Biography of Judy Blume

Name: Judy Blume
Bith Date: February 12, 1938
Death Date:
Place of Birth: Elizabeth, New Jersey, United States
Nationality: American
Gender: Female
Occupations: writer

Judy Blume

Perhaps the most popular contemporary author of works for upper elementary to junior high school readers, Judy Blume (born 1938) is the creator of frank, often humorous stories which focus on the emotional and social concerns of suburban adolescents.

Although Blume is best known for her fiction for adolescents, she began her career by writing books for younger children, an audience she still continues to address; Tales of a Fourth-Grade Nothing (1972) and Superfudge (1980), two entertaining tales about ten-year-old Peter and his incorrigible baby brother, Fudge, are especially popular with readers. Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret (1970) depicts eleven-year-old Margaret's apprehensions about starting her period and choosing her own religion. At the time of the book's publication, Blume was praised for her warm and funny recreation of childhood feelings and conversation, but was criticized for her forthright references to the human body and its processes. Margaret is now considered a groundbreaking work due to the candor with which Blume presents previously taboo subjects. Forever (1975), in which Blume relates the particulars of her eighteen-year-old heroine's initial sexual experience, created an even greater furor. Despite the fact that it was published as an adult book, protestors pointed out that Blume's name and characteristically uncomplicated prose style attracted a vulnerable preteen audience who could be influenced by the intimate details of the novel. In Tiger Eyes (1981), Blume relates the story of how fifteen-year-old Davey adjusts to her father's murder. Hailed by many critics as Blume's finest work for her successful handling of a complex plot, Tiger Eyes includes such issues as alcoholism, suicide, anti-intellectualism, and violence. Letters to Judy (1986) was a promoted as a response to the voluminous amount of mail that Blume receives from her readers. Selecting a number of representatives letters to reprint anonymously with accompanying comments, she created the book for a dual purpose: to enable children to see that they are not alone and to make parents more aware of their children's needs.

Reviewers commend Blume for her honesty, warmth, compassion, and wit, praising her lack of condescension, superior observation of childhood, and strong appeal to children. Critics are strongly divided as to the success of Blume's plots, characterization, writing style, and nonjudgmental approach; they object to her uninhibited language and permissive attitude toward sexuality, and complain that her cavalier treatment of love, death, pain, and religion trivializes young people and the literature written for them. However, most commentators agree that Blume accurately captures the speech, emotions, and private thoughts of children, for whom she has made reading both easy and enjoyable.

In the twenty years since she published her first book, Judy Blume has become one of the most popular and controversial authors for children writing today. Her accessible, humorous style and direct, sometimes explicit treatment of youthful concerns have won her many fans--as well as critics who sometimes seek to censor her work. Nevertheless, Blume has continued to produce works that are both entertaining and thought- provoking. "Judy Blume has a knack for knowing what children think about and an honest, highly amusing way of writing about it," Jean Van Leeuwen states in the New York Times Book Review.Newsweek likewise reports that Angeline Moscatt, head librarian of the Children's Room of the New York Library, believes Blume "has a way of portraying human foibles in a way kids can relate to. In twenty years, I've never seen such a popular children's author."

Many critics attribute Blume's popularity to her ability to discuss openly, realistically, and compassionately the subjects that concern her readers. Her books for younger children, such as Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing,Blubber, and Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, deal with problems of sibling rivalry, establishing self-confidence, and social ostracism. Books for young adults, such as Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret,Deenie, and Just As Long as We're Together consider matters of divorce, friendship, family breakups, and sexual development (including menstruation and masturbation), while Forever...specifically deals with a young woman's first love and first sexual experience. But whatever the situation, Blume's characters confront their feelings of confusion as a start to resolving their problems. In Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, for instance, the young protagonist examines her thoughts about religion and speculates about becoming a woman. The result is a book that uses "sensitivity and humor" in capturing "the joys, fears and uncertainty that surround a young girl approaching adolescence," Lavinia Russ writes in Publishers Weekly.

"Blume's books reflect a general cultural concern with feelings about self and body, interpersonal relationships, and family problems," Alice Phoebe Naylor and Carol Wintercorn remark in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. But Blume has taken this general concern further, the critics continue, for "her portrayal of feelings of sexuality as normal, and not rightfully subject to punishment, [has] revolutionized realistic fiction for children." Blume's highlighting of sexuality reflects her ability to target the issues that most interest young people; when she first began writing, she "knew intuitively what kids wanted to know because I remembered what I wanted to know," she explained to John Neary of People. "I think I write about sexuality because it was uppermost in my mind when I was a kid: the need to know, and not knowing how to find out. My father delivered these little lectures to me, the last one when I was 10, on how babies are made. But questions about what I was feeling, and how my body could feel, I never asked my parents."

