Wikipedia Deep Dive

Judy Blume

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In 1970, a New York housewife published a book about an eleven-year-old girl who talks to God about bras, boys, and getting her first period. The book became one of the most beloved—and most banned—novels in American history. The author was Judy Blume, and she would go on to sell more than 82 million copies of her books worldwide, fundamentally changing what children's literature could be.

Growing Up in Elizabeth

Judith Sussman was born on February 12, 1938, in Elizabeth, New Jersey, into a Jewish family that she later described as culturally rather than religiously observant. Her father, Rudolph, was a dentist. Her mother, Esther, was a homemaker. She had an older brother, David, five years her senior.

Childhood wasn't idyllic.

When Blume was in third grade, David developed a severe kidney infection. The treatment regimen of that era required a warmer climate, so Esther packed up both children and moved them to Miami Beach for two years while Rudolph stayed behind in New Jersey to keep his dental practice running. The family was split in half, a formative experience of separation and uncertainty.

Then came the plane crashes.

Between 1951 and 1952, three separate commercial aircraft crashed in Elizabeth, New Jersey—an almost unthinkable concentration of tragedy in a single small city. A total of 121 people died. Blume's father, as a local dentist, was called upon to help identify the remains of victims—dental records being one of the few reliable methods of identification when bodies were damaged beyond recognition.

Blume says she buried these memories deep. She wouldn't consciously process them until more than sixty years later, when she wrote her 2015 novel In the Unlikely Event, building a fictional narrative around those real disasters.

Throughout these difficult years, young Judy found refuge in creativity. She took dance lessons. She played piano. Most importantly, she read voraciously—a love her parents actively encouraged. She spent hours creating elaborate stories in her head, though she never imagined she might one day write them down for others to read.

The Path to Writing

After graduating from the all-girls Battin High School in 1956, Blume enrolled at Boston University. The transition didn't go smoothly. Just weeks into her first semester, she was diagnosed with mononucleosis and had to take a leave of absence. She eventually transferred to New York University.

In 1959, two significant events occurred. Her father died. And she met a law student named John M. Blume.

The couple married in August of that year. Judy graduated from NYU in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in education. That same year, she gave birth to her daughter Randy. Two years later, her son Lawrence arrived.

And then, like millions of educated women of her generation, Judy Blume became a full-time homemaker.

She was bored out of her mind.

When her children started nursery school, Blume enrolled in a writing course at NYU—not with any particular career ambitions, but simply to have something to do that engaged her intellect. She began writing children's stories.

The rejection letters piled up. For two years, publishers said no. Then, in 1969, a small book called The One in the Middle Is the Green Kangaroo was finally published. Blume was 31 years old.

Breaking Every Rule

Her third book changed everything.

Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret appeared in 1970 and immediately became a phenomenon. The novel follows Margaret Simon, a sixth-grader navigating the ordinary crises of early adolescence: she worries about when she'll get her period, whether she's developing fast enough compared to her friends, which religion she should belong to (her mother is Christian, her father Jewish), and whether boys will ever like her.

It sounds unremarkable now. In 1970, it was revolutionary.

Children's literature at that time generally avoided anything related to bodies, sexuality, or the messy emotional realities of growing up. Books for young people were supposed to be wholesome, uplifting, and fundamentally dishonest about what it actually felt like to be a kid. Blume threw all of that out the window.

She wrote about what she remembered wondering about as a child—the questions nobody would answer, the experiences nobody would acknowledge. Over the following decade, she tackled masturbation in Deenie (1973), bullying in Blubber (1974), and divorce in It's Not the End of the World (1972).

Then came Forever.

The Most Banned Book

Published in 1975, Forever was written because Blume's teenage daughter made a simple request. She wanted to read a book where teenagers had sex and didn't die afterward.

This was, remarkably, a radical concept in young adult fiction. The genre's unwritten rule was that any character who engaged in premarital sex had to be punished—pregnancy, disease, death, social ruin. Sex was always a cautionary tale, never simply part of life.

Forever tells the story of Katherine and Michael, two high school seniors who fall in love and eventually sleep together. They use birth control. They're responsible. They don't face divine punishment. Their relationship ends, eventually, but because they grow apart—the way many first loves do—not because of cosmic retribution for their choices.

The book has been banned, challenged, and removed from libraries consistently for nearly fifty years. It appeared at number seven on the American Library Association's list of the 100 most banned books of the 1990s. Five of Blume's novels made that list.

The Censorship Wars

When Blume first started publishing in the early 1970s, she encountered little resistance. The organized movement to ban books from schools and libraries hadn't yet coalesced.

That changed dramatically around 1980.

