Editorial: Reflecting on “The Teen Whisperer”: Twenty Years of John Green

In lieu of an abstract: As an undergraduate student at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 2015, I proposed my first research project. An avid reader of young adult (YA) literature with a blossoming scholarly interest in the field, I was interested in writing a dissertation exploring the connections between canonical American literature and contemporary American YA novels. In particular, I was fascinated by the ways in which Robyn Schneider’s The Beginning of Everything (2013) and John Green’s Paper Towns (2008) played with intertextual references to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), respectively, as they mapped these classic texts onto stories of two contemporary teenagers’ searches for and constructions of selfhood. This project, it turned out, planted seeds not only for the early stages of my academic career, but for this special section.