Adolescent Literature History The following are links to information about the history of Adolescent Literature and its importance.

History of Adolescent Literature
The following is a brief history of Adolescent Literature taken from Kenneth Donelson and Alleen Pace Nilsen's Literature For Todays Young Adults.
1900-1940
Young adult literature and books read by young adults underwent many changes from 1900 to 1940. Teachers and librarians took more interest in assessing types and titles of books read by young adults. The Stratemeyer Syndicate turned the creation of series stories from a small-scale operation into a major industry. If teachers and librarians heartily disapproved of Stratemeyers series and other series, young adults read them avidly, though by 1940 most series books were dead except for the lively Hardy Boys and the even healthier Nancy Drew. Publishers added Junior or Juvenile divisions. Fiction of the time moved slowly and sometimes clumsily from the innocence of Pollyanna and Graustark to serious and non romanticized books. Life seemed relatively sure, easy, simple, and safe in 1900; the First World War and the Depression dispelled that myth. When the Depression of the 1930s was ending, World War II and a very different world were just over the horizon, and a different kind of literature was soon to appear for young adults (Donelson 526).
http://web.cortland.edu/classes/eng506/adlit/history.html

Young Adult Literature
Brief History
There was a time when little or no distinction was made about the age for which literary works were intended. Few enough people could read anything, so most written works were directed at a small minority of educated people; oral literature (folklore), which provided a source of entertainment for the mass of people, was necessarily presented to mixed audiences
http://www2.uhv.edu/trowbridges/Adolescent%20Lit/history%20of%20adolescent%20lit.htm

Why is Adolescent Literature important?
The value of adolescent literature is that it helps adolescents make sense of the issues and concerns they are facing during a critical time of development. In particular, adolescent literature:
Provides a safe haven to accrue experience of the real world. Reading, a non-threatening and open-ended medium, empowers students to empathize, consider, and recognize a broad range of circumstances, actions, and the consequences of these actions. Yet they do not have to face directly the repercussions of risks.

Helps them discover their unique place in the world and find out who they are.
Gives them models that help them deal with problems they face daily. Troubled adolescents may often find books that speak to them and help them sort through their own problems.

Where does Adolescent Literature appear in the ELA Standards?
Below are three standards drawn from the 12 developed in 1966 by the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association. These three focus on the particular issues related to the teaching of adolescent literature.
Standard #1
"Students read a wide range of print and non-print texts to build an understanding of texts, of themselves, and of the cultures of the United States and the world; to acquire new information; to respond to the needs and demands of society and the workplace; and for personal fulfillment. Among these texts are fiction and nonfiction, classic and contemporary works."
Standard #2
"Students read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an understanding of the many dimensions (e.g., philosophical, ethical, aesthetic) of human experience."
Standard #3
"Students apply a wide range of strategies to comprehend, interpret, evaluate, and appreciate texts. They draw on their prior experiences, their interactions with other readers and writers, their knowledge of word meaning and of other texts, their word identification strategies, and their understanding of textual features (e.g., sound-letter correspondence, sentence structure, context, and graphics)."
http://www.literacymatters.org/adlit/overview/standards.htm