Are coming of age novels really written for kids?

For the most part, we have discussed censorship as it affects young people in the classrooms of America. And I would guess that many of us have been taught one or more of these texts, especially To Kill a Mockingbird, in grade school or high school. Additionally, almost all of these texts could fall under the category of bildungsroman, or the coming of age story. And while I certainly would not like to argue that any of these texts are inappropriate for young people, I do not believe that they were written explicitly for a young audience.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, we hear the story of Scout as she grows up and learns about race, poverty and class in Alabama in the 1930s. However, it is presented by Harper Lee as a memoir of sorts; Scout is looking back on the events of her childhood as an adult. Of course, this is a common voice to deliver a bildungsroman, one which allows the narrator to give a less biased impression of his or her own past. It also allows the narrator to include information that he or she did not understand at the time, but that the audience will be able to tease out of the text. But these various levels of understanding inherent in the text seem to target an adult audience rather than a young audience.

Additionally, it is not children who create the canon or decide what books they will be reading in class, but rather English professors and teachers. As we learned, Catcher in the Rye became popular first among the literary elite rather than teenagers and proceeded to trickle down into high school classrooms. I believe that the common line of thought is that books written from the point of view of a young person will connect far better with young people, allowing them to learn and grow with the characters. But if the books are written by adults for an adult audience, that does not necessarily have to hold true. For example, Catcher in the Rye is taught more frequently in the high school than Franny and Zooey, possibly just because Catcher stars a 16 year old boy rather than two people in their twenties. While I think that Mockingbird and Catcher do have their place in the classroom, I think that often the coming of age novel is taught to younger readers simply because of the age of the protagonist.