Conservative and religious groups began systematically targeting books they considered inappropriate for young readers. Blume's novels, with their frank discussions of bodies, puberty, and sexuality, became prime targets. School principals who had initially been happy to stock Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret suddenly refused to shelve it because it mentioned menstruation.

The criticism followed predictable lines. Critics accused Blume of placing too much emphasis on physical and sexual development while ignoring moral and emotional maturity. They argued her books sent dangerous messages—that Blubber, for instance, showed children behaving badly without facing consequences.

Blume didn't retreat. She went on offense.

She began reaching out to other writers, to teachers and librarians, building coalitions against censorship. She joined the National Coalition Against Censorship and remained on its board for decades. She spoke publicly and frequently about the importance of letting young people read about real experiences rather than sanitized fables.

Her argument was simple: children already know about these things. They're living through puberty, navigating family conflicts, dealing with bullies. Pretending these experiences don't exist doesn't protect children—it just leaves them feeling alone and ashamed.

Beyond Young Readers

In 1978, Blume pivoted to adult fiction with Wifey, a novel about a bored New Jersey housewife's sexual awakening. The book hit the top of the New York Times bestseller list and sold over four million copies. If the premise sounds autobiographical—bored housewife discovers her voice through writing—Blume has always been coy about how much of herself appears in her characters.

She published two more adult novels: Smart Women in 1983 and Summer Sisters in 1998. Both were commercial successes, though Summer Sisters drew criticism for its inclusion of homosexual themes—demonstrating that Blume's talent for controversy extended beyond the young adult genre.

Her most personal adult work came last. In the Unlikely Event (2015) finally confronted those airplane crashes from her childhood in Elizabeth. After more than sixty years, she was ready to write about the trauma she'd witnessed as a girl—and that her father had been forced to process in the most visceral way possible.

Personal Life and Resilience

Blume's first marriage to John M. Blume ended in divorce in 1975, the same year Forever was published. Shortly after their separation, she met Thomas Kitchens, a physicist. They married in 1976 and moved to Los Alamos, New Mexico, for his work. That marriage lasted only two years.

Her third marriage proved lasting. In 1987, she married George Cooper, a former law professor who had become a nonfiction writer. They remained together, eventually settling in Key West, Florida, where in 2018 they opened a nonprofit bookstore called Books & Books.

In 2012, Blume faced another challenge. A routine ultrasound before a trip to Italy revealed breast cancer. Six weeks after diagnosis, she underwent a mastectomy and reconstruction. The surgery was successful—she was cancer-free afterward—but it was a stark reminder of mortality for a woman who had spent her career writing honestly about life's difficulties.

Her children followed creative paths. Randy became a therapist specializing in helping writers complete their work—an appropriately meta career for the daughter of a woman who taught millions of children to understand their own experiences through books. Lawrence became a film director and collaborated with his mother on the screenplay for the 2012 film adaptation of Tiger Eyes.

The Legacy

More than 82 million copies. Thirty-two languages. Over ninety literary awards.

The numbers only tell part of the story.

In 1996, Blume won the American Library Association's Margaret A. Edwards Award for her contributions to young adult literature—the same organization that tracks how frequently her books are banned. In 2000, the Library of Congress named her a Living Legend. In 2004, she received the National Book Foundation's medal for distinguished contribution to American letters.

In 2023, Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

She was 85 years old.

That same year, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret finally received a theatrical film adaptation—more than fifty years after the book's publication. The timing felt significant. In an era of renewed battles over what books children should be allowed to read, Margaret's story of a girl trying to understand her own body and beliefs remained as urgent as ever.

What Blume Understood

The letters started arriving after Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret was published. Young girls wrote to tell Blume how much they loved the book, how seen they felt, how relieved they were to discover that their own confusing feelings were normal.

Those letters never stopped.

Generation after generation of readers discovered Blume's books and felt, often for the first time, that someone understood what they were going through. Female novelists have credited her with teaching them about their bodies. Readers recall learning about menstruation from Margaret, masturbation from Deenie, first love from Forever.

Blume understood something fundamental: children don't need protection from information about their own lives. They need acknowledgment that their experiences are real, that their questions are valid, that they're not alone in wondering about all the things adults pretend don't exist.

The censors never stopped trying to ban her books. Blume never stopped fighting back. At 87, she remains on the board of the National Coalition Against Censorship, still defending the right of young people to read honestly about the world they're growing up in.

A documentary about her life, Judy Blume Forever, won a Peabody Award. The title is apt. As long as children grow up confused about their bodies and feelings, as long as adults try to pretend those confusions don't exist, Judy Blume's books will find readers who need them.

She started writing to entertain herself while her kids were at nursery school. She ended up changing what it meant to write for young people—proving that honesty, even about uncomfortable subjects, is a form of respect.