It would not be an overstatement to say that the novels of American young adult (YA) fiction writer John Green constitute one of the most remarkably popular literary phenomena of our young century. According to the author's website, Green's work has been translated into more than fifty-five languages, and over twenty-four million copies of his six books are currently in print ("About"). In addition to this literary success, two of his novels have been adapted into major motion pictures – The Fault in Our Stars (2014), which grossed over $307 million worldwide ("The Fault in Our Stars"), and Paper Towns (2015), which grossed a little over $85.5 million ("Paper Towns"). More recently, Green's first novel, Looking for Alaska, and the short story collection Let it Snow, co-authored with Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle, were both adapted into miniseries for online streaming platforms in 2019 ("About").
           
Green's staggering rise in popularity as an author has coincided with the development and massive following of several YouTube web series created by John and his brother Hank Green. Included in these variously educational, charitable, and purely entertaining video projects are the Vlogbrothers YouTube channel – whose videos have accumulated over 800 million views since 2007 – and CrashCourse, an educational channel used by K-12 schools and universities around the globe ("About"). Thus, one marvels not only at the incredible sales numbers attached to Green’s fiction franchises, but also how the Green brothers have found themselves at the vanguard of so many nascent mediums – YouTube, podcasts, and online learning, to name a few – over the first two decades of the twenty-first century. These two strands of Green's work, his blockbuster novels and his popular online presence, are both characterized by an ability to speak to teenagers, particularly bookish or "nerdy" teens, with earnestness and without condescension, bringing frank discussions of the human condition to an audience that has often been sheltered from subjects considered taboo in the high school classroom. It would appear salient, then, to explore the origins of Green's unique approach to engaging young readers and follow its evolution in the current media landscape.
           
It is beyond the scope of this essay to find reasons for the resounding success of each of the Green brothers' enterprises. Instead, I would like to investigate how the novel that first brought John Green to national attention, Looking for Alaska, employs techniques seen in another celebrated young adult novel – J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye – to elicit formative responses in young readers that contribute to the enduring popularity of these works. By examining Green's thoughts on Catcher as expressed in his YouTube videos and bringing in criticism from Mark Silverberg and Kenneth B. Kidd, I hope to show how Green attempts to update Salinger's first-person version of "the adolescent novel," especially as it relates to the presentation of female characters in Looking for Alaska (Kidd 156). Finally, I will posit Hulu's 2019 adaptation of Looking for Alaska as an attempt to further update this project by casting off the monovocal, adolescent-white-male perspectives of both Catcher and the novel version of Looking in favor of a more diverse, polyvocal point of view.

Identification and Formative Responses

While Salinger's novel has sold over sixty-five million copies since its publication in 1951, Catcher in the Rye and Looking for Alaska have more in common than impressive sales figures (Dalton). On YouTube, Green has explicated Catcher's major themes and motifs in two separate video series – one for Vlogbrothers and one for CrashCourse – and he likes to don the signature accessory of Catcher protagonist Holden Caulfield, a red hunting hat, on screen from time to time. Green's interest in Catcher may lie outside and apart from his own literary work, but the frequency with which he references the novel in his videos and the parallels between Holden Caulfield and Looking's protagonist, Miles Halter, suggest that Catcher significantly influenced Green's first book.

In the earliest Vlogbrothers video about Catcher, "OMFG CATCHER IN THE RYE!!!" posted 22 July 2008, Green – after warning viewers that he getting "totally English teacher-y about" the novel – says the following:

There's this, like, weird but pervasive feeling in the world of contemporary coming-of-age fiction that characters ought to be, like, the person you want to be or the person you want to be with, and I'm happy to acknowledge that Holden Caulfield is not the guy you want to be or the guy you want to be with. He's not Edward Cullen. But he is the guy you secretly know yourself to be, which I would argue is, in the end, much more interesting. ("OMFG")

