Barbara Wersba, 85, Author for Youths

Barbara Wersba, whose candid books for young adults were among the first to explore topics like alcoholism and same-sex relationships, died Feb. 18 in Englewood, New Jersey. She was 85.

Her death was confirmed by an administrator at the Actors Fund Home, where she had been living.

Wersba began writing in the 1960s, and her work reflected the era’s new realism in literature for younger readers with stories no longer confined to intact nuclear families and sanitized goings-on like prom nights. Some of her frank themes generated criticism; others generated praise.

Her “Tunes for a Small Harmonica” was a National Book Award finalist in 1977, and the American Library Association honored her novels, including “The Carnival in My Mind” (1982) and “Whistle Me Home” (1997).

She also wrote for movies and adapted her young-adult book “The Dream Watcher” for the stage, specifically with actress Eva Le Gallienne in mind. It was produced at the White Barn Theater in Norwalk, Connecticut, in 1975.

She was also a teacher and mentor to writers, contributed to magazines and journals, and was a frequent reviewer of children’s literature for The New York Times Book Review. In addition, she founded a small press.

Wersba wrote that she was the last surviving member of her family. Her partner of many years, Zue Sharkey, died in 1994.

Barbara Wersba was born Aug. 19, 1932, in Chicago to Robert Wersba and the former Lucy Jo Quarles. The family moved to California when Barbara was small.

Wersba once wrote that although she remembered “joining the Girl Scouts, selling war bonds (for this was World War II), and spending every Saturday afternoon at the movies,” she grew up in what she felt was “almost total solitude.” She dreamed of acting as an escape and had her first role at a community theater where she had volunteered to take on tasks.

Her parents’ troubled marriage broke apart when she was 11, and she and her mother moved to New York City, where they lived in the theater district. Wersba, at 12, headed straight for the box office and bought a ticket for “The Glass Menagerie” with Laurette Taylor, a performance that cemented her love for the theater.

As a teenager, she studied acting at the Neighborhood Playhouse and took dance classes with Martha Graham.

After graduating from Bard College in 1954, where she immersed herself in dramatic arts, she returned to the city, living in an East Village tenement with other performers, studying at the Paul Mann Actors Workshop and getting parts where she could.

Her acting career ended and her writing career began when she contracted hepatitis in her 20s and was faced with a long convalescence. Her first few books, including “The Boy Who Loved the Sea” (1961) and “Do Tigers Ever Bite Kings?” (1966), were for younger children.

To a question about why she wrote for children, she responded, “It is all the same life, it is all one, and the best children’s writers know that they are writing for the child in the adult, and the adult in the child.”

Her breakthrough came in 1968 with “The Dream Watcher,” about a dejected young nonconformist whose friendship with a quirky if less than truthful aged actress nurtures his sense of individualism.

“This theme of older person helping younger person had been the underlying theme of my own life,” Wersba wrote in an autobiographical entry in a Gale reference series on writers. “Unable to relate to my parents, I had sought parent substitutes everywhere.”

One older person she grew close to was Carson McCullers, the author of the novels “The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter” and “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” among other works. They met in 1966 when a friend asked if Wersba might be willing to read to an invalid.

“For the next two years,” she said, “I visited Carson McCullers every day — read aloud to her, went shopping for her, ate meals with her, and loved her deeply. She was not easy to love, but before me always, in my mind, were her books. Her great books. Unable now to write physically, she dictated stories to me, phoned in the middle of the night with ideas.”