Not all books for children and young adults during the 1960s were controversial, of course, even though most carried implicit messages. In Leo Lionni's Swimmy (1963), for example, a small fish gets other small fish to group together to scare away the big fish, while Ezra Jack Keats's The Snowy Day (1962) broke new ground in making nothing of the fact that the protagonist was black, which after all was obvious from the illustrations. Another popular book, E. L. Konigsberg's From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1967), for intermediate readers, showed children as independent persons rather than as accessories of their parents, reflecting new attitudes toward children espoused by psychologists and educators.

Sources:

Lee Burress, Battle of the Books: Literary Censorship in the Public Schools, 1950-1985 (Metuchen, N. J.: Scarecrow, 1989);

Kenneth L. Donelson and Alleen Pace Nilsen, Literature for Todays Young Adults, third...