The Wave

The Wave is a young adult novel by the American writer Todd Strasser, first published in 1981. It appeared under the pen name Morton Rhue and has been reprinted under his own name.

The setting is a high school in the spring of 1969, and the teacher is Ben Ross, whose class has been studying the rise of the Nazi party in Germany. When his students ask how a nation could have accepted it, he has no answer that satisfies him, so the following day he begins an experiment in discipline, community and action that he calls The Wave. The students take to it far more quickly than he expects, and the movement gathers members outside his room while one of them, Laurie, begins to argue that it should be stopped.

The book is a novelisation of a television screenplay of the same name, and that screenplay was itself a fictionalised account of an experiment run by the teacher Ron Jones in a history class at a school in Palo Alto, California.