Making American Boys

"Kidd offers fascinating evidence that 'feral tales' . . . seeped into the mind of childhood experts . . . [and] indelibly marked the way we think about boyhood." -Village Voice

"Kenneth Kidd's Making American Boys is a remarkable pioneer study of the sociocultural conditions that influenced the particular development of American boyhood from the late nineteenth century to the present. . . . This book is requisite reading for understanding how boys become 'real' American men." -Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

Will boys be boys? What are little boys made of? Kenneth B. Kidd responds to these familiar questions with a thorough review of boy culture in America since the late nineteenth century. From the "boy work" promoted by character-building organizations such as Scouting and 4-H to current therapeutic and pop psychological obsessions with children's self-esteem, Kidd presents the great variety of cultural influences on the changing notion of boyhood. Analyzing icons of boyhood and maleness from Huck Finn and The Jungle Book's Mowgli to Father Flanagan's Boys Town and even Michael Jackson, Kidd surveys films, psychoanalytic case studies, parenting manuals, historical accounts of the discoveries of "wolf-boys," and self-help books to provide a rigorous history of what it has meant to be an all-American boy.

Kenneth B. Kidd is associate professor of English at the University of Florida and associate director of the Center for Children's Literature and Culture.

ContentsAcknowledgementsBoyhood for Beginners: An Introduction1. Farming for Boys2. Bad Boys and Men of Culture3. Wolf-Boys, Street Rats, and the Vanishing Sioux4. Father Flanagan's Boys Town5. From Freud's Wolf Man to Teen Wolf6. Reinventing the Boy ProblemNotesWorks CitedIndex