Judy Blume

Judy Blume: The Writer Who Told Kids the Truth

In 1970, an eleven-year-old girl named Margaret Simon talked to God about getting her period, and American children's literature was never quite the same. Judy Blume did not invent the coming-of-age novel, but she stripped it of euphemism, and for that she has spent five decades as both one of the best-selling authors alive and one of the most banned.

Elizabeth, New Jersey

Judith Sussman was born February 12, 1938, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, to Rudolph Sussman, a dentist, and Esther Sussman, a homemaker, and grew up in a Jewish household marked by concealed trauma: in 1951 and 1952, three separate airplane crashes hit her hometown, killing 121 people, and her father, called on to help identify remains, never spoke of it. Blume herself buried the memory for six decades before finally writing it into her 2015 novel *In the Unlikely Event*. She attended the all-girls Battin High School, started at Boston University, transferred to New York University after a bout of mononucleosis, and graduated in 1961 with a degree in early education — training she would never use in a classroom, but would use on the page.

From Felt Board to Bestseller List

Married at nineteen to lawyer John Blume and raising two small children in New Jersey suburbia, Blume first tried selling felt-craft kits to Bloomingdale's before enrolling in a writing course at NYU. Two years of rejection slips followed her 1969 debut, *The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo*, before *Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.* arrived in 1970 and made her name. Told in the first person by a girl anxious about her body, her faith and her place among her friends, it treated menstruation, bras and religious doubt as ordinary childhood preoccupations rather than shameful secrets, and readers responded with the kind of mail that told Blume she had touched something real.

A Body of Work Built on Candor

Over the next two decades she produced a shelf of books that between them covered nearly every subject American children's publishing had previously avoided: masturbation and eating disorders in *Deenie* (1973), bullying in *Blubber* (1974), divorce in *It's Not the End of the World* (1972), and, most controversially, teenage sex and birth control in *Forever...* (1975), written for her teenage daughter after she asked for a story where the girl in love did not have to die or get pregnant as punishment. Alongside these she built the comic *Fudge* series, beginning with *Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing* (1972), and later moved into adult fiction with *Wifey* (1978), *Smart Women* (1983) and *Summer Sisters* (1998), which sold more than three million copies. In total she has published more than two dozen novels that have sold upward of 82 million copies in 32 languages.

America's Most Banned Author

Candor came at a cost. Beginning around 1980, Blume's books became fixtures of American censorship fights: five of her titles landed on the American Library Association's list of the hundred most challenged books of the 1990s, with *Forever* ranked seventh for its depiction of teenage sex and contraception, and *Margaret* was pulled from school library shelves over its treatment of menstruation and religious uncertainty. The National Book Foundation, awarding her its 2004 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, noted she had been called the second most censored author in America over the preceding fifteen years — the first time the Foundation had given that lifetime honor to a writer whose primary readers were children. In her acceptance speech, delivered in November 2004, Blume said simply, "Writing saved my life and it changed it forever," and thanked the free-speech advocates — Joan Bertin, Chris Finan, Judith Krug and Pat Scales — she called her "Fab Four." She joined the board of the National Coalition Against Censorship and has spent decades corresponding with young readers and defending libraries against removal campaigns.

Later Life and Adaptations

Blume married twice more after her first divorce in 1975 — briefly to physicist Thomas Kitchens, then in 1987 to law professor George Cooper — and eventually settled in Key West, Florida, where she co-owns an independent bookstore. She survived a breast cancer diagnosis in 2012. Her fiction reached the screen only slowly: a television film of *Forever* aired in 1978, but it was not until 2012's *Tiger Eyes*, co-written with her son and film director Lawrence Blume, that one of her novels became a theatrical feature, followed in 2023 by a well-received adaptation of *Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.* A Peabody Award-winning documentary, *Judy Blume Forever*, premiered at Sundance the same year, and Yale's Beinecke Library acquired her archive in 2017.

Why Judy Is Called a Genius

Blume's claim to genius is not stylistic virtuosity — critics have rarely praised her prose for its complexity — but a rarer and harder-to-fake instinct: an unerring memory for exactly what a child privately wonders and is too embarrassed to ask, rendered without the adult impulse to moralize. The National Book Foundation called her "one of the most influential and important writers in America," and Time named her among its 100 most influential people in the world in 2023, citing the same quality generations of young readers described in fan letters — the sensation of a book that seemed to know them. Her method was less inventive plotting than radical honesty about ordinary experience: puberty, divorce, grief and desire treated as facts of childhood rather than crises requiring a lesson. The counter-case, made consistently by her critics, is that this candor sometimes came at the expense of literary ambition — that her books are, technically, simple, and that their power lies almost entirely in subject matter and timing rather than craft. Even admirers concede she is a phenomenon of influence more than a stylist, which is itself a different, narrower kind of genius than the term usually implies.

Legacy

Six decades after Margaret first talked to God, Blume's books remain in print, still read, still occasionally banned, and still credited by novelists and readers alike with having taught an entire generation of American children that their bodies and fears were not shameful secrets but ordinary material for a story.

Achievements

• Regina Medal — 2015
• Notable work: Tiger Eyes
• Notable work: Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.
• Notable work: The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo
• Notable work: Iggie's House
• Genres: romance