At 9:00 on a Monday morning early each year, at its midwinter conference, the Association for Library Service to Children announces its selections for the best children's books of the year -- the Newbery award, for "the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children," and its sister award, the Caldecott, for the most distinguished American picture book. The winners, who are notified of their selection by phone just prior to the announcement, are invited to fly to New York the following morning and appear, often slightly stunned, on "Good Morning America" to be interviewed. They are then allowed a few months to prepare a formal acceptance speech for the official presentation banquet the following summer, with their prerecorded speeches distributed in cassette form as a party favor to each of the two thousand diners.

The Newbery is the Holy Grail of American children's book writers. There are other awards -- the National Book Award for Young People's Literature, for example -- but none comes close to conferring the cachet, the recognition, that the Newbery conveys. It is the oldest children's book award in the world. Libraries and bookstores have shelves devoted to Newbery winners. The author's future books -- and reissued earlier ones -- will frequently bear on their covers the legend "Newbery Award author." The award brings fortune (or what passes for it in the children's book world) as well as fame. Although the award itself does not include a monetary payment, it can double the sales of the book, as well as increase sales of the author's other books. It will also keep the book alive. The average shelf life (time in print) of a children's book today is eighteen months. But of the seventy-seven Newbery medal books, seventy-two are still in print today, including the second recipient, The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, published in 1922.

The Newbery award reflects an old struggle for children's books to be taken seriously as literature. It was the brainchild of Frederic Melcher, who in 1921 proposed the award to the Children's Librarians Section of the American Library Association. The purpose of the medal, as stated in Melcher's formal agreement with the ALA, was to "encourage original creative work in the field of books for children," and "to emphasize to the public that contributions to the literature for children deserve similar recognition to poetry, plays, or novels." The award is named after the eighteenth-century English bookseller John Newbery, and consists of a bronze medal, designed by Rene Paul Chambellan, depicting a man holding a book with a boy and girl reaching towards him. The winner's name and the year are engraved on the back.

The Newbery winner is selected by a committee of fifteen members of the Association for Library Service to Children. Competition to get onto the committee is fierce. Seven members and the committee chair are elected from a ballot of twice that many candidates, and the President of the Association appoints the remaining seven, with an eye to achieving ethnic, gender, professional and geographic balance. Although the ALSC is itself a division of the American Library Association, membership is not restricted to librarians. Parents, authors, booksellers and publishers are members and have participated on the awards committees, barring conflict of interest.

Once selected, the members begin the year-long process of choosing from the approximately five thousand children's books published annually in the U.S. the single most outstanding work. From such a wealth of prospects, how do committee members learn of the best candidates? Suggestions come from their own professional work, from reading book reviews, and from book publishers. Committee members' names and addresses are available through the ALSC, and publishers are not shy about sending members likely candidates -- often in galley form, as it can take up to six months from the proof stage for a book to be published. Any book with a publication date during the year in question is eligible, if written by an author who is a citizen or resident of the U.S., and if the book is originally published in the U.S. But if a book is not slated to appear until the fall pre-holiday season, a publisher may want to get it into committee members' hands earlier than that. Publishers' recommendations can be particularly helpful in the case of new writers, whose names may be unknown to committee members. And new writers can win -- Emily Cheney Neville won the 1964 medal for her very first novel, It's Like This, Cat, a realistic look at a fourteen-year old New York boy's life -- and conflicts -- with his parents and friends. More commonly, the winner is an established writer, and may even have won before. E.L. Konigsburg, Joseph Krumgold, Lois Lowry, Katherine Paterson, and Elizabeth George Speare have all received the medal twice.

