Harriet the Spy

Harriet M. Welsch carries a notebook everywhere and writes down everything she observes — her neighbors, her classmates, her nanny Ole Golly, the people on her spy route. She is honest to a fault, ambitious, unsentimental, and completely certain that writing is the most important thing she will ever do. When her notebook is found and her classmates read what she actually thinks of them, everything falls apart. Fitzhugh published this in 1964 and it was immediately controversial — Harriet is not nice, she is not sorry, and the book refuses to make her be. She is a writer, and writers see clearly and write what they see, and the world is not always ready for that. The most important book on the DoCR shelf for young writers — not because it teaches writing techniques but because it shows that the compulsion to observe and record is a legitimate way of being in the world, even when it costs you. Harriet's notebook is her power. Losing it and getting it back is the whole story.