Maniac Magee

Twenty-one years ago, in April 1990, Jerry Spinelli’s Maniac Magee was published. I first read an advanced reading copy of the book before it was published and then watched it sweep the prizes, including the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award and Newbery Medal. Still going strong, it has now become a classic, one of the books remembered with great fondness by those in their twenties.

The book’s unconventional approach distinguished it from so much else that had appeared at the time. Jerry Spinelli combined realistic fiction with tall tale, legend, and a dose of fantasy to craft a book unlike any other. In Everything I Need to Know I Learned from a Children’s Book, singer Tyler Hilton admits that as a child he wasn’t much of a reader until he found Maniac Magee and was inspired by the hero. “But then I met Maniac Magee,” he writes, “a mysterious young wanderlust of a kid, and knew that I had a new role model.” And letter from a contemporary student just won one of the top prizes in the Center for the Book’s Letters About Literacy competition.

Maniac Magee has both one of the best openings and closings in the children’s book canon. “They say Maniac Magee was born in a dump. They say his stomach was a cereal box and his heart a sofa spring. They say he kept an eight-inch cockroach on a leash.” An orphan running away from his guardians, Jeffrey Lionel Magee lives by his own rules and in a variety of locations. Legends grow around him as he does one outstanding feat after another. Fearless, he breaks all the rules in the town of Two Mills, Pennsylvania. This young white boy sees no race barriers in a town divided by them. So he lives with families in both the East and West End, as well as the buffalo pen in the local zoo.

But Maniac Magee is always haunted by his past—the death of his parents and the bad things that happen to those he loves. For a time he takes up with Grayson, a failed baseball player in the minors, who sets up a temporary home for the boy in the equipment room of the band shell. But then Grayson dies, and Maniac starts running again.

Slowly, in this town torn by racial hatred, Maniac Magee begins to make a difference. And by running and racing and being involved with the people in the town, he heals himself enough finally to accept an invitation to stay with a black family that he has come to love. The book ends, “He knew that finally, truly, at long last, someone was calling him home.”

With humor, heart, and wit, Maniac Magee brings to life an unforgettable hero and explores the issues of class and race in a way that a child can understand. Not only did the character of Maniac Magee make a difference in his small Pennsylvania town, but also this book has made a difference in the lives of children everywhere.

Here’s a passage from Maniac Magee:

Jeffrey fell to his knees. He and Amanda and the suitcase were like a rock in a stream; the school-goers just flowed to the left and right around them. He turned his head this way and that to read the titles. He lifted the books on top to see the ones beneath. There were fiction books and nonfiction books, who-did-it books and how-not-to books and just-regular-kid books. On the bottom was a single volume from an encyclopedia. It was the letter A.

“My library,” Amanda Beale said proudly.