Earliest second-person novel

Cafe Society
1

As a kid I used to love reading Choose Your Own Adventure, a series of interactive fiction books which are written with second-person narration. That is, the reader takes the role of the main character of the story, and is directly addressed in the books as “you”.

This got me wondering about the first such work of written fiction to feature this device. (To be clear, I’m talking only about the use of the second-person point of view for the main character; the work need not be interactive as in CYOA.) Some cursory research turns up La Modification, a 1957 novel by French writer Michael Butor. Does anyone know of any earlier examples? If not, what’s the earliest example in English-language literature?

2

I can’t think of any earlier examples of novels that do it, but…

Lester Del Rey’s And It Comes Out Here, published in 1951 is done in the second person. Future and present tense. (It’s time travel, with the narrator telling ‘you’, that is, himself, what’s going to happen. Not really a spoiler…the first sentence makes it obvious and the third paragraph makes it explicit.)

3

Ill add that rereading The Stand Frannie disparages Harold Lauter for writing fiction in the 2nd person.

4

As a child, I owned a copy of You Will Go To the Moon. It’s not as old as the Lester Del Rey.

At some point, while discussing POV and tense and whatnot in writing, it struck me that the book was pretty unusual in being second person future tense throughout.

Is the Del Rey also in future tense?

5

I had that book too! I first read it before anyone had been to the moon. I must have read it hundreds of times.

6

At the beginning, but for the bulk of it, it’s present tense.

7

Comic books are the first thing that comes to mind - an example here from 1951, not sure if that comes before the Lester Del Rey referenced above.

I’m pretty sure I’ve come across this in some of the older pulp magazines too, if anybody can come up with specific examples…