Green’s imagining of a universal teenager who sees himself in Holden – and here the second-person subject is implicitly male: "the guy you secretly know yourself to be" – points to a pattern of reader identification investigated in depth by Mark Silverberg in his 2002 essay "'You Must Change Your Life': Formative Responses to The Catcher in the Rye." In the essay, Silverberg quotes several critics and English teachers who claim, as Green does implicitly in the above speech, that Holden's infamously caustic outlook is somehow indicative of "every" teenager (258). Silverberg allows that "perhaps because of the (sometimes extreme) anxiety of youth, some readers no doubt find comfort in the belief that their own experience is shared by a community of respondents," and goes on to suggest, "[t]his community is sometimes exaggerated into 'everyone' as a way of validating the young reader's own feelings" (Silverberg 258-9). This universalizing, it seems, serves as a mode of connection, both between book and reader and between reader and other readers. But Silverberg also points out that the universalization of Holden provides high school teachers a model of adolescence that is "safe to work with": "One can make teachable generalizations about abstracted and generalized experience," he says, "whereas individual, intensely felt emotion has a messy, unteachable quality about it" (259). So we see how the immense popularity of Catcher likely has something to do with the usefulness of Holden as a teachable archetype. In certain circles, the very name Holden Caulfield has become something of a catch-all term for anxious adolescence, a stand-in that high school English teachers can conveniently use to make reluctant young readers feel understood by a piece of literature.

Even if the popularity of Catcher is to some extent manufactured by English teachers and high school required reading lists, the continued cultural relevance of Holden's voice suggests that it does resonate with a surprising amount of people. In an attempt to understand why so many people identify with Holden, Silverberg cites various scholars who have theorized the process of literary identification. Following the logic of Freudian psychologist Erik Erikson, Silverberg defines "identification" as the process by which "we project...our own feelings...onto the other which we believe to be their source" (Silverberg 259). This powerful psychological response can cause us to feel like certain authors or characters know us intimately, which often results in exaggerations of these inherently parasocial relationships. Thus, a statement such as "John Green just gets me," belies the more accurate statement, "John Green's writing makes me feel understood."

Can identification, especially on the part of anxious young readers longing for community, explain the mass appeal of these young adult novels? What if this subconscious reader response – so characteristic of, to use Green's term, "coming-of-age fiction" – is intentionally affected by the authors who write books like Catcher and Looking? Kenneth B. Kidd, in his 2011 book Freud in Oz: At the Intersection of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature, points out that "the midcentury rise of 'identity' as an American keyword" is linked to "the coterminous emergence of two other categories, 'teenager' and 'rebel'" (139). Considering the power of the American teenager as a market force since the 1950s, one can see how an author might be tempted to draw in this demographic with teenage, rebellious, identifiable characters.

For adolescent readers, misunderstood as they may be by the adults in their lives, it makes sense that feeling understood by – in other words, identifying with – an author or literary character would be a significant formative experience. Silverberg terms this sort of reaction to a literary work as a "formative response" (264) and quotes a passage from Norman Holland's The Dynamics of Literary Response that outlines a psychological process readers go through when identifying with a narrative:

The plot or incidents cause me [the reader] to have certain feelings or wishes or tensions. I feel these tensions from the play [or any text] as tensions in myself, but, both intellectually and emotionally, I attribute these tensions to the characters as motives: I project or bestow my feelings on the characters...The more clearly a given character embodies my tensions, the more the work of art stimulates those tensions in me; the more I have those tensions in myself anyway – why, then, the more real a given character will seem. He will, ultimately, seem as real to me as I myself, for out of my own drives and needs for defense, I have created him. (qtd. in Silverberg 261)

One can easily imagine scores of readers who would claim that Holden Caulfield or the characters in Looking for Alaska seem real to them – just try a quick Tumblr search of either book's title to get a sense of this reality. If critical reception and social media mentions are anything to go by, these formative responses to literary works tend to be intensely emotional and memorable, which might explain the enduring popularity and reputation of Green's and Salinger's books for young adults.