Nowhere is Blume's insight into character more apparent than in her fiction for adolescents, who are undeniably her most loyal and attentive audience. As Naomi Decter observes in Commentary, "there is, indeed, scarcely a literate girl of novel-reading age who has not read one or more Blume books." Not only does Blume address sensitive themes, she "is a careful observer of the everyday details of children's lives and she has a feel for the little power struggles and shifting alliances of their social relationships," R. A. Siegal comments in The Lion and the Unicorn. This realism enhances the appeal of her books, as Walter Clemons notes in a Newsweek review of Tiger Eyes: "No wonder teen-agers love Judy Blume's novels: She's very good.... Blume's delicate sense of character, eye for social detail and clear access to feelings touches even a hardened older reader. Her intended younger audience gets a first-rate novel written directly to them."

Blume reflected on her ability to communicate with her readers in a Publishers Weekly interview with Sybil Steinberg: "I have a capacity for total recall. That's my talent, if there's a talent involved. I have this gift, this memory, so it's easy to project myself back to certain stages in my life. And I write about what I know is true of kids going through those same stages." In addition, Blume enjoys writing for and about this age group. "When you're 12, you're on the brink of adulthood," the author told Joyce Maynard in the New York Times Magazine, "but everything is still in front of you, and you still have the chance to be almost anyone you want. That seemed so appealing to me. I wasn't even 30 when I started writing, but already I didn't feel I had much chance myself." As a result, "whether she is writing about female or male sexual awakening, and whatever other adolescent problems, Judy Blume is on target," Dorothy M. Broderick asserts in the New York Times Book Review. "Her understanding of young people is sympathetic and psychologically sound; her skill engages the reader in human drama without melodrama."

Blume's style also plays a major role in her popularity; as Adele Geras remarks in New Statesman, Blume's books "are liked because they are accessible, warm hearted, often funny, and because in them her readers can identify with children like themselves in difficult situations, which may seem silly to the world at large but which are nevertheless very real to the sufferer." "It's hard not to like Judy Blume," Carolyn Banks elaborates in the Washington Post Book World. "Her style is so open, so honest, so direct. Each of her books reads as though she's not so much writing as kaffeeklatsching with you." In addition, Siegal observes that Blume's works are structured simply, making them easy to follow. "Her plots are loose and episodic: they accumulate rather than develop," the critic states. "They are not complicated or demanding."

Another way in which Blume achieves such a close affinity with her readers is through her consistent use of first-person narratives. As Siegal explains: "Through this technique she succeeds in establishing intimacy and identification between character and audience. All her books read like diaries or journals and the reader is drawn in by the narrator's self- revelations." "Given the sophistication of Miss Blume's material, her style is surprisingly simple," Decter similarly comments. "She writes for the most part in the first person: her vocabulary, grammar, and syntax are colloquial; her tone, consciously or perhaps not, evokes the awkwardness of a fifth grader's diary." In Just as Long as We're Together, for instance, the twelve-year-old heroine "tells her story in simple, real kid language," notes Mitzi Myers in the Los Angeles Times, "inviting readers to identify with her dilemmas over girlfriends and boyfriends and that most basic of all teen problems: `Sometimes I feel grown up and other times I feel like a little kid.' "

Although Blume's work is consistently in favor with readers, it has frequently been the target of criticism. Some commentators have charged that the author's readable style, with its focus on mundane detail, lacks the depth to deal with the complex issues that she raises. In a Times Literary Supplement review of Just as Long as We're Together, for example, Jan Dalley claims that Blume's work "is all very professionally achieved, as one would expect from this highly successful author, but Blume's concoctions are unvaryingly smooth, bland and glutinous." But Beryl Lieff Benderly believes that the author's readability sometimes masks what the critic calls her "enormous skill as a novelist," as she writes in a Washington Post Book World review of the same book. "While apparently presenting the bright, slangy, surface details of life in an upper-middle class suburban junior high school, she's really plumbing the meaning of honesty, friendship, loyalty, secrecy, individuality, and the painful, puzzling question of what we owe those we love."

