The woman who made puberty a little less terrifying for millions of girls is being honored with a lifetime achievement award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Judy Blume will be given the E.B. White Award, a $10,000 prize for young people’s literature, at the academy’s upcoming annual ceremony in May, USA Today reports.
Blume’s generation-defining works include titles such as “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” “Blubber,” and “Forever.” Her books have been celebrated — and censored — for their depictions of bullying, masturbation, menstruation, and sex.
“‘Deenie,’ ‘Forever’ …, every year, somewhere, they’re challenged,” Blume has said. “When I started, in the ’70s, it was a good time for children’s book writers. Children’s reading was much freer than in the ’80s, when censorship started; when we elected Ronald Reagan and the conservatives decided that they would decide not just what their children would read but what all children would read, it went crazy,” she recalled. “My feeling in the beginning was, ‘Wait, this is America: We don’t have censorship, we have, you know, freedom to read, freedom to write, freedom of the press, we don’t do this, we don’t ban books.’ But then they did.”
While she’s sold more than 82 million copies of her books, Blume still has many vocal critics, and continues to deal with harassment. “I went to a couple of places two years ago and I got seven hundred and something hate-mail warnings — ‘We know where you are going to be and we’ll be there waiting for you’, that sort of thing,” she revealed in 2014. “My publisher sent me with a bodyguard. He was wonderful, I loved knowing he was there. And nothing happened and probably nothing would have happened, but it was very scary.”
Other female writers set to receive awards at the academy’s event include Dana Spiotta (“Innocents and Others”), Kathleen Graber (“The Eternal City”), and Jennifer Haigh (“Heat and Light”)
