A Banned Books Reading List
“Repressive societies always seemed to understand the danger of “wrong” ideas.”
— Kindred, by Octavia Butler“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
— The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald“Those that fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.”
— Winston Churchill
It seems that book challenges and bans come in waves. The same tried and true classics often appeared on the lists published by the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) when it began collecting data about book challenges in 1990. Things started to shift in the early 2000s, though, as the top 10 most challenged books have increasingly been those published within the last few years. In 2021 a record 1,597 books were affected by censorship attempts, and this year has seen an “unprecedented uptick” of challenges from groups like Moms for Liberty and state legislators focused almost exclusively on books by Black and LGBTQ+ authors.
Banned Books Week was founded 40 years ago in 1982; sadly, a time not so different from today. That same year, the Island Trees School District v. Pico case was decided by the Supreme Court. In 1975, the Island Trees Board of Education in Levittown, New York banned nine books from the district’s libraries and curricula. Steven Pico, a senior, and four other students challenged that decision and won. While Island Trees School District v. Pico held that “the First Amendment limits the power of junior high and high school officials to remove books from school libraries because of their content,” it was nonetheless a split decision with ambiguities that could have repercussions in future court cases. Thankfully, censorship also did not prevail in the recent trial in Virginia Beach:
Yet challenges and bans show no signs of letting up. In a particularly egregious form of censorship, 300+ books were recently removed from schools in Collierville, Tennessee and subsequently “reviewed” and categorized into a five-tiered rating system according to the level of LGBTQ+ content and “sexual interactions” in each. The books were pulled prior to the passage of the state’s Age Appropriate Materials Act which requires that each school maintain a list of materials in classroom and library collections. It would be simpler, of course, to trust teachers, librarians, and kids themselves to make these decisions.
In the spirit of learning from the past as we navigate the present, this reading list features books that help illuminate the history and impact of censorship.
You Can’t Say That!: Writers for Young People Talk About Censorship, Free Expression, and the Stories They Have to Tell
Book bans and challenges today are most often focused on titles for children and young adults. You Can’t Say That! brings together authors such as Angie Thomas and others whose books have been targeted for removal from schools for everything from “coarse language” to “scatological humor.” Editor Leonard S. Martin also provides historical context for First Amendment challenges.
Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times
With Read Dangerously Azar Nafisi uses her lived experiences in the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States in the form of letters written to her father to illustrate why the freedom to read is “so central to the preservation of democracy.” She argues that reading is an essential act of resistance in the “art of engaging with the opposition” in the fight against censorship and totalitarianism.
Book Banning in 21st-Century America
Emily Knox is an associate professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an editor of the Journal of Intellectual Freedom and Privacy. Her book focuses on the more recent history of book bans while also drawing attention to the practices of “relocation and restriction…[of] user access to information” that have also become popular.
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses
Kevin Birmingham’s “biography of a book” tells the origin story of Ulysses in Joyce’s life and its subsequent ban as an “obscene, lewd, and lascivious” work of literature for a decade after publication. It was finally declared not obscene in a landmark United States federal court case in 1933.
Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America’s Maverick Publisher and His Battle against Censorship
As the founder of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review, Barney Rosset was the first to publish many of the most historically banned books in the United States in the 1950s and 60s. His tireless efforts to defend the First Amendment set an example for what it means to take the First Amendment at its word.
The End of Obscenity: The Trials of Lady Chatterley, Tropic of Cancer and Fanny Hill
While this title is a bit older than the others on this list (first published in 1969), it’s a little like Law & Order but for banned books. Charles Rembar was the lawyer who represented the three books in the title, arguing in support of their unrestricted publication. Rembar’s books covers all of the legal ins and outs of his work defending the First Amendment and the fundamental right to freedom of expression.
Reading the Obscene: Transgressive Editors and the Class Politics of U.S. Literature
Banned Books Week focuses on books, but there’s a world outside of Yonkers when it comes to censorship of materials that have been characterized as obscene. Jordan S. Carroll turns the spotlight primarily on the magazines and comic books that have faced their own challenges, revealing the ways that censorship has far reaching consequences.
Obscene in the Extreme: The Burning and Banning of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
It may seem like stale required school reading today, but The Grapes of Wrath faced a literal firestorm of controversy when it was published in 1939. Banned across the country and described as “not fit for anyone’s daughter to read,” the East St. Louis, IL Public Library board voted to burn its three copies.¹ Although the board later rescinded this action, a copy was still burned in Bakersfield, California by three members of the Associated Farmers organization. Rick Wartzman’s history of the censorship efforts surrounding Steinbeck’s novel is an all too familiar reflection of the present day.
Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century
As controversial books go, Lolita is infamous. I confess to not having read it, although I tried. Perhaps it gets better or somehow more interesting or salacious, but I couldn’t make it past the first several pages. Yet Lolita is a book whose reputation has always preceded it since its publication in 1958 in the United States. Even if you’ve never read it you know what it’s about. Lolita in the Afterlife turns the art of literary criticism thoroughly on its head by bringing together a who’s who of contemporary writers to put that book by Nabokov in modern context.
Neither love nor terror makes one blind: indifference makes one blind.
— James Baldwin
Finally, we are only doomed to repeat history if we fail to do anything about what we’ve learned. Please check out the The Get Ready, Stay Ready: Community Action Toolkit at the link below. The toolkit includes curated resources for LGBTQIA+ material support, templates for letter writing and public speaking, and so much more. What direct action will you take to fight censorship?
Source:
1 “Ban on book is lifted,” The Kansas City Times, Nov. 22, 1939, vol. 102, no. 279.