Newbery Wayback Machine: Tales from Silver Lands, by Charles Finger (1925)

 

The Newbery Terms and Criteria loudly proclaim, "there are no limitations as to the character of the book considered except that it be original work." And indeed, over the past ninety-odd years, we've had winners representing novels, poetry, nonfiction, picture books, graphic novels, biographies, and verse novels; nearly every form has taken home the gold medal at one point or another. This includes folktale-style short stories, which have won twice -- once for Arthur Bowie Chrisman's fakelore stylings in Shen of the Sea (1926), and the year before that, when Charles Finger's Tales from Silver Lands was named the winner.

The titular "Silver Lands" are Central and South America. Unlike Chrisman's "China" tales, Finger's have at least some authenticity to them. He lived and traveled extensively in those areas during his twenties, and this book comes across as having its genesis in those times. Though Finger doesn't provide the kind of source notes we'd hope for in a book of folktales today, he does at least provide the names of his informants and the place where he learned the stories for some of the tales. (Others are given no introduction at all, and the place and culture to which they belong remains opaque.) Finger does freely admit to having heavily edited some of the stories he was told in order to make them more readable; more than once, he interrupts himself in order to complain about the discursive, meandering manner in which his informants told the tales.

Questions about authenticity aside, the stories in Tales from Silver Lands certainly have the feel of folktale collections like those of the Brothers Grimm -- eerie characters, symbolism that would make Jung proud, and a general feeling that they proceed from that state between waking and dreaming. Highlights include the Sorcerer's Apprentice-style "The Tale of the Lazy People," the trio of tales involving a pair of brothers ridding the land of three destructive giants, and the closing story, "The Cat and the Dream Man," which features the most unsettling of the villains in the book, the Fox-Faced Man, as well as an ending reminiscent of Grimm 187, "The Hare and the Hedgehog."

Two Honor books were named in 1925, Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, by Annie Carroll Moore, and The Dream Coach, by Anne & Dillwyn Parrish. Left off the list was the book that would become the most enduring American classic of the year, Gertrude Chandler Warner's The Boxcar Children. There was probably no chance that The Boxcar Children could have won, given that "children having adventures without an adult" was actually sort of controversial at the time, and the Newbery was in its Tales From Far-Off Lands period -- the only winner from 1923 to 1933 that didn't spend at least part of its plot in some exotic locale was Smoky, the Cowhorse. However, Tales from Silver Lands is certainly better than some of the other early winners, even if it hasn't become part of the kidlit canon.