Book censorship in the United States

Book censorship is the suppression of books considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient. It is carried out in several localities in the United States and there is strong lobbying from various organizations to have certain books banned from libraries.^[1] The United States does not ban (and has not banned) books; individual schools, school districts, churches, etc. often impose "local" bans and challenges.

List of censored books

The American Library Association, specifically the Office of Intellectual Freedom, has since 1990 maintained a list of books that have at some point in history been banned or censored in the United States (though none of the titles below are banned today).^[2]

• Candide^[3]
• The Canterbury Tales^[3]
• Catch-22^[4]
• The Decameron^[3]
• Fanny Hill^[5]
• The Federal Mafia^[6]
• The Grapes of Wrath^[7]
• Homo Sapiens, withdrawn from sale by the publisher after being labeled obscene.^[8]
• Lady Chatterley's Lover^[9]
• The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption^[10]
• Moll Flanders^[11]
• My Life and Loves^[12]
• Naked Lunch^[13]
• Operation Dark Heart^[14]
• Tropic of Cancer^[15]
• Ulysses^[16]
• Uncle Tom's Cabin^[17]
• United States – Vietnam Relations: 1945–1967^[18]
• Women in Love^[3]

Specific cases

• In August 1939, the Board of Supervisors of Kern County, California passed a resolution to ban The Grapes of Wrath from county libraries and schools. The head librarian of the Kern County Free Library, Gretchen Knief, despite personal protest to the supervisors, complied with the ban. The ban is said to have been largely a product of the infrastructure of a county whose economy relied heavily upon agriculture, and Knief’s compliance, a contemporary lack of official support from the field of librarianship. The ban was rescinded in 1941.^[19]

• Between 1961 and 1982, The Catcher in the Rye was the most censored book in high schools and libraries in the United States.^[20] In 1981 it was both the most censored book and the second most taught book in public schools in the United States.^[21] According to the American Library Association, The Catcher in the Rye was the tenth most frequently challenged book from 1990–1999.^[22] It was one of the ten most challenged books of 2005^[23] and although it had been off the list for three years, it reappeared in the list of most challenged books of 2009.^[24] The challenges generally begin with Holden's frequent use of vulgar language,^[25][26] with other reasons including sexual references,^[27] blasphemy, undermining of family values^[26] and moral codes,^[28] Holden's being a poor role model,^[29] encouragement of rebellion,^[30] and promotion of drinking, smoking, lying, and promiscuity.^[28] Often the challengers have been unfamiliar with the plot itself.^[20] Shelley Keller-Gage, a high school teacher who faced objections after assigning the novel in her class, noted that the challengers "are being just like Holden... They are trying to be catchers in the rye."^[26] A reverse effect has been that this incident caused people to put themselves on the waiting list to borrow the novel, when there were none before.^[31]

• Flowers for Algernon is on the American Library Association's list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-1999 at number 43.^[32] The reasons for the challenges vary, but usually center on those parts of the novel in which Charlie struggles to understand and express his sexual desires.^[33] Many of the challenges have proved unsuccessful, but the book has occasionally been removed from school libraries, including some in Pennsylvania and Texas.^[33][34]

• Mummy Laid an Egg under the title Mommy Laid an Egg was listed as number 82 in the American Library Association's "100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000".^[35]

• Operation Dark Heart, a 2010 memoir by U.S. Army intelligence officer Lt. Col Anthony Shaffer, is notable for the lengths the U.S. Defense Department went in an attempt to censor information revealed within after the book had already been distributed free of redactions.
• In 2003 the children's book The Family Book was removed from the curriculum of the Erie, Illinois school system due to the book's representation of same sex families.^[36]
• In October 2006, a resident of Marshall, Missouri attempted to have the graphic novels Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Blankets by Craig Thompson removed from the Marshall Public Library.
• Barney Rosset, led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence's novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, and later was the American publisher of Henry Miller's controversial novel Tropic of Cancer.
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain is listed by the American Library Association as the 5th most banned book in the U.S. due to supposed racism as late as 2007. NewSouth Books received media attention for publishing an expurgated edition of the work that censored the words nigger and Injun. A parent in a school district in Arizona failed to have the work banned from the high school curriculum in a case that reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, Monteiro v. The Tempe Union High School District (1998).
• King & King, a controversial children's book that portrayed LGBT themes in a positive light.
• Ruth Brown, a librarian accused of providing "subversive" materials to the public and indoctrinating children against the principles of America.
• In 2014, River Springs Charter School in Temecula, California banned all Christian-based books from its library, including The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom.^[37]

See also

• Censorship in the United States
• List of books banned by governments
• List of most commonly challenged books in the U.S.
• List of proposed anti-gay book bans in the United States
• Banned Books Week
• National Organization for Decent Literature
• Island Trees School District v. Pico
• Challenge (literature)
• Wilhelm Reich

References

External links

• List of Banned & challenged books at the American Library Association