The Plot: 17 year old Angie Morrow has just graduated from an all-girls prep school in the medium-sized town of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin when she suddenly attracts the notice of Jack Duluth, who has also just graduated from the local public high school. So, pretty much Saved By The Bell: The Novel. But that’s not the cover on my paperback copy. The first edition dust-jacket is pictured above, but really, anything from Password to Larkspur Lane to Peyton Place could be lurking behind that nondescript foliage. Which could happen, considering that while it has been in print for 70 years, it has gone through myriad changes in cover art. In contrast, the contemporary reader picking up Seventeenth Summer unaware of its vintage is going to feel like she has been abruptly dropped down amongst the Moon-people. First published in 1942 and continuously in print ever since, Maureen Daly’s Seventeenth Summer is widely credited with being the very first work of YA Fiction, the genre that would go on to spawn a gazillion age-inappropriate romances, would-be Olympic Ice Dancers and the Wakefield Twins.īackground: Written by the precociously talented Daly when she herself was 17 years old and published before she was 21, Seventeenth Summer is an interesting read in the wake of Fifteen, and other books which make a convincing case that being a teenager has been pretty much the same since the dawn of time (or at least since the mid-20th Century). This week, we’re going to start at the beginning, literally.

Neal adams deadman cover