The Boy Who Dared

Susan Campbell Bartoletti

Susan Campbell Bartoletti is an American writer for young readers whose historical fiction and narrative nonfiction examine how large political and social forces enter ordinary lives. A former eighth-grade English teacher, she writes with a clear sense of what younger readers can grasp without simplifying the moral difficulty of her subjects. Her nonfiction is grounded in archival research, primary documents, testimony, photographs, and personal accounts. In Hitler Youth, she sets the scale of Nazi recruitment beside the experiences of children who joined or resisted; They Called Themselves the K.K.K. similarly traces organized white supremacist violence through documentary evidence and individual voices. Her fiction often approaches history from the perspective of adolescents caught inside it. The Boy Who Dared turns Helmuth Hübener’s resistance to Nazi propaganda into a spare account of conscience and risk, while A Coal Miner’s Bride connects immigration with labor, language, family obligation, and early adulthood. Across genres, Bartoletti is especially interested in the pressures that institutions exert on young people and in the choices people make within systems of power.