Other reviewers have taken exception to Blume's tendency to avoid resolving her fictional dilemmas in a straightforward fashion, for her protagonists rarely finish dealing with all their difficulties by the end of the book. Many critics, however, think that it is to Blume's credit that she does not settle every problem for her readers. One such critic, Robert Lipsyte of Nation, maintains that "Blume explores the feelings of children in a nonjudgmental way. The immediate resolution of a problem is never as important as what the protagonist ... will learn about herself by confronting her life." Lipsyte explains that "the young reader gains from the emotional adventure story both by observing another youngster in a realistic situation and by finding a reference from which to start a discussion with a friend or parent or teacher. For many children, talking about a Blume story is a way to expose their own fears about menstruation or masturbation or death." Countering other criticisms that by not answering the questions they raise Blume's books fail to educate their readers, Siegal likewise suggests: "It does not seem that Blume's books ... ought to be discussed and evaluated on the basis of what they teach children about handling specific social or personal problems. Though books of this type may sometimes be useful in giving children a vehicle for recognizing and ventilating their feelings, they are, after all, works of fiction and not self-help manuals."

Even more disturbing to some adults is Blume's treatment of mature issues and her use of frank language. "Menstruation, wet dreams, masturbation, all the things that are whispered about in real school halls" are the subjects of Blume's books, relates interviewer Sandy Rovner in the Washington Post. As a result, Blume's works have frequently been the targets of censorship, and Blume herself has become an active crusader for freedom of expression. To answer those who would censor her work for its explicitness, Blume replied: "The way to instill values in children is to talk about difficult issues and bring them out in the open, not to restrict their access to books that may help them deal with their problems and concerns," she said in a Toronto Globe and Mail interview with Isabel Vincent. And, as she revealed to Peter Gorner in the Chicago Tribune, she never intended her work to inspire protest in the first place: "I wrote these books a long time ago when there wasn't anything near the censorship that there is now," she told Gorner. "I wasn't aware at the time that I was writing anything controversial. I just know what these books would have meant to me when I was a kid."

Others similarly defend Blume's choice of subject matter. For example, Natalie Babbitt asserts in the New York Times Book Review: "Some parents and librarians have come down hard on Judy Blume for the occasional vulgarities in her stories. Blume's vulgarities, however, exist in real life and are presented in her books with honesty and full acceptance." And those who focus only on the explicit aspects of Blume's books are missing their essence, Judith M. Goldberger proposes in the Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom. "Ironically, concerned parents and critics read Judy Blume out of context, and label the books while children and young adults read the whole books to find out what they are really about and to hear another voice talking about a host of matters with which they are concerned in their daily lives. The grownups, it seems, are the ones who read for the `good' parts, more so than the children."

Blume, too, realizes that the controversiality of her work receives the most attention, and that causes concern for her beyond any censorship attempts. As the author explained to Maynard: "What I worry about is that an awful lot of people, looking at my example, have gotten the idea that what sells is teenage sex, and they'll exploit it. I don't believe that sex is why kids like my books. The impression I get, from letter after letter [I receive], is that a great many kids don't communicate with their parents. They feel alone in the world. Sometimes, reading books that deal with other kids who feel the same things they do, it makes them feel less alone." The volume of Blume's fan mail seems to reinforce the fact that her readers are looking for contact with an understanding adult. Hundreds of letters arrive each week not only praising her books but also asking her for advice or information. As Blume remarked in Publishers Weekly, "I have a wonderful, intimate relationship with kids. It's rare and lovely. They feel that they know me and that I know them."

In 1986 Blume collected a number of these letters from her readers and published them, along with some of her own comments, as Letters to Judy: What Your Kids Wish They Could Tell You. The resulting book, aimed at both children and adults, "is an effort to break the silence, to show parents that they can talk without looking foolish, to show children that parents are human and remember what things were like when they were young, and to show everyone that however trivial the problem may seem it's worth trying to sort it out," writes Geras. "If parents and children alike read Letters to Judy," advice columnist Elizabeth Winship likewise observes in the New York Times Book Review, "it might well help them to ease into genuine conversation. The book is not a how-to manual, but one compassionate and popular author's way to help parents see life through their children's eyes, and feel it through their hearts and souls." Blume feels so strongly about the lack of communication between children and their parents that she uses the royalties from Letters to Judy, among other projects, to help finance the KIDS Fund, which she established in 1981. Each year, the fund contributes approximately $45,000 to various nonprofit organizations set up to help young people communicate with their parents.

