BROOKLYN CRAWFORD

Suzanne Collins sat in her Connecticut home taking in coverage of the Iran War alongside reality television shows like Kitchen Nightmares and Keeping Up with the Kardashians. She felt a sense of loss between the staggering differences in the content she had access to on her television. These observations would then culminate in her desire to write about the Just-War theory, which eventually culminated in the YA fiction series we now know as The Hunger Games. 

The Hunger Games’ initial publication was not an instance of Scholastic taking a chance on Collins, but a business decision that would pay off even more than they expected. Collins’ experience writing on children’s television shows like Little Bear, Franklin, and the overall success of her earlier five-book fantasy series, Gregor the Overlander. Her presence in The Hunger Games did much better than anticipated. Within the first year of publishing the first book in the series, 50,000 copies were sold, and in the next year 200,000 copies according, to Scholastic’s Media Room. The book was translated into 52 languages and became a smash hit with audiences everywhere, as well as a clear sign to other publishing houses that dystopian fiction was something that young readers would be interested in. 

With the success of The Hunger Games and its upcoming sequels, a trend began to present itself in the book publishing sphere. Seeing Collins’ work’s popularity, many publishers acquired books and series like The Hunger Games to tap into this new cult audience. This is where Veronica Roth enters the scene. Her series, Divergent, like The Hunger Games, is dystopian young-adult fiction published three years after the Latter. Its success as a book also translated into Hollywood success, with the movie trilogy bringing in over 765 million dollars at the box office, as reported by Box Office Mojo. While Roth doesn’t specifically cite The Hunger Games as a source of inspiration, the dichotomy between the two books creates a conversation about the publishing industry and how it chooses to capitalize on trends to make as much profit as possible. In my essay, I will discuss how I believe the publication of The Hunger Games set the groundwork for the future success of Divergent.

In The Hunger Games, sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen lives in post-apocalypse North America, now known as PANEM. Katniss finds volunteers to compete in the Hunger Games in the place of her younger sister. The Hunger Games is a yearly tradition held, where 24 children from the 12 districts of PANEM fight to the death until there is one tribute standing. The purpose of these games is to remind the districts that they are beneath the capital after attempting to start an uprising against the Capital. Katniss ends up winning The Hunger Games, along with the male District 12 tribute Peeta Mellark by playing into a star-crossed lovers angle to the pleasure of the capital citizens watching the games at home who enjoy the spectacle crated from the games. The pleasure of the capital citizens, however, comes to the dismay of the President of Panem, Coriolanus Snow. Who becomes angry when the game makers choose to let both children live, effectively undermining the purpose of the games.  

The Hunger Games and Divergent were published by Scholastic Corporation and Harper Collins Press respectively. It is important to discuss these corporations for their similarities of being large publishing houses each with prominent histories revolving around the publication of books to many demographics of people, and the deciding factors that came into publishing these books from the perspective of these companies according to interviews. Scholastic Corporation is a publishing house founded in October 1920. Since then, it has grown to become one of the biggest publishers of children’s books, comics, and educational materials in the world. Scholastic Corporation started small in Pennsylvania; with the first books they published being a collection of student writing called Saplings. The company continued to grow and started publishing internationally in the 1940s, and later publishing and adopting its famous mascot Clifford, the Big Red Dog in the 1960s. If that’s not impressive enough, in the 1980s, the famous book series The Baby-sitters Club and The Magic School Bus were launched and became a success. The Baby-sitters Club has 176 million books in print and The Magic School Bus has more than 90 million books in print respectively. This would set the stage for the Harry Potter series, which has sold over 500 copies and been translated into over 80 languages.

Scholastic Corporation’s many initiatives like Scholastic Professional Publishing, and Scholastic News Kids Press Corps along with the acquisition of companies Grolier and Klutz extended the places and materials that Scholastic published further cementing itself as the figurehead of children’s book publishing and leading to the publication of The Hunger Games. The Hunger Games is not the first book series by Suzanne Collins to be published by Scholastic Corporation, but the second. The first book series was Gregor the Overlander, a five-book children’s epic fantasy novel series that was extremely well received by the public with more than one million copies in print combined by the time that The Hunger Games debuted. So, after the relative success of Gregor the Overlander, Scholastic Corporation when receiving the manuscript of The Hunger Games, was extremely confident in its success. David Levithan can even be quoted in 2008 stating that “Usually an editor sort of holds the manuscript to their chest and doesn’t share it until everything is perfect, but this one came in such great form.” This confidence in The Hunger Games manuscript that Scholastic had would prove correct with over 100 million copies of the book being sold, and the movie series making more than 3 billion dollars at the box office. 

Unlike Scholastic Corporation, Harper Collins was originally founded in 1817 under the name J. and J. Harper in New York City. The publishing house would go through many name changes throughout the years, but along with that comes its broad and long publishing history. Publishing books from authors like Mark Twain, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis. Harper Collins Press is not focused on the genre but is great at identifying authors and books that will sell well to audiences.

