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• Fox Running : a novel
  The fourth novel for teenagers by R.R. Knudson (1932-2008), again with a sporting theme (‘You Are the Rain’, about a doomed canoe trip, was another of the books seized in ‘Operation Tiger’). Fox Running is a Mescalero Apache girl in her late teens, coached by young former Olympian Kathy ‘Sudden’ Hart. To research the novel, Knudson spent time at the Mescalero Apache Reservation in New Mexico and with an athletics track team at the University of Arizona. ‘Fox Running’ was first published by Harper & Row in 1975 before being reprinted by Avon in 1977 and as an Avon Flare paperback in 1981. The inside illustrations are by Ilse Koehn and are reproduced from the Harper & Row edition.
• Happy endings are all alike
  Uncompromisingly frank from its opening line, Sandra Scoppettone’s (1936-) depiction of the love affair between teenage girls Jaret and Peggy was a much-needed riposte to 1950s lesbian pulp, such as the novels of Ann Bannon and Vin Packer. As one reviewer put it, “The story 1) is not preachy, 2) does not kill off either girl in the end, 3) is not syrupy”. The ground-breaking ‘Happy Endings Are All Alike’, chosen as an American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults, was first published by Harper & Row in 1978, preceding Nancy Garden’s ‘Annie on My Mind’ by four years. Scoppettone is known also for her crime-writing, as a playwright and for her collaboration with Louise Fitzhugh (author of ‘Harriet the Spy’) on the 1961 picture book ‘Suzuki Beane’, a counterculture parody of the ‘Eloise’ books set in Greenwich Village.