The question then becomes, what "feelings or wishes or tensions," in Holland's terms, do these authors, by way of their plots, set up to embody the tensions of their readers? According to Silverberg, "there are two stories that readers have continually told about Holden – the story of the sensitive outsider and of the boy who refused to grow up" (261). I would argue that in Looking, a somewhat less morally ambivalent work than Catcher, narrator Miles Halter, and to some extent the novel's other principal characters, embody the same stories, though with an important modification – the sensitive outsiders, and the kids who must grow up.

The View from Inside the Sensitive Outsider

Let's consider again the speech quoted above from John Green's earliest YouTube video on The Catcher in the Rye: "I'm happy to acknowledge that Holden Caulfield is not the guy you want to be or the guy you want to be with...But he is the guy you secretly know yourself to be, which I would argue is, in the end, much more interesting" ("OMFG"). I have shown that Holden's identifiable, as opposed to aspirational, qualities may be a primary driver of that book's popularity. In Green's mind, at least, these qualities are what make Holden more interesting than the characters in many contemporary YA novels. It follows that Green would want to make the protagonist of his first novel not "the guy you want to be," but "the guy you secretly know yourself to be." Of course, readers will each have a different person in their minds whom they know themself to be, but the "sensitive outsider," to use Silverberg's term, modeled by Holden Caulfield, seems to typify this secretly known self for a remarkably large amount of young readers.

A Holden-esque sensitive outsider is exactly what we get in Miles Halter, the first-person narrator of Looking for Alaska. While in Catcher, Holden believes he has left school for good, at the beginning of Looking, Miles has left a public school in Florida to attend a private boarding school outside Birmingham, Alabama. But despite the differences in circumstance, the similarities between these two narrators abound. Like Holden, Miles is a disaffected sixteen-year-old boy and an avid cigarette smoker with an initially unsatisfactory social life, a sardonic interior monologue, a squeamish obsession with female characters and sex, and a penchant for morbid preoccupations – in Miles's case, a habit of memorizing the last words of famous historical figures. In much the same way Holden hates movies but goes to them anyway, Miles purports to hate sports before attending several of his new boarding school's basketball games (Looking 45). And at times, Miles's narrative voice strikingly resembles Holden’s, riddled with the same verbal tics he makes fun of in other people (Looking 4) and referring to a storied Buddhist monk as "this guy Banzan" (195).

In his chapter on young adult literature, "'A Case History of Us All': The Adolescent Novel Before and After Salinger," Kidd suggests that first-person narration of this sort marked a midcentury turning point in an evolution from the "novel of adolescence," which typically espoused a social reformist perspective on teenage issues, to what he calls the "adolescent novel," which speaks to teenagers on their psychological level – in other words, transitioning from aspirational to identifiable portrayals of adolescence:

The adolescent novel achieves not so much the disappearance of social problems as a streamlined emphasis on their emotional impact, often through first-person narration. Unlike the third-person narrator, more typical in the literature of adolescence, the narrating personality in the adolescent novel is more egocentric, less adult, and less cognizant of the dimensions of sociality. Novels of adolescence tend to be autobiographical first novels, but the adolescent novel goes even further in pursuit of the psyche. (Kidd 156)

Much has been made of the "egocentric," whiny quality in Holden Caulfield's narration, and this "less adult," essentially fallible point of view seems to be a key component of Looking for Alaska as well. Because Miles is the new kid at school, lending him a definitively outsider-ish perspective, the teenage reader who feels like they do not fit in – the type who might read YA novels in study hall rather than pass notes to friends – automatically has common ground with him. This makes the narrator, in Holland's terms, "seem more real" and potentially triggers a formative experience (Silverberg 261).  

