what would become Harriet’s words about her classmates. So they brought in Louise to explain to her what they wanted the book to be. "Louise sat sullenly, hands jammed into her pockets, while we expressed enthusiasm over what we’d seen . . . After at least an hour she looked up and said, ‘So you’re not really interested, are you?’ We almost died."  Eventually they persuaded her to expand the text, she did, and it was a hit.

Controversy city when this book came out though, folks. According to Dear Genius, "A group of librarians from Miami, Florida had written to say they had found Harriet ‘completely unchildlike’ and "more suitable for a New Yorker piece than a children’s book." George Woods of the Times wouldn’t even give it to his children.  Even today you can look at the comments from parents on Common Sense Media or Amazon and note their horror that Harriet is not an obedient, perfect child.

In American Writers for Children Since 1960: Fiction, the point of Harriet the Spy is summed up quite neatly. "What Harriet learns is the difference between writing and mere spying, between a social act and a self-indulgent one. The difference is not in what she does or who she is, but in her reasons for doing what comes so naturally and uncontrollably."  I love that distinction.

In Everything I Need to Know I Learned in a Children’s Book, Dr. Perri Klass (who teaches pediatrics and journalism at NYU) also pinpoints what it is about the book that makes it as good as it is. "The most important lesson of Harriet the Spy . . . is a message about the intoxicating and addictive joys of observation, of looking at the people across from you on the bus, or sitting next to you at the coffee shop counter, or ahead of you in line, and noting down the details of appearance and clothing and gesture – of listening in on their conversations (of course) – of trying to figure out their family dynamics and their back story. That’s what Harriet did with her spy route and her spy notebook – she worked on figuring out the world and its stories. She did it because she was driven to do it; she did it because she had figured out how much fun it was; she did it because it was her way of operating in the world and making it her own."

But perhaps the best, and certainly my favorite, article on Louise Fitzhugh and Harriet was the January/February 2005 article in Horn Book by K.T. Horning called "On Spies and Purple Socks and Such". Ms. Horning recalls what it was to grow up gay and to have no role models, until she met Harriet Welsch. She was astonished by the book, but one aspect in particular. ".. the thing that shocked me the most about Harriet was her cross-dressing. It’s an aspect of the novel that girls today would miss entirely (thank goodness!), but in 1965 Harriet’s spy clothes struck me as revolutionary. Back then, girls in blue jeans and hooded sweatshirts were uncommon, though not unheard of. But Harriet’s high-top sneakers were solely boys’ wear. I know for sure, because I used to beg my otherwise indulgent, liberal parents for them, and they refused, although they bought them regularly for my brothers." Horning goes on to explain why this book was so revolutionary for her and other queer kids of the time period. If you’re going to know your Harriet the Spy, I’d pretty much call this required reading.

There were two real sequels, of a sort, and several fake sequels, of a sort. The real sequels written by Ms. Fitzhugh were The Long Secret (maybe the best known period book for kids today) and Sport. The fake sequels include Harriet the Spy, Double Agent by Maya Gold and Harriet Spies Again by Helen Ericson. There may be more faux Harriet out there, but those are the two that come most immediately to mind.

Harriet won no awards, with the possible exception of the Sequoyah Book Award and the New York Times Outstanding Book Award in 1964. In fact, in 1965 the Newbery Award winner was Shadow of a Bull by Maia Wojciechowska. The Honor book was Across Five Aprils by Irene Hunt. Perfectly fine books, but they were clearly no Harriet the Spy.

Said School Library Journal, "Harriet the Spy bursts with life."