A friend of mine is going crazy vaguely remembering a book that was read to her in school in third grade or thereabouts. Third grade for her would have been approximately 1980.
It was about an indoor world. She seems to remember it began with an indoor escalator. She could swear it was called “Outside” but can’t turn up anything on google using that title. She can’t remember if there really was an outside world in the story.
It’s not much to go on, but dopers are awesome. I know you can do it!
Found a likely candidate with a little Googling
*Outside *by Andre Norton, 1972
A young girl determines to find out what is “outside” the sealed off city in which she’s always lived but discovers that the only way she can get out is with the help of a mysterious rhyming man.
Thanks! It looks promising. She’s going to try to get a hold of a copy
Could it be Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky? That one is about a lost human civilization living inside a huge starship that has been traveling through deep space for generations, if not centuries. The protagonist’s tribe has superstitious beliefs about the origin of their world, and have no idea that there isn’t anything in the world other than the ship in which they live.
There’s also This Time of Darkness by HM Hoover. It was published in 1985 though, so it’s a little after 1980.
“Eleven-year-old Amy lives in a decaying underground city. Ignored by her mother and under surveillance by authorities because she can read, Amy reluctantly finds herself befriending Axel-a strange boy who claims to have come from a mythical place called …Outside. Is Axel crazy? Amy knows there is no such place as Outside.”
I remember reading the aforementioned Outside by Andre Norton as well. My only memories of it are of some clown-like creature that I thought was creepy.