While this first-person perspective makes Green's narrator more identifiable, it also forces readers to absorb his world through the eyes of a sexually immature sixteen-year-old boy, which causes some problems with the presentation of female characters in Looking, much as it does in Catcher. The character whose name graces the title of Green's novel is, despite the author's protestations, emphatically "the person you want to be with" – if we take "you" to be, like Miles and Holden, a heterosexual teenage boy. Alaska Young, when we first meet her, is described by Miles as "the hottest girl in human history" (Looking 14). An expert prankster with a fake ID, a poetry enthusiast with a professed love for sex and booze – Alaska appears to be nothing if not Miles' dream girl. Ironically, however, despite being the girl Miles wants to be with, Alaska is probably not the person one would want to be, no matter their demography. The first thing she does in the novel is tell Miles and his roommate Chip about how she was groped by a childhood friend over the summer, and though she presents it as "a very funny story," it is clear that because of her sex appeal, Alaska needs to constantly have her defenses up around men (Looking 15). This helps to explain why it takes 119 pages and multiple bottles of wine for her to reveal her most formative trauma: the loss of her mother when she was just six years old. The ramifications of this trauma can be seen in many of Alaska's alternately impulsive, evasive, and depressive episodes. But it is important to note that almost all of these hints are lost on Miles, Chip, and their other best friend, Takumi; and until Alaska's tragic death halfway through the novel, the boys inquire little into her mental health, usually content to pass off her erratic behavior as pretentious, crazy, and/or bitchy (Looking 75, 89, 96). When Alaska finally does tell the story of her mother's death, Chip asks her, "Why didn't you ever tell me?" and Alaska responds, rather damningly, "It never came up" (120).

The boys' dismissal of Alaska's troubling behavior and their unwillingness to inquire into her difficult past during her lifetime seem to be deliberately highlighted by Green in an attempt to present a cautionary tale, an example of how the hypersexualizing adolescent gaze can blind teens to the cries for help coming from the objects of their infatuations. When Alaska dies, then, the boys begin to recognize how they never bothered to see Alaska as her own person, and they start trying to be better people. But because that morality tale is told through the very lens it purports to indict, it becomes difficult for the reader – especially one who identifies heavily with Miles – to pick up on the lesson. Furthermore, this approach, in an attempt to show how the boys remain willfully ignorant of Alaska's existence outside of their gaze, reduces Alaska to a means by which the male protagonist gains a greater understanding of himself. Supporting evidence for this point exists throughout the novel, but especially in the last two pages wherein Miles "forgives" and thereby implicitly blames Alaska for her own death (Looking 219-21). Ultimately, Green's attempt to critique the adolescent male gaze is hindered by the way in which he inhabits that gaze so completely.

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl

Now let's turn to an interrogation of the relationship between John Green's fictions and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope – a term coined by critic Nathan Rabin in reference to the Cameron Crowe film Elizabethtown (2005). According to Rabin, "The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." Seen through the eyes of Miles Halter in the novel version of Looking, Alaska Young certainly appears to fit this type – and it seems worth noting that Looking came out the same year as Elizabethtown. Green, however, appears to be cognizant of this construction, and in videos and social media posts online he has openly discussed his attempts to topple it. While another Manic Pixie Dream Girl appears in his third novel, Paper Towns, in the character of Margo Roth Spiegelman, a predominant theme of that book – and Looking as well – is the danger of placing a love interest on a pedestal. Quentin, the narrator of Paper Towns, puts it this way: "What a treacherous thing it is to believe that a person is more than a person" (282). And as Anna Leszkiewicz points out in the New Statesman magazine, Green offered his thoughts on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope more explicitly in a since-deleted Tumblr post: "Paper Towns is devoted IN ITS ENTIRETY to destroying the lie of the manic pixie dream girl... I do not know how I could have been less ambiguous about this without calling the novel The Patriarchal Lie of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl Must Be Stabbed in the Heart and Killed" (qtd. in Leszkiewicz). It would be difficult to contradict Green on this point, especially considering that in Looking, Alaska Young, in a sense, is stabbed in the heart and killed.