Committee members meet at the midwinter conference, at the annual ALA conference in June, and again in the winter of the following year when the final decision is made and announced. They may also communicate with each other throughout the year via confidential e-mail, and discuss books with colleagues, friends, and children. And read, read, read. Ellen Fader, who has served on the committee three times and was the chair of last year's committee, estimates that during her first stint she read over five hundred books. Children's books, to be sure, but that doesn't necessarily mean very short ones. Although books written for children from birth to age fourteen are officially eligible for the Newbery, most of the awards have in fact been given to books written for third grade and up. Books for younger children, with their correspondingly higher proportion of illustrations, are more likely to be candidates for the Caldecott (although the 1982 Newbery winner, A Visit to William Blake's Inn, was also a Caldecott Honor book). So many of these are books of some length. They may not be War and Peace, but they're not Goodnight Moon either.

From the field of five thousand, about one hundred books are ultimately considered serious candidates for the medal. This list gets narrowed to around fifty during the course of the year, and committee members go into the final meeting prepared to discuss and vote on about thirty-five titles. Members vote for their first, second and third choices. Unanimity is not required, but the winner must receive a certain number of first place votes and be eight points ahead of the next candidate. The committee also chooses one or more "Newbery Honor Books."

Committee deliberations and communications are confidential, and there is no official short list, unlike with the Pulitzer and Booker prizes. But by the time of the final selection there is usually a buzz among children's book publishers and librarians as to likely candidates. Some writers of potential winners wait nervously by the phone. Or flee it. Lois Lowry, who had won in 1990 for Number the Stars and whose novel The Giver had commanded a great deal of attention as a possible winner in 1994, dealt with the tension by getting as far away from the convention as she could, on a boat in Antarctica. They tracked her down anyway, and notified her via a radiogram slid under the door of her cabin. Then, she said, "I wanted to tell someone -- even though I assumed no one on the boat would have heard of the medal -- so I told the woman sitting next to me at lunch. And it turned out that she was a past president of the American Library Association." The public announcement follows the notification of the winners; there is a "large hullabaloo," as Ellen Fader puts it, and the next year's committee gets to work.

What effect does receiving the award have upon a writer, besides increased book sales? For a beginning or unknown writer, it may mean simply being able to continue writing. As Sharon Creech, who won in 1995 when she was living in England and relatively unknown in the States, said in her acceptance speech, "An unknown [writer] has simple prayers: please let my books be published; please let readers know these books exist; please let me keep writing. What the Newbery does is answer all of these prayers." It can also encourage a writer to explore new paths, to take risks. "In an odd way," says Lowry, "the effect on future work is to free it. I think future work after a Newbery is scrutinized more closely, reviewed more widely, read more critically, but a writer who has won the Newbery can try something new -- a different genre, a new form -- and be forgiven if it fails."

What does it take for a book to win? The official criteria state that it must have "conspicuous excellence" and be "individually distinct." It must be age appropriate as well. A good book for a fourth grader dealing with, say, racial prejudice, will be very different in style and presentation from a book on the same subject intended for eighth graders. The majority of winners have been novels, but other genres have been represented as well. The very first winner was, perhaps appropriately, an account of the history of the world from prehistoric times to the present -- the present being the end of World War I. Three have been books of poetry -- last year's medalist, Out of the Dust, described as " a novel in blank verse," the 1982 winner, A Visit to William Blake's Inn, and the 1989 recipient, Joyful Noise: Poems for Two Voices, a delightful collection of poems ostensibly by insects, intended to be read aloud by two persons together. There have been biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Louisa May Alcott, and Daniel Boone. And the 1979 winner, Ellen Raskin's The Westing Game, is actually a murder mystery that invites the reader to decode clues contained in elaborate plays on words.

Even the straightforward novels have ranged from contemporary realistic fiction to fantasy and myth. A recurring subject is a "coming of age" story of a young adolescent, often in an interesting or unusual time or place. The classic Johnny Tremain, the 1944 medalist, set a boy's search for his identity and role in life in the context of the Revolutionary War. Caddie Woodlawn did the same for a pioneer girl. The High King, Lloyd Alexander's final book in his Chronicles of Prydain series, which won in 1969, involved a similar quest set in a fantasy kingdom derived from Welsh mythology. In Shadow of a Bull, a boy must confront the legacy of his father, a famous bullfighter, and his town's expectations that he will follow in his father's footsteps. Julie of the Wolves, the1973 winner, involved a young Eskimo woman's attempt to locate her place between the old Eskimo culture and the new culture of the whites, against the backdrop of her struggle for survival alone in the ice and snow of the Arctic as she flees an arranged marriage.