Divergent was Roth’s first published book, written as she was working on her Creative Writing degree in 2009. Veronica Roth met her literary agent Joanne Stampfel Volpe of New Leaf Literary Agency at a writing conference and pitched the book to her. Volpe, who describes the pitch itself as reading like a book report, also described the book as “unputdownable”, and chose to sign her as publishing houses were desperate to find their next Stephanie Meyer or J.K. Rowling. After deliberating between 12 different publishing houses, Harper Collins Publishing was the house that was chosen to publish Divergent. Their most prominent draw to the book is how her factions could be a savvy marketing hook.

Marketed as a series for fans of The Hunger Games, Divergent is also about a 16-year-old girl, Beatrice Prior, who lives in a post-apocalyptic version of Chicago where society has separated itself into five factions named Dauntless, Amity, Erudite, Abnegation, and Candor. To decide where they live in this society, teens take a test that indicates what faction would best suit them. It is then that they select their faction at the annual Choosing Ceremony or become factionless. Beatrice Prior finds herself in a predicament after her test comes back inconclusive, which marks her as Divergent. To hide this fact, Beatrice joins the Dauntless faction, and renaming herself Tris attempts to assimilate. Meanwhile, a rebellion brews in the background. The rebellion finds its way to the Dauntless headquarters, and the book ends with Tris deciding to join them. 

The similarities and successes of these two books’ publications set up the foundation for a shift in the dystopian genre. Many fans chose the books due to the similar protagonists and engaging plots such as Cinder, Red Queen, The Selection, and even The Maze Runner. Out of all of these books, however, Divergent is the one that many fans found themselves picking up when waiting for the next movie to release. 

Divergent is an excellent example of the formula for a contemporary young adult dystopian novel. The publishing industry picked it up as they saw the rising popularity of The Hunger Games, and the desire to find another strong book like that of Suzanne Collins and other prominent female writers of the time like J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer. With The Hunger Games setting the stage, Harper Collins Press’ choice to pick up the book was a good decision overall, both financially and for the rebirth of dystopian literature.

Dystopian novels as a genre are nothing new to the publication industry having been a genre for over 100 years. In his article “The Unexpected Popularity of Dystopian Literature,” Geir Finneson discusses how the genre itself has evolved, both in terms of the plot structure and emphasis on gender roles in dystopia brought on by the new female writers who have become frontrunners. Geir singles out Nineteen Eighty-Four, The Handmaid’s Tale, and The Hunger Games as markers of this change in the genre. Geir also argues that earlier dystopian novel books had a focus on single-minded survival and world events. Many young readers saw themselves and hope in characters like Katniss Everdeen who were living in a situation extremely dire to themselves, but having hope, nonetheless. The popularization of The Hunger Games, as Geir eventually talks about in his essay, leads to the young adult dystopian literature section in bookstores.

Another article that discusses the developing themes and aspects of this new age of young adult dystopian literature is Phillip Stoner’s “Dystopian Literature: Evolution of Dystopian Literature from We to the Hunger Games.” Stoner marks four things that distinguish contemporary dystopian novels from the older books in the genre: The Regulation of the Arts and Original Thought, Self Exploration, A Female Instigator, and a Bleak Ending. All these things are aspects that The Hunger Games and Divergent share. The Hunger Games, with its twelve districts that each focus on producing a particular good for the capital, and its bleak ending, with Katniss having to deal with the extreme trauma of surviving the Hunger Games compares to Divergent’s separation of people through personality traits, and the testing to make sure that a person in this society will fall in line easier, and the bleak ending where Tris and her friends find themselves joining a rebel cause of Divergents to save their lives while being prosecuted. The books are excellent markers of the new wave of contemporary dystopia.

Stoner also discusses how this trend began with the popularization of the dystopian genre when The Giver by Lois Lowry was published. The Giver’s popularization of dystopia as a means of personal discovery would bring a larger audience to the genre of young adult dystopia and later create the groundwork of these guidelines set in The Hunger Games, and the solidification of these markers in Divergent for this new era of Young Adult Dystopia. This trend can also be seen in the publishing industry, specifically with women becoming the frontrunners of publicity. Dan Sinykin writes, “Publicity, nevertheless, continued to grow in influence, and with it the power of women,” regarding marketing in the publishing industry beginning after the 1980s (102). The new era of young adult dystopia hails the presence of female writers and the presence of more women in the publishing industry. 

WORKS CITED

Borreli, Christopher. “Veronica Roth the next Young Adult Superstar?” Tribunedigital-Chicagotribune, 2014, web.archive.org/web/20150325042847/articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-10-21/entertainment/chi-veronica-roth-profile-20131021_1_veronica-roth-allegiant-anderson/4.

Finnsson, Geir. The Unexpected Popularity of Dystopian Literature. From Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games Trilogy. Diss. 2016.

Sellers Magazine, John A. ““The Hunger Games”: A Dark Horse Breaks Out.” PublishersWeekly.com, 9 June 2008, www.publishersweekly.com/pw/print/20080609/9915-a-dark-horse-breaks-out.html.

Sinykin, Dan. Big Fiction. Columbia University Press, 24 Oct. 2023.

Stoner, Philip. “Merge Dystopian Literature: Evolution of Dystopian Literature from We to Dystopian Literature” Merge, vol. 1, no. 1, 2017, pp. 1–30, athenacommons.muw.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1003&context=merge.

“The Hunger Games.” Scholastic Media Room. Mediaroom.scholastic.com, mediaroom.scholastic.com/hungergames.