Of course, there’s Sport, the writer’s son and Janie, the incipient chemist. She is an only child who doesn’t like many of the sixth graders in her class. This concise description of the book is from the 1964 HarperCollins edition: Harriet the Spy lives in a comfortable brownstone in the east eighties in Manhattan. Playing Town: Revisiting Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy Harriet, apparently, set a bad example for children, according to the gatekeepers, who neglect to take into account the love, forgiveness, and redemption that are at the heart of the story. Schools and parents often objected to the story’s inclusion of lying, spying, tantrums, and swearing. Interestingly, what has made Harriet the Spy appealing to young readers has also made it a fixture on lists of banned books for children.

But this review also observed, “Their elders will admire the book’s vigor and originality and the essential truth of children’s thought and action, though some will be disturbed, as we were, at the lack of warmth and kindliness of any of the characters.” The San Francisco Examiner, for example, praised its hilarious scenes and appeal to children’s sensibilities in its 1965 review. Some reviewers expressed a more mixed view. The complexity of pre-teen social life is forgotten by most people once they’ve lived through it, but as we follow Harriet and her friends through their days at school we recognize adult social life in miniature.” We also expect that it will be a great favorite of adults. “Harriet the Spy is such a book … we expect that many girls will identify fully with this delightful book. “Once every few years someone writes a real children’s classic,” observed The South Bend Tribune in 1965. A number of contemporary authors have reflected about how it inspired and influenced them. Harriet is relatable and though quite flawed, she’s also evidently lovable and memorable. When the book was first published, critical reaction was quite positive. When her sixth-grade classmates find and read the contents of her notebook, Harriet’s world turns upside down. Her observations of the people in her life are funny, poignant, and sometimes cruel. To prepare, she keeps a notebook in which she records details of the world around her in minute detail. Welsch, who wants to be a famous writer when she grows up. The children’s novel, set in Manhattan’s upper east side, stars 11-year-old Harriet M. Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, then an unknown author, seemed to burst on the scene as an instant classic when it was published in 1964.