Over the years, Blume's writing has matured and her audience has expanded with each new book. While she at first wrote for younger children, as Blume's audience aged she began writing for adolescents and later for adults. Her first adult novel, Wifey, deals with a woman's search for more out of life and marriage; the second, Smart Women, finds a divorced woman trying to deal with single motherhood and new relationships. Blume's third adult novel, Summer Sisters, examines the relationship between two adult women whose friendship has grown apart since the teenage years of their lives when they spent each summer together. Although these books are directed towards a different audience, they are similar to her juvenile fiction in two characteristics: an empathy for the plights and feelings of her characters and a writing style that is humorous and easy to read. Interestingly enough, even in Blume's adult fiction "the voices of the children ring loudest and clearest," Linda Bird Francke declares in a New York Times Book Review, praising Blume's Smart Women in particular for its portrayal of "the anger, sadness, confusion and disgust children of divorce can feel."

One reason that children play such a role in Blume's "adult" fiction may be due to the author's reluctance to direct her works solely towards one audience, as she disclosed in her interview with Steinberg: "I hate to categorize books.... I wish that older readers would read my books about young people, and I hope that younger readers will grow up to read what I have to say about adult life. I'd like to feel that I write for everybody. I think that my appeal has to do with feelings and with character identification. Things like that don't change from generation to generation. That's what I really know." "I love family life," the author added in her interview with Gorner. "I love kids. I think divorce is a tragedy, traumatic and horribly painful for everybody. That's why I wrote Smart Women. I want kids to read that and to think what life might be like for their parents. And I want parents to think about what life is like for their kids."

Banks commends Blume not only for her honest approach to issues, but for her "artistic integrity": "She's never content to rest on her laurels, writing the same book over and over as so many successful writers do." For instance, Tiger Eyes, the story of Davey, a girl whose father is killed in a robbery, is "a lesson on how the conventions of a genre can best be put to use," Lipsyte claims. While the author uses familiar situations and characters, showing Davey dealing with an annoying younger sibling, a move far from home, and a new family situation, "the story deepens, takes turns," the critic continues, particularly when Davey's family moves in with an uncle who works for a nuclear weapons plant. The result, Lipsyte states, is Blume's "finest book--ambitious, absorbing, smoothly written, emotionally engaging and subtly political." And even when Blume returns to familiar characters, as she does in the series starting with Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Superfudge, her sequels "expand on the original and enrich it, so that [the] stories ... add up to one long and much more wonderful story," Jean Van Leeuwen remarks in a New York Times Book Review article about Fudge-a-Mania.

"Judy Blume is concerned to describe characters surviving, finding themselves, growing in understanding, coming to terms with life," John Gough notes in School Librarian. While the solutions her characters find and the conclusions they make "may not be original or profound," the critic continues, "... neither are they trivial. The high sales of Blume's books are testimony to the fact that what she has to say is said well and is well worth saying." "Many of today's children have found a source of learning in Judy Blume," Goldberger contends. "She speaks to children, and, in spite of loud protests, her voice is clear to them." As Faith McNulty similarly concludes in the New Yorker: "I find much in Blume to be thankful for. She writes clean, swift, unadorned prose. She has convinced millions of young people that truth can be found in a book and that reading is fun. At a time that many believe may be the twilight of the written word, those are things to be grateful for."

Historical Context

The Life and Times of Judy Blume (1938-)
At the time of Blume's birth:
Franklin D. Roosevelt was president of the United States
Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) erupted in Germany
The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins published by Dr. Seuss
Film The Adventures of Robin Hood with Errol Flynn released
The times:
1939-1945: World War II
1950-1953: Korean War
1957-1975: Vietnam War
1983: American invasion of Grenada
1991: War against Iraq
1992-1996: Civil war in Bosnia
Blume's contemporaries:
Amiri Baraka (1934-) American writer
Woody Allen (1935-) American screenwriter and director
Vaclav Havel (1936-) Czech writer and former president
Jane Fonda (1937-) American actress
Janet Reno (1938-) American attorney general
Paula Gunn Allen (1939-) Native American writer
Margaret Atwood (1939-) Canadian writer
Wilma Rudolph (1940-) American athlete
Selected world events:
1941: Japan attacked Pearl Harbor
1951: J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye published
1955: Dr. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine was used for first time in U.S.
1963: John F. Kennedy assassinated in Dallas
1965: Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X published
1975: Patty Hearst was arrested, charged with bank robbery
1983: Alice Walker's The Color Purple published
1987: Nearly 50,000 AIDS cases reported in U.S.
1995: O.J. Simpson found not guilty in double-murder