Harriet the Spy

Plot summary

Eleven-year-old Harriet M. Welsch is an aspiring writer who lives in New York City's Upper East Side. A precocious and enthusiastic girl, Harriet enjoys writing and hopes to become a writer. Encouraged by her nanny, Catherine "Ole Golly," Harriet carefully observes others and writes her thoughts down in a notebook as practice for her future career, to which she dedicates her life. She follows an afternoon "spy route", during which she observes her classmates, friends, and people who reside in her neighborhood. One subject that Harriet observes is a local store, where the younger son Fabio cannot make anything of his career in contrast to the hardworking and loyal Bruno, and where the stock boy Joe Curry or "Little Joe" is eating in the storeroom and feeding homeless kids instead of working.

Harriet's best friends are Simon "Sport" Rocque, a serious boy who wants to be a CPA or a ball player, and Janie Gibbs, who wants to be a scientist. Harriet's enemies in her class are Marion Hawthorne, the teacher's pet and self-appointed queen bee of her class, and Marion's best friend and second-in-command, Rachel Hennessy.

Harriet enjoys having structure in her life. For example, she regularly eats tomato sandwiches and adamantly refuses to consume other types of sandwiches. However, Harriet's life changes abruptly after Ole Golly's suitor, Mr. Waldenstein, proposes and she accepts; when Mrs. Welsch exclaims, "You can't leave, what will we do without you?!" Ole Golly replies that she had planned to leave soon because she believes Harriet is old enough to care for herself. Harriet is crushed by the loss of her nanny, to whom she was very close. Her mother and father, who have been largely absentee parents during Ole Golly's tenure as nanny due to their obligations to work and social life, are at a loss to understand Harriet's feelings and are of little comfort to her.

Later at school, during her period game of tag, Harriet loses her notebook. Her classmates find it and are appalled at her brutally honest documentation of her opinions of them. For example, in her notebook she compares Sport to a "little old woman" for his continual worrying about his father. The students form a "Spy Catcher Club" in which they think up ways to make Harriet's life miserable, such as stealing her lunch, passing nasty notes about her in class, and spilling ink on her, but that backfires when Harriet slaps Marion in revenge, leaving a blue hand print on her face.

Harriet regularly spies on them through a back fence and concocts vengeful ways to punish them. She realizes the consequences of the mean things she wrote, and though she is hurt and lonely, she still thinks up special punishments for each member of the club. After getting into trouble for carrying out some of her plans, Harriet tries to resume her friendship with Sport and Janie as if nothing had ever happened, but they both reject her. Harriet spends all her time in class writing in her notebook as a part of her plan to punish the Spy Catcher Club. As a result of never doing her schoolwork and of skipping school for days at a time and taking to her bed out of depression, her grades suffer. This leads Harriet's parents to confiscate her notebook, which only depresses Harriet further. Harriet's mother takes her daughter to see a psychiatrist, who advises Harriet's parents to contact Ole Golly and encourage Harriet's former nanny to write to her. In her letter, Ole Golly tells Harriet that if anyone ever reads her notebook, "you have to do two things, and you don't like either one of them. 1: You have to apologize. 2: You have to lie. Otherwise you are going to lose a friend."

Meanwhile, dissent is rippling through the Spy Catcher Club. Marion, the teacher's pet and self-appointed queen bee of her class, and her best friend and second-in-command, Rachel, are calling all the shots, and Sport and Janie are tired of being bossed around. When they quit the club, most of their classmates do the same.

Harriet's parents speak with her teacher and the headmistress, and Harriet is appointed editor of the class newspaper, replacing Marion. The newspaper—featuring stories about the people on Harriet's spy route and the students' parents—becomes an instant success. Harriet also uses the paper to make amends by printing a retraction, defeating Marion and is forgiven by Sport and Janie.

Reception

The book appeared on a 1964 list of "The Year's Best Juveniles" in The New York Times Book Review. One 1965 reviewer called the book "a brilliantly written, unsparing realistic story, a superb portrait of an extraordinary child". Another reviewer found that it "captures the feelings, thoughts and situations of a modern city child with remarkable clarity and dimension". Nevertheless, at least one reviewer in 1965 felt that the book dealt with "disagreeable people and situations". Although it was not chosen as one of the American Library Association (ALA) Notable Books for Children for 1964, years later it was included in a retrospective 1960–1964 ALA Notable Books List.