The award criteria declare that the award "is not for didactic intent." But to receive a Newbery, it helps to have a serious theme. Death, loss, injustice, and hard decisions have figured in winners throughout the history of the awards. There have been lighter books, including a recent winner, The Whipping Boy, a romp in which an appropriately nicknamed Prince Brat, accompanied by his whipping boy, discovers what life is like outside the castle. But, although it is difficult to generalize among so many books, it seems that many of the more recent winners display a decidedly more serious tone than the majority of the earlier books. The Giver is set in a future Utopia where all memories of the past -- with its sorrows as well as joys -- are held by one member of the community so that the others will not be disturbed by them. Those who become old or who do not fit into the community are quietly eliminated. Lowry's other winner, Number the Stars, concerns the occupation of Denmark by the Nazis. Although the central story of the book -- the attempt to smuggle the main character's Jewish friend and her family to safety in Sweden -- has a happy ending, the brutality of the Nazis is vividly portrayed and the main character's older sister is in fact killed by them. In the 1978 winner, The Bridge to Terabithia, a boy's limited rural existence is enlivened by a new girl in the neighborhood, whose family moves there from Washington D.C. Creative, intelligent, and different, she initiates him into a world of the imagination and of friendship. And then drowns. Walk Two Moons, which received the medal in 1995, involves a girl's reluctant discovery of her mother's death, in a story weighted with many other deaths, as well as blindness and mental illness.

In this regard, it is interesting to compare the 1996 winner, The Midwife's Apprentice, with Johnny Tremain. Both main characters are orphans and apprentices who must make their own way in the world. But the world of medieval England is much less hospitable to its heroine than is Revolutionary America. It is a world in which orphans sleep in dung-heaps and bullies torment the weak. Even the midwife teaches her apprentice only grudgingly, fearing a rival. The heroine triumphs in the end, having learned the need for perseverance. But in this world, although kindness and compassion can be found, they are stumbled upon only by luck. There is little reliable protection for the helpless.

This more sober perspective in Newbery winners reflects an overall trend in children's books. The last twenty years, Ellen Fader says, have seen an increase in treatment of serious subjects in children's books. Even picture books now deal with issues such as blended families, guns, and homelessness. Life has changed, and children's books reflect that. Virginia Euwer Wolff, whose novel about a girl's softball team, Bat 6, is mentioned by some (but not the closemouthed committee) as a leading candidate for this year's award, said, "[I]n this time in history we know that no child is genuinely safe; thus our books offer few curtseys and bows, fewer ahems and excuse-me's. We've been sweeping less and less under the rug in the last quarter-century. In fact, we're pulling back the rug and exposing more and more of the really awful stuff that previous generations have tried to hide there, in their earnest and pious need to protect us from it." The passage of time also plays a role in the subject matter of books. There are lots of books now about World War II and the Holocaust. As survivors grow older, they want to pass their stories on. Last year there were three books on the Dust Bowl, including one picture book. And including the Newbery winner.

The winner, Out of the Dust, is the most striking example of this more somber tone. Written in blank verse, it is the diary of a fourteen-year-old Oklahoma girl during the years 1934-1935. In the midst of the imminent failure of the family farm, the girl loses her mother and newborn brother as a result of a kerosene fire that scars her own hands, making it difficult for her to continue with the one activity that has been her escape from the harsh confines of her life -- playing the piano. She begins to lose her father too, as he slips away from her into his grief. Finally she leaves, hitchhiking on a train to California. On the trip, she comes to realize that her home is back with her father, and she returns. The book ends on a hopeful note, with a new understanding between the girl and her father, and a wise and kind future stepmother. And the prospect of her being able to play the piano again. The story is powerful, the language spare and beautiful. And yet the images -- the mother moaning in pain, the daughter unable to get water into her mother's badly burned mouth, a boy caught against a barbed-wire fence, another boy suffocated by a dust storm -- are disturbing. It does not seem a book children would read for pleasure. A children's bookstore owner told me he thought it was more a book for adults.

