Robert Cormier, born in Leominster, Massachusetts, in 1925, would later raise a family of three daughters and a son there. During his adolescence, Robert Cormier's own son objected to participation in his school's candy sale. While the boy did not suffer the extreme humiliation that the novel's Jerry Renault undergoes, he did feel a certain amount of alienation from his peers. Building on this premise, the elder Cormier created his fourth novel, The Chocolate War, a work that focuses on the sometimes cruel nature of adolescent societies and the consequence of individual choice in a communal world.
Adolescents and popular fiction. Although adolescent novels such as The Chocolate War now line the shelves of bookstores and libraries nationwide, young readers did not always have such literature at their disposal. In fact, relative to the history of the written word, the teenage novel is a new genre. During the 1930s, secondary education enrollments nearly doubled, giving rise to a new and powerful class of readers. Prior to this period, teachers and authors had, for the most part, ignored the tastes of adolescents, choosing instead to rely on the so-called "literary classics" for reading fare.
This is a free page. This page contains 201 words. This
article contains 3,140 words (approx. 10 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Article with our The Chocolate War Access Pass.