Green's dream girls are quick to let their narrator-admirers know that they are both more independent and more troubled than those narrators imagine them to be. Alaska even seems to acknowledge the role she's playing when she says, "You never get me. That's the whole point" (Looking 54). Even so, it is debatable whether the novels do anything more than mildly subvert, and possibly perpetuate, this cliché. The attempt to expose the lie of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is admirable, but as Leskiewicz holds, in Green's work it is probably less than effectual:

I'm pleased that young people now have a wealth of literature that points out the hypocrisy of the cardboard-cutout visions of women that surround them, but I can't help but wonder: is a Manic Pixie Dream Girl not a Manic Pixie Dream Girl when her sole function is to teach a brooding, soulful young man that his understanding of women is flawed? Yes, Paper Towns works hard to demolish the fiction of the perfect, mysterious woman. But that act is unsatisfying if, ultimately, that woman still only exists to help a man come to a greater understanding of himself, and the world around him, before exiting the story forever. (Leskiewicz)

The problem, in my estimation, relates to the perspective through which these characters are presented – the same first-person voice that makes Green's narrators, and Salinger's, so identifiable. Because Alaska and Margo are enticingly inaccessible to the narrators who relate their stories, the dream girls in Looking for Alaska and in Paper Towns can only assert their interiority in the negative, revealing by degrees how much the narrators do not know about them. This is a problem, it seems, that Hulu's 2019 adaptation of Looking for Alaska tries to solve.

The View from Outside

A moment appears toward the beginning of episode two when Alaska, in response to a comment that Chip (a.k.a. The Colonel) makes about another classmate's breasts, says the following: "You only view the world through your limited male gaze. There's so much you're missing, Colonel" (Schwartz). This line could come off ham-handed, but what the series has shown us so far of Alaska's character – that she's not just a feminist but a "third-wave feminist" ("They have waves?" asks Miles), that she routinely critiques the "sexist adolescent fantasies" of her male friends – shows the viewer how blinkered the boy characters truly are and prepares us for such an observation (Schwartz). As a result, the line almost works as a mission statement for the series, or at least a declaration of its attempt to make the novel's narrative more inclusive. In this presentation, since we do not perceive all the events of the story purely by way of Miles's gaze, the audience gets to see more of what his narration in the novel was missing.
           
What was missing in the novel, it seems, was a better view into the lives of Miles's friends. I have discussed already how the first-person points of view in both Looking and Catcher serve to make their protagonists more identifiable to readers. In those novels, Miles's and Holden's idiosyncratic voices and melodramatic reactions convey the emotional impact of plot incidents in a way that makes them, as characters, feel more real and more interesting than if they were depicted through third-person narration. But as Petrana Radulovic points out in her review of the television series for Polygon, "[l]ocked in Miles' point of view, the book presents an idealized version of Alaska. To Miles, she is that tropey Manic Pixie Dream Girl" (Radulovic). "To Miles" is the key here; in the book, we have to see Alaska as she appears to Miles. This draws the reader in with the powerful emotionality of Miles's infatuation and that emotionality tends to overshadow any questions the reader might have about its healthiness. Despite Green's attempts to show Miles's infatuation for what it is, Alaska's idealized form is the impression that sticks. Radulovic puts it this way: "Ironically, the biggest fault of Looking for Alaska is the very thing it seeks to dismantle: Alaska herself, or rather, how we view her" (Radulovic).

Television, on the other hand, all but necessitates a third-person perspective; it is hard to imagine a hand-camera point of view like that of the movie Cloverfield being sustained over Looking for Alaska's eight-hour run time. The show takes this change in perspective and uses it as a license to explore not only Miles's story, but the stories of the characters who surround him as well. For example, we see more of Miles's working-class roommate The Colonel – who is Black in this adaptation – and his contentious relationship with his rich, white girlfriend. In a plotline not present in the novel, The Colonel writes other students' term papers for money in order to buy a suit, so he can escort Sara at her debutante ball, only to find out that in order to be an escort, his family would have to belong to the country club where the ball is held. "You don't get it," Sara says, to which The Colonel responds, "I've been getting it my whole life" (Schwartz). Class and racial dynamics such as these ones are certainly present in the novel version of Looking, but the Colonel's disappointment hits harder when we are able to see him react vulnerably without Miles in the room.

