45 pages • 1 hour read
Chris CrutcherDeadline
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Chris Crutcher
Chris Crutcher is a renowned author of young adult fiction. Crutcher’s 1983 novel Running Loose established him as a resonant voice in the literary community. Crutcher has since published over a dozen young adult novels, including Whale Talk, The Sledding Hill, and Staying Fat for Sarah Byrnes, featuring the stories of teenagers dealing with serious issues like racism, abuse, and mental health conditions. Crutcher’s background as a therapist has particularly contributed to his distinct authorial lens. Throughout his therapy career, he has advocated for teenagers wrestling with adversity. These complex coming-of-age stories are central to Crutcher’s canon of work. The same narrative circumstances and themes appear in Deadline within the context of the protagonist Ben Wolf’s storyline. Crutcher depicts Ben’s complex journey toward Self-Discovery and Personal Growth in the Face of Adversity with both empathy and wit.
Crutcher has received numerous awards and widespread recognition for his writing. In 1993, the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents awarded him the ALAN Award for Significant Contribution to Adolescent Literature. In 1998, the National Council of Teachers of English awarded him the Intellectual Freedom Award. Like his other publications, Deadline conveys Crutcher’s mission to advocate for marginalized voices and pursue social justice via literature. In particular, his work interrogates sociopolitical divides and challenges the “most popular high school history texts” (40). Furthermore, like his Deadline protagonist, Crutcher “welcomes political debate” in his novels, and therefore inspires his readers to engage in similarly challenging discourses about American society and government (41). Crutcher’s diverse vocational and rich literary backgrounds authenticate his characters’ distinct points of view. Furthermore, Crutcher writes about the places, communities, and experiences that he knows. Like Ben, he grew up in a small Idaho town where he played football and lived a challenging home life. These facets of Ben’s fictional experience parallel threads from Crutcher’s personal life, and thus grant the novel its tender, resonant undertones.
Genre Context: Young Adult Literature
Deadline is a work of young adult literature that advocates for exploring serious themes in an accessible manner. The novel is part of a rich tradition of young adult novels that similarly capture the complexities of coming of age amidst complex home, school, and community circumstances. Originally published in 2007, the novel is a groundbreaking work that has created space on the literary stage for similarly challenging and progressive stories about and for young people. In the years since its publication, Deadline has remained a powerful tool for teaching young people the value of self-reflection, honesty, and bravery.
The circumstances and themes central to Deadline are in conversation with those featured in other contemporary young adult novels including Daniel Nayeri’s Everything Sad Is Untrue, A. M. Dassu’s Boy, Everywhere, and Abbi Glines’s Until Friday Night. Like these novels, Deadline explores the complexities of finding oneself and growing up amidst challenging, unprecedented circumstances. The teenage protagonists of these stories try as hard as they can “to figure out who they are and why they’re here” despite the hardships they are facing (256). For Crutcher’s protagonist, Ben, these personal questions in turn beget crucial questions about culture, community, and society. Crutcher’s own cultural, social, vocational, and academic backgrounds make him a valuable voice in this literary and genre sphere. As in his other novels, in Deadline, Crutcher uses Ben as a mouthpiece by which to deliver progressive social commentary. By writing the story from Ben’s first-person point of view, Crutcher has translated these complex political notions for the interest and understanding of young, developing minds.
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