Gregory McNamee: We're still banning books?
What do J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Paul Zindel’s My Darling, My Hamburger, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me, and Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl have in common?
The answer: these five books rank high among the titles most often banned by school boards and libraries throughout the United States.
Many other books join them. Among them are George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, which dares value human freedom over the State, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, a powerful critique of racism. Add to them Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, depicting a World War II in which the Nazis aren’t the only ones to commit atrocities; John Knowles’s A Separate Peace, in which a young man struggles to understand his emergent sexuality; and Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth, suspected since well before the Cold War of beaming premature antifascist thoughts into the minds of young America.
Classics all, and dangerous to the touch.
Schools and public libraries aren’t the only battlegrounds. In the 1990s, a so-called liberal coalition urged a boycott of all books published by Random House after the appearance of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho.
Yet, the incidence of book banning in public libraries and schools is on the rise. This banning is being effected by liberals and conservatives alike, eager to purge the shelves of any books that do not further their own agendas. In one strange case, for instance, two self-styled witches petitioned a California school board and local booksellers to demand that the Grimm Brothers tale “Hansel and Gretel” be banished from the shelves. The story, of course, paints a negative, self-esteem-diminishing portrayal of witches.
We live in an age in which it is becoming increasingly impossible to express in any medium anything potentially offensive to anyone. We also live in a time when, as the the aptly named Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression once reported, more and more citizens believe that the government should enjoy the power to censor works of art and literature—but not, of course, restrict their own freedom of speech.
So governments of all kinds do, most often pushed to do so by interest groups, religious organizations, and other pleaders of special causes. In 2006, these ten books and book series were most challenged:
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And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell
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The “Gossip Girls” series by Cecily Von Ziegesar
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The “Alice” series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor
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The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things by Carolyn Mackler
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The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
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The “Scary Stories” series by Alvin Schwartz
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Athletic Shorts by Chris Crutcher
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The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
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Beloved by Toni Morrison, again
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and The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
Most of these books have been challenged for “offensive language,” a broad category that admits of four-letter words and various epithets (Mark Twain’s sole sin, it seems). Others are condemned for portraying homosexuality, period, or portraying it in anything other than a condemnatory light: the first book on the list, for instance, depicts a baby penguin being raised by two same-sex parents. (It happens in nature, but apparently is not supposed to in fiction.) This makes the book antifamily, at least in the eyes of certain self-appointed censors. The Schwartz series gets nailed for supposed satanism, a charge that must be depressingly familiar to J. K. Rowling. And so on.
The American Library Association has designated September 29–October 6 as this year’s Banned Books Week, centering on these ten books and more. It’s a time to read and talk about books of all kinds, from Of Mice and Men to Reading Lolita in Tehran to Huckleberry Finn to, yes, And Tango Makes Three.
And the Constitution, too.