Alaska's character is also given more space in the series. In another deviation from the plot of the novel, in the first episode of the Hulu series, before she meets Miles, we see Alaska reunite with her friend Marya and drive with her to the liquor store. Later, after Alaska is caught by the dean hiding her bottles of Strawberry Hill wine, she "rats" on Marya and her boyfriend Paul – who are smoking weed, having sex, already drunk in Marya's room – in order to avoid expulsion. This betrayal becomes the inciting incident of a "prank war" between the rich kids, Alaska, and Miles's friend group that frames much of the plot (Schwartz). But in the book, Alaska's betrayal of Marya occurs before the events of the novel – off-screen, so to speak – and is recounted only in retrospect. While in the novel, the revelation of Alaska's decision to rat does cause trust issues between her and the boys, her previous friendship with Marya is never shown or discussed at length.

The editorial decision to include Marya and Alaska's friendship in the first episode of the series could be seen as merely a concession to the filmic medium, an easier way to visualize the important events of the story. However, the viewer's ability to see the female friendship Alaska lost as a result of her ratting adds weight to the character's decision and works to explain why she only seems to hang out with boys. Thus the series adds a dimensionality to Miles’s friends – Alaska in particular – that was not present in the book.

The downside is that when we are not locked in Miles's head, plot incidents that seem life-or-death to the protagonist in the novel can come off as trivial in the series, sometimes comically so. Miles's ability to remember Millard Fillmore's last words as part of a challenge from the rich kids, for example, is a shining moment for him in the novel, but in the series it feels vastly overblown. Indeed, the series' whole premise can feel overblown given this filmic objectivity, as Margaret Lyons implies when summarizing it in her review for The New York Times: "Miles Halter (Charlie Plummer) is restless in his hometown and heads off to boarding school seeking adventure, but the kind of adventure that anxious nerds seek – mostly adventurous reading and maybe a prank or two" (Lyons). The attempt to analyze an adaptation produced fifteen years after the release of its source material will surely be tainted by the imprint of our formative response to the original. Still, upon rereading Green's debut, when we follow the events of Looking for Alaska through the eyes of its anxious teenage protagonist, the adventure can feel truly adventurous. But viewed from the outside, it does seem fairly tame.

Conclusion

How do we reconcile the immediacy and emotional impact of a teenager's interior monologue with the problematic elements this perspective inevitably invites? Ditching that interiority for a slightly more objective point of view may allow an audience to work through the problems to a greater extent, but at what cost? In his YouTube series on The Catcher in the Rye for CrashCourse, Green introduces that novel by telling us that it is the best-selling non-religious book to never be adapted for the screen ("Language"). One wonders if perhaps Salinger predicted the harsh light in which a movie camera would cast a pretentious teenage boy like his beloved Holden.
           
But it may be that film is a more conducive medium for these kinds of stories in a decreasingly hegemonic age. In the case of Looking for Alaska, the showrunners worked to correct for the boyish flaws of the novel's narrator, and that correction undoubtedly expands the range of characters with whom its audience can identify. By decentralizing the perspective, the series is able to include viewpoints that knowingly critique Miles's white-boy gaze and the concurrent adolescent horniness of his friends.

What is less clear is whether the show succeeds in approximating the emotional impact of the novel from which it draws. That emotionality, I think, is largely responsible for the book's lasting popularity. Not every YA novel survives in the cultural imagination long enough to get a screen adaptation fifteen years after its publication. Reviews of the show generally land on the positive side of mixed, so perhaps Hulu's adaptation has succeeded well enough. But it seems unlikely that the show will match the staying power of its source material.

