The Cay

Theodore Taylor was born and raised in North Carolina. He dropped out of high school at the age of 17 to begin his career as a writer, first working for a local newspaper. He served in the United States Navy during World War II, then held a series of public relations and newspaper jobs until he resumed active duty with the Navy again for the Korean War. His work in public relations with the navy eventually led to his developing contacts in Hollywood, and he began writing successful screenplays in the early 1970s. Eventually, he turned his Hollywood experience into a children’s book, which launched the next phase of his career. During his life, Taylor would write more than 50 fiction and nonfiction books for both adults and children. He died of a heart attack at the age of 85.

The Cay is set during the height of World War II, as German submarines began to cross the Atlantic Ocean and bring the war ever closer to American shores. The arrival of these submarines instigates Phillip’s and his mother’s exodus from Curaçao, and it points to some of the dangers from which Phillip’s mother wants to—but cannot—protect her son. But the book itself was written in the 1960s and has the issues of the 1960s firmly in mind, particularly the deeply engrained racism, segregation, and prejudice that the civil rights movement sought to address. The civil rights movement worked to abolish legalized systems that segregated, discriminated against, and disenfranchised Black and other racialized groups in the United States. The book was written and published just before the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and is dedicated to Dr. King’s “dream”—recalling a 1963 speech on the National Mall in Washington, DC in which Dr. King imagined a future in which American society overcame its systemic racism, prejudice, and exploitation of Black people.

Separated from his family and from the privileged and racist white society in which he has been raised, Phillip finds himself utterly dependent on the wisdom and care of a Black man. This scenario echoes parts of Mark Twain’s 1885 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which young white runaway Huck Finn meets and eventually befriends Jim, a Black man who has run away from his enslaver. In both novels, the young white protagonist must confront and realize the inhumanity of his racist beliefs. Harper Lee’s 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird also portrays a young white protagonist’s growing awareness of racism and its effects on society. In an entirely different vein, since it shows a young protagonist’s successful attempts to survive after getting lost in a harsh environment, The Cay invites comparison with Gary Paulsen’s 1987 Hatchet, in which 13-year-old Brian Robeson must survive in the Canadian wilderness after an airplane crash. Like The Cay, Hatchet uses an adventure story to highlight the challenging work of coming of age.