Hooks Hits: Those Darn Kids!

Part of a series saluting artist-illustrator Mitchell Hooks.


Never Too Young, by Joseph Weeks (Popular Giant, 1956). This novel was first published in 1955 as All Our Yesterdays.

Mitchell Hooks’ artistic contributions range across every genre of fiction, with the seeming exception of romance stories (though some of the historical novels for which he painted covers certainly leaned in that direction). But if he had any specialty, it appears to have been tales about mid-20th-century “teen-agers in torment,” as the subhead on Never Too Young puts it.

Although Life magazine proclaimed in 1954 that young people growing up in the wake of World War II comprised “the luckiest generation,” the offspring themselves often felt more confused than fortunate. “The idea of teenagers as an independent age group between childhood and adulthood was birthed in the 1940s,” a retrospective on the History Channel Web site observes. “In the 1950s, this group came into its own aided by their increased spending power, the ubiquity of the car, and the rise of high school as a world unto itself. Many of the new American teens followed the 1955 lead of James Dean and became Rebels Without a Cause. This was the age of getting cozy at drive-ins and cruising around town. It was during this decade that rock and roll was born, and that the music culture, courtesy of renegades like Elvis Presley and the Beatles, began to fundamentally change the culture of American youth.”

Hollywood did its best to portray the dichotomous camps in that period’s cultural rebellion and struggle for generational identity. So for every motion picture on the order of Gidget there was a Hot Rod Girl, for every April Love there was a High School Confidential or a Wild One; and for every TV series such as Leave It to Beaver there was an East Side/West Side. Literature commented on the era, as well. That was, after all, the age of Holden Caulfield and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, of Evan Hunter’s Blackboard Jungle and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Thomas Dewey’s Mean Streets.

The 13 covers featured in this post, all of them painted by Hooks between the early 1950s and mid-’60s, portray the oft-troubled paths down which postwar youth sought to find their way. In looking through them, you’ll likely notice the concept similarity between two of the fronts—those of Never Too Young and The Very First Time (1960). And you may wonder whether Hal Ellson, author of Tomboy (1957), was actually Harlan Ellison, who penned Rockabilly (1961), among so many other works: he was not.

Click on any paperback cover here for an enlargement.