The term “Young Adult Literature” dates to 1942, when the genre was conceptualised and developed as a literary genre of literature defined to be between the class of children’s literature and adult literature. The thought towards the categorisation was due to the aftermath and new grounds that emerged from the Second World War. This resulted from the development of characters and the readers’ recognition of a unique demographic known as adolescents.
As a result, several themes related to youth became the focus of stories and books that are now referred to as young adult literature. It is important to remember that librarians from the New York Public Library were the ones who initially defined the genre. They changed the title from “Books for Older Boys and Girls” to “Books for Young Adults,” making the “boy” and “girl” stories the genre’s central theme.
However, before the genre’s canonisation, other authors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tried to write novels of this genre, though they weren’t always referred to as young adult novels. Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer, Treasure Island, Lewis Caroll’s Alice Adventures in Wonderland, and other works that fit this description. Maureen Daly’s 1942 book Seventeenth Summer is recognised as the first Young Adult book due to its classification.
It is the follow-up to the continuation of such novels in Nigeria and Africa at large that the TY Buratai Literary Initiative (TYBLI), a non-profit organ.
