Celebrate Banned Books Week: read now, before it's too late

[Dennis Baron]

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Celebrate Banned Books Week: read now, before it's too late

This week is Banned Books Week (Sept. 26- Oct. 3), celebrating the
freedom to read. Because that freedom is not constitutionally
protected, everyone from the federal government to local school boards
gets into the banned books act from time to time. James Joyce's
Ulysses was banned by U.S. Customs, which also banned Lady
Chatterley's Lover, Fanny Hill, and Tropic of Cancer until such bans
were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964.

When the federal government steps out of the book-banning business,
local governments often step in. Among the many bannings detailed by
the American Library Association are these: a Tulsa teacher was fired
in 1960 for teaching The Catcher in the Rye. The subject of frequent
bans and protests, the book was also challenged in Columbus, Ohio, for
being "anti-white and obscene." And a school superintendent in
California removed it from the district's libraries as a precaution in
case the book became too polarizing. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse
Five, which describes the fire-bombing of Dresden during World War II,
also a frequent target of bans, was actually burned in Drake, North
Dakota, in 1973.

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____________________
Dennis Baron
Professor of English and Linguistics
Department of English
University of Illinois
608 S. Wright St.
Urbana, IL 61801

office: 217-244-0568
fax: 217-333-4321

http://www.illinois.edu/goto/debaron

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