About the Author

Lois Lowry was born in Hawaii in 1937, the daughter of an Army dental surgeon, and spent her childhood moving — Brooklyn, Pennsylvania, postwar Japan. She married young, raised four children, and did not publish her first novel until she was forty. By the time she wrote The Giver in the early 1990s, she had built a steady career in realistic middle-grade fiction, mostly about ordinary American kids working through grief and family trouble (the Anastasia Krupnik series, A Summer to Die). Then, in 1989, she published Number the Stars, a novel about a Danish girl helping her Jewish best friend escape the Nazis, and won her first Newbery Medal. The Giver won her second, in 1994, and turned her into one of the most widely read — and most frequently banned — American children's authors of the last fifty years.

What makes Lowry a useful author to know for this book is that she had already spent a decade writing about what children understand and what adults try to hide from them. The Giver is less a departure from her earlier work than a distillation of it: Jonas's community is simply a society built entirely on the adult instinct to protect children from hard feelings, taken to its logical end.

Detailed Analysis

Lowry has identified three personal sources for the novel, and each one is traceable in the finished book. The first is a visit to her father in a nursing home in the late 1980s; his long-term memory had begun to fail so completely that when Lowry held up a photograph of her older sister Helen, he did not recognize her. Lowry had to remind him who Helen was, and then tell him that Helen had died, decades earlier, of cancer. The question that stayed with her — whether a life without painful memory is still a full life — became the novel's central argument. The second is her friendship with the painter Carl Nelson, whose photograph appears on the first American hardcover; Nelson had an unusually acute sense of color and later lost his vision, and the image of a man who could once see what others could not gave Lowry the figure of the Giver himself. The third is her long attentiveness to the adult dystopian tradition — Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, Zamyatin — which she read as a young woman and whose moves she adapts without apology. The "community" and its engineered conformity are obviously indebted to Brave New World; the ritualized vocabulary and the erasure of forbidden names ("Not-to-Be-Spoken") owe something to 1984; the suppression of memory as a political technology echoes Fahrenheit 451. What Lowry added was a child protagonist and a prose register clean enough that fifth-graders could follow it without missing the horror.

Her place in the literary record is unusual. Most Newbery winners are admired and then quietly shelved; The Giver became one of the best-selling middle-grade novels in American history and spawned three further books — Gathering Blue (2000), Messenger (2004), and Son (2012) — that gradually revealed a wider world around the original community. (The quartet has divided readers ever since: some feel the sequels resolved an ending that was better left open.) Her other major late-career novels, The Silent Boy (2003) and the memoir Looking Back (1998), show the same preoccupations in a realistic key — memory, loss, the things adults can't bring themselves to say to the children they love. The Giver is the strange, speculative version of a theme she has worked at her whole career.

Historical Background

The Giver came out on April 26, 1993, in the middle of a peculiar moment for American culture. The Cold War had just ended; the Soviet Union had dissolved a year and a half earlier; for the first time since 1945 there was no obvious geopolitical rival to organize a dystopia around. At the same time, the country was arguing publicly about subjects the novel quietly takes up — euthanasia (Jack Kevorkian had assisted his first patient in 1990 and was a front-page presence through the whole period), the beginnings of bioethics as a popular field, the meaning of historical memory after the fall of communism, and an anxious national conversation about what multiculturalism and "difference" were supposed to mean. Lowry's community, which maintains perfect peace by erasing color, weather, family bonds, and anyone who doesn't fit, is a direct argument into that moment: the novel asks what we give up when we decide that suffering is the one thing a society is permitted to abolish.

Lowry drew her material from life as much as from reading. The conversation with her father about forgotten grief gave her the memory premise; Carl Nelson's paintings gave her color as the book's primary image of lost experience; her own knowledge of the Holocaust, reinforced by the research for Number the Stars, clearly shaped the scenes of "release" — the euphemism, the orderly paperwork, the cheerful voice of the man administering the lethal injection. The Giver is a middle-grade novel that never mentions the twentieth century, but it is saturated in it.

Detailed Analysis

The novel's early reception was unusually mixed for a Newbery winner. Critics and the selection committee praised it almost without reservation — Horn Book called it "a powerful and provocative novel"; the School Library Journal review from 1993 treated it as a landmark — and it sold in the hundreds of thousands within its first year. But it was also challenged in American schools almost from the moment it appeared. The ALA has tracked it among the country's most frequently challenged books for three decades, with objections centering on the release of the newchild in chapter 19, the Stirrings pill and what it implies about adolescent sexuality, the euthanasia of the elderly, and an ending parents of middle-schoolers often read as depicting a child's death. Districts in Kansas, California, Kentucky, and elsewhere have periodically removed it from reading lists; it returns each time, usually after student protest. The pattern is itself revealing: a book about a community that suppresses hard material has become the standard example, in American schools, of a book adults try to suppress.

Its literary afterlife has been enormous and slightly uncomfortable. Before The Giver, dystopia for young readers essentially did not exist as a category — Huxley and Orwell were understood as adult property, and middle-grade science fiction leaned toward adventure (A Wrinkle in Time) rather than political critique. Lowry effectively invented the form, and everything from The Hunger Games (2008) to Divergent (2011) to Scott Westerfeld's Uglies (2005) to Ally Condie's Matched (2010) is descended from her template. The discomfort is that most of those downstream books amplify the spectacle Lowry carefully withheld — arenas, revolutions, uniformed villains — while losing the restraint that made The Giver work in the first place. The 2014 film adaptation, directed by Phillip Noyce with Jeff Bridges as the Giver and Meryl Streep as the Chief Elder, illustrated the problem in miniature: it added a rebellion plot, aged Jonas into a teenager, and delivered the kind of confirmatory ending Lowry had deliberately refused. The book has survived its imitators and its adapters, and the main reason is the thing that also gets it challenged — Lowry's willingness to leave the reader, like Jonas, riding downhill toward something she will not name.