It won a Sequoyah Book Award in 1967. The paperback version was selected as one of the "Best in the Field" published during the previous 16 months in a 1968 New York Times article. In 1995, Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies claimed that 2.5 million copies of the book had been sold; however, the book did not appear on a 2001 Publishers Weekly list of "hardcovers that have sold 750,000 copies and paperbacks that have topped the one million copy mark."

Whitney Matheson wrote on the USA Today site in 2002 that Harriet "attracts dedicated, lifelong supporters". Anita Silvey in 2004 selected it as one of the 100 best books for children. In 2005, the ex-CIA officer Lindsay Moran cited the Harriet the Spy series of books as an inspiration for her career. It was included in a 2009 list of "Children’s Classics" by The Horn Book Magazine.

In 2012 Harriet the Spy was ranked number 17 among all-time children's novels in a survey published by School Library Journal. Earlier that year, Time Out New York Kids ranked it number 12 among "The 50 Best Books for Kids". (Late in 2015 the same source ranked it 34th among "kids books of all time for families", a collection including many children's picture books.

Despite its popularity, the book has been banned from some schools and libraries "because it was said to set a bad example for children". Along with Are You There God?, Blubber, and Where the Sidewalk Ends, the book was challenged at a 1983 school board meeting in Xenia, Ohio. Proponents of the Xenia ban stated that the book "teaches children to lie, spy, back-talk and curse", but the board voted to keep the books in the school libraries.

Although the book does not state the title character's sexuality, lesbians have identified with Harriet due to her being an "outsider" and due to her dressing like a boy. For example, Harriet wore high-top sneakers, a rarity for girls in the 1960s. Furthermore, Fitzhugh was known to be a lesbian, and the "Boy with the Purple Socks" character in the book may have been gay as the color purple is associated with the gay community. Harriet's friend Sport is also a departure from 1960s gender norms, as he cooks and cleans in addition to taking care of other household tasks due to his absentee mother and stay-at-home father who is consumed with trying to get his novel published.

Selected translations

Series

Fitzhugh wrote two sequels to the book: The Long Secret (1965) and Sport (1979, published posthumously). Both books received mixed reviews.

Sport is a spin-off that focuses on Simon "Sport" Rocque, expanding upon his brief family background covered in Harriet the Spy. As his parents are divorced, Sport lives with his father who is a struggling writer who has been focusing on a book (a big gamble) rather than the steady income of journal/newspaper articles, with Sport managing their finances. Their financial problems are exacerbated once Sport's grandfather Simon Vane (from his mother's side) becomes terminally ill and stops sending regular payments to Sport. Things change for the better once Sport's father meets the kind Kate who becomes a good stepmother. However Simon's will has named Sport as the main beneficiary to the $30 million family fortune, much to the chagrin of Sport's mother Charlotte Vane and her sister. Charlotte, an absentee mother who has been living well abroad in Europe most of the time, returns to New York City upon hearing of her father's illness, scheming to increase her share of Simon's inheritance by kidnapping Sport and imprisoning him in the Plaza Hotel for a week.

In 2002, a sequel Harriet Spies Again appeared; written by Helen Ericson, it also received mixed reviews. Another sequel, Harriet the Spy, Double Agent by Maya Gold, was published in 2005; one review of that book stated "there's not much to interest readers here."

Adaptations

Film rights to the novel were bought by Herbert Swope in 1964.

Harriet the Spy was made into a 1996 film of the same name. It starred Michelle Trachtenberg and was the first film to be produced by Nickelodeon's feature film division.

In September 2004, Mainframe Entertainment announced that Protocol Entertainment will produce a new Harriet the Spy live-action television series, consisting of at least 22 half-hour episodes, with 2 Friends Entertainment acting as Executive Producers and US sales agent and Mainframe retaining international distribution rights.

In March 2010, Disney Channel aired a version of the story, Harriet the Spy: Blog Wars. This starred Wizards of Waverly Place cast member Jennifer Stone as Harriet, Alexander Conti from Cheaper by the Dozen 2 as Harriet's friend Sport, and Degrassi: The Next Generation's Melinda Shankar as Janie. In this film Harriet competes against Marion Hawthorne to see who has a better blog.