But just as adults do not read solely for pleasure, neither do children. We as adults read books that disturb, sadden, even horrify us. And we do so without parents, teachers or librarians telling us to do so (pace Oprah). Fader says that children will come into a library asking for "a new sad book." They read it because it is not what is happening in their lives and they want to learn about it, because it is cathartic, because they enjoy escaping into the book's world. Like adults. Our discomfort at introducing such books to children reflects the tension between our two tasks as parents or mentors to children -- to protect them, and to prepare them for adulthood. But children may be more resilient than we think. Bruno Bettelheim, in his book The Uses of Enchantment, argued strenuously for reading children the old fairy tales in their unexpurgated, often bloody forms. Children know, he said, that life is like that.

It is nevertheless a safe assumption that more children read Goosebumps (where the terrors are patently unrealistic) than Out of the Dust, a fact that does not seem to worry the award committee. The award criteria also state that the award is not for popularity, and Ellen Fader acknowledges that a well-written book could be a serious contender for the award even if it didn't have a lot of "child appeal."

Which raises the question of the role of children in the Newbery awards, and in the world of children's books generally. Children's books are an anomaly -- they are for children, but they are written by adults, purchased (generally) by adults, and judged by adults. Ursula Nordstrom, the longtime children's book editor at HarperCollins, once defined part of her job as getting children's books past the adults who buy them. Should children -- the intended recipients of the work so honored -- be given a role in the selection of the Newbery winner, as they are in some lesser-known awards? Virginia Euwer Wolff said that her spontaneous answer would be "yes," but her more considered answer would be "no." Children's experience and perspective are not deep enough, she thinks; they don't know enough about the "architecture" of books. Lois Lowry agrees, for a different reason. "Kids are plunged too soon in their lives into a world where they have to assess and judge and analyze," she says. "There are so few things left simply to be enjoyed. I think the major role of children in connection with literature is that they should curl up in a comfortable chair and consume books with passion and no criteria." Lowry adds that she has no problem with book-discussion groups.

Something of that nature occurs each year in Riverdale Grade School in Portland, Oregon. Children prepare brief analyses of likely Newbery candidates and discuss their opinions of the work at a "Newbery Night." They then vote their choices just prior to the ALSC announcement. Last year, Ella Enchanted was their selection. A charming version of the Cinderella story -- the heroine was placed under a curse of obedience, which she had to discover how to remove -- it proved to be one of the Newbery Honor books when the real decision was made. Because one of the event participants was last year's committee chair, Ellen Fader, it provided a mechanism for her to hear a number of children's opinions of the works prior to the final committee decision. And the children love the fact that adults want to hear their views. The children's opinions this year will be forwarded to the new committee chair, who has an e-mail address to which anyone, including children, can send their opinion of any books.

Have the Newbery awards made a difference? Most children's book writers -- and readers -- would say "yes." Because they are so widely respected, they encourage good writing, even among authors who do not win the award. As Wolff puts it, "[w]hen our fellow authors write good stories, we're likely to write better than we would if they were writing mediocre ones." By identifying the best work in American children's literature, the awards make this literature better known. Parents and other adults will buy and check out from the library Newbery books on the strength of the award alone, without knowing anything about the work or author. The books may or may not be a good "fit" for a particular child, but at least the quality of the work is very high. And introducing a child to good literature may have unforeseen results. Karen Hesse, the author of Out of the Dust, thanked the Newbery committee as "the girl who devoured Newberys in a corner of the Enoch Pratt Free Library." The Newberys give the best work broad exposure -- and longevity. As a child, I read my mother's copy of Hitty, Her First Hundred Years (the autobiography of a doll), which won in 1930. Last month I saw it on the shelf of a bookstore and resolved to buy it for my daughter. I like to think Frederic Melcher would have been pleased.

NEWBERY AWARD WINNERS