In an early video on Catcher, Green states, "the way [Holden] writes the story makes us care...That's the miracle of text, I would argue" ("Part 2"). Text, and our ability as readers to identify with it – however messy or problematic that process might be – is indeed a miracle of human consciousness. For certain teenagers, it can be a legitimately life-changing experience. Because the reading of texts, of novels, and especially of first-person young adult novels, is such a powerful, individualized experience, these questions of perspective are deeply important ones. Filmmakers can use images quite deftly to trigger emotions in viewers, meanwhile providing a more "objective" visual vantage point that perhaps is open to more inclusive interpretations. But text can give us a fuller sense of a character's inner consciousness, and in the loneliness of adolescence, that sort of connection can be a balm. While the consciousnesses depicted through these adolescent narrators may often be flawed, their voices remain invitingly familiar enough to reach teenage readers long after the protagonists would theoretically have grown up. In 2021, Salinger's Holden would likely be a nonagenarian, and Green's Miles would be entering his mid-thirties. Somehow, they continue to make America's teenagers care, which is the miracle of text.

Works Cited

"About John Green." John Green, https://www.johngreenbooks.com/bio

Dalton, Dan. "36 Things You Probably Didn't Know About 'The Catcher in the Rye.'" BuzzFeed, 16 July 2014, https://www.buzzfeed.com/danieldalton/people-are-always-ruining-things-for-you

Green, John. "Language, Voice, and Holden Caulfield - The Catcher in the Rye Part 1: CC English Literature #6." YouTube, uploaded by CrashCourse, 10 Jan. 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R66eQLLOins.

---. Looking for Alaska. SPEAK, 2005.

---. "OMFG CATCHER IN THE RYE!!!" YouTube, uploaded by vlogbrothers, 22 July 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSR8J6LUaT8.

---. Paper Towns. SPEAK, 2008.

---. "The Catcher in the Rye, Part 2." YouTube, uploaded by vlogbrothers, 26 Aug. 2008, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUnQ-wOPGUE

Kidd, Kenneth B. "A Case History of Us All." Freud in Oz: At the Intersections of Psychoanalysis and Children's Literature. U of Minnesota P, 2011, pp. 139-80.

Leszkiewicz, Anna. "Paper Towns and the Myth That Just Won't Die: The Manic Pixie Dream Girl." The New Statesman, 26 Aug. 2015, https:// www.newstatesman.com/culture/2015/08/paper-towns-and-myth-just-won-t-die-manic-pixie-dream-girl

Lyons, Margaret. "'Looking for Alaska' But Finding Talky Teens." Review of Looking for Alaska, by Josh Schwartz. The New York Times, 17 Oct. 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/arts/television/looking-for-alaska-review.html

"Paper Towns." Box Office Mojo, IMDbPro, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt3622592/

Rabin, Nathan. "The Bataan Death March of Whimsy Case File #1: Elizabethtown." The A.V. Club, 25 Jan. 2007, https://film.avclub.com/the-bataan-death-march-of-whimsy-case-file-1-elizabet-1798210595

Radulovic, Petrana. "Hulu's Looking for Alaska Overcomes Fifteen Years of Contentious John Green Fandom." Review of Looking for Alaska, by Josh Schwartz. Polygon, 28 Oct. 2019, https://www.polygon.com/2019/10/28/209 32248/hulu-looking-for-alaska-john-green-tumblr-fandom

Schwartz, Josh, creator. Looking for Alaska. Hulu, Temple Hill Productions, Fake Empire Productions, and Paramount Television, 2019.

Silverberg, Mark. "You Must Change Your Life: Formative Responses to The Catcher in the Rye." Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 243, Gale, 2008. Gale Literature Criticism, https://www.link-galecom. proxy.lib.utk.edu/apps/doc/UGTZGE555899909/LCO?u=knox61277&sid=LCO&
xid=17517718. Originally published in The Catcher in the Rye: New Essays, edited by J. P. Steed, Peter Lang, 2002, pp. 7-32.

"The Fault in Our Stars." Box Office Mojo, IMDbPro, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl324240897/