Boston Daily Globe, 3/17/85 Boston Daily Globe
Boston Daily Globe, 3/17/85 Boston Daily Globe
March 17, 1885
p. 2
Members of the Concord public library committee have drawn the line on literature, and pronounced MARK TWAIN'S "Huckleberry Finn" too "coarse" for a place among the classic tomes that educate and edify the people. They do not pick out any particular passage, but just sit on the book in general. When MARK writes another book he should think of the Concord School of Philosophy and put a little more whenceness of the hereafter among his nowness of the here.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
March 17, 1885
p. 4
The directors of the Concord Public Library have joined in the general scheme to advertise MARK TWAIN'S new book "Huckleberry Finn". They have placed it on the Index Expurgatorius, and this will compel every citizen of Concord to read the book in order to see why the guardians of his morals prohibited it. Concord keeps up its recent reputation of being the home of speculative philosophy and of practical nonsense.
Boston Daily Advertiser
March 25, 1885
p. 4
From the Evening Record.
Concord has made a sort of amends to Mark Twain, whose "Huckleberry Finn" it lately refused a place on its library shelves, by making him a member of the Free Trade Club. If the school of philosophy will now come forward with an honorary membership in its faculty for Mr. Twain, all, we have no doubt, will be forgiven.
Boston Daily Advertiser
April 2, 1885
p. 2
Concord, April 1--At a recent meeting of the Concord Free Trade Club, Mr. S.L. Clemens (Mark Twain) was elected an honorary member of the club. A certificate of his election was sent Mr. Clemens in due course, and the following acknowledgment of the same has just been received:---
Hartford, March 28, 1885.
Frank A. Nichols, Esq., Secretary Concord Free Trade Club:--
Dear Sir,--I am in receipt of your favor of the 24th instant, conveying the gratifying intelligence that I have been made an honorary member of the Free Trade Club of Concord, Massachusetts, and I desire to express to the club, through you, my grateful sense of the high compliment thus paid me. It does look as if Massachusetts were in a fair way to embarrass me with kindnesses this year. In the first place, a Massachusetts judge has just decided in open court that a Boston publisher may sell, not only his own property in a free and unfettered way, but also may as freely sell property which does not belong to him but to me; property which he has not bought and which I have not sold. Under this ruling I am now advertising that judge's homestead for sale, and, if I make a good a sum out of it as I expect, I shall go on and sell out the rest of his property.
In the next place, a committee of the public library of your town have condemned and excommunicated my last book and doubled its sale. This generous action of theirs must necessarily benefit me in one or two additional ways. For instance, it will deter other libraries from buying the book; and you are doubtless aware that one book in a public library prevents the sale of a sure ten and a possible hundred of its mates. And, secondly, it will cause the purchasers of the book to read it, out of curiosity, instead of merely intending to do so, after the usual way of the world and library committees; and then they will discover, to my great advantage and their own indignant disappointment, that there is nothing objectionable in the book after all.
And finally, the Free Trade Club of Concord comes forward and adds to the splendid burden of obligations already conferred upon me by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, an honorary membership which is worth more than all the rest, just at this juncture, since it indorses me as worthy to associate with certain gentlemen whom even the moral icebergs of the Concord library committee are bound to respect.
May the great Commonwealth of Massachusetts endure forever, is the heartfelt prayer of one who, long a recipient of her mere general good will, is proud to realize that he is at last become her pet.
Thanking you again, dear sir, and gentlemen,
I remain,
Your obliged servant,
S.L. Clemens.
(Known to the Concord Winter School of Philosophy as "Mark Twain.")
The Atlanta Constitution
May 26, 1885
p. 4
"Huckleberry Finn" and His Critics.
A very deplorable fact is that the great body of literary criticism is mainly perfunctory. This is not due to a lack of ability or to a lack of knowledge. It is due to the fact that most of it is from the pens of newspaper writers who have no time to elaborate their ideas. They are in a hurry, and what they write is hurried. Under these circumstances it is not unnatural that they should take their cues from inadequate sources and give to the public opinions that are either conventional or that have no reasonable basis.
All this is the outcome of the conditions and circumstances of American life. There is no demand for sound criticism any more than there is a demand for great poetry. We have a leisure class, but its tastes run towards horses, yachting and athletic sports, in imitation of the English young men who occasionally honor these shores with their presence. The imitation, after all, is a limping one. The young Englishman of leisure is not only fond of outdoor sports, but of books. He has culture and taste, and patronizes literature with as much enthusiasm as he does physical amusements. If our leisure class is to imitate the English, it would be better if the imitation extended somewhat in the direction of culture.
The American leisure class--the class that might be expected to patronize good literature and to create a demand for sound, conservative criticism--is not only fond of horses, but is decidedly horsey. It is coarse and uncultivated. It has no taste in either literature or art. It reads few books and buys its pictures in Europe by the yard.
We are led to these remarks by the wholly inadequate verdict that has recently been given in some of the most prominent newspapers as to the merits of Mark Twain's new book, "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." The critics seem to have gotten their cue in this instance from the action of the Concord library, the directors of which refused the book a place on their shelves. This action, as was afterwards explained, was based on the fact that the book was a work of fiction, and not because of the humorous characteristics that are popularly supposed to attach to the writings of Mr. Clemens. But the critics had got their cue before the explanation was made, and they straightway proceeded to inform the reading public that the book was gratuitously coarse, its humor unneccessarily broad, and its purpose crude and inartistic.
Now, nothing could be more misleading than such a criticism as this. It is difficult to believe that the critics who have condemned the book as coarse, vulgar and inartistic can have read it. Taken in connection with "The Prince and the Pauper," it marks a clear and distinct advance in Mr. Clemens's literary methods. It presents an almost artistically perfect picture of the life and character in the southwest, and it will be equally valuable to the historian and to the student of sociology. Its humor, which is genuine and never-failing, is relieved by little pathetic touches here and there that vouch for its literary value.
It is the story of a half illiterate, high-spirited boy whose adventures are related by himself. The art with which this conception is dealt with is perfect in all its details. The boy's point of view is never for a moment lost sight of, and the moral of the whole is that this half illiterate boy can be made to present, with perfect consistency, not only the characters of the people whom he meets, but an accurate picture of their social life. From the artistic point of view, there is not a coarse nor vulgar suggestion from the beginning to the end of the book. Whatever is coarse and crude is in the life that is pictured, and the picture is perfect. It may be said that the humor is sometimes excessive, but it is genuine humor--and the moral of the book, though it is not scrawled across every page, teaches the necessity of manliness and self-sacrifice.
Tribute to Mark Twain
By Booker T. Washington
North American Review 191 (June 1910).
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It was my privilege to know the late Samuel L. Clemens for a number of years. The first time I met him was at his home in Hartford. Later I met him several times at his home in New York City and at the Lotus Club. It may be I became attached to Mr. Clemens all the more strongly because both of us were born in the South. He had the Southern temperament, and most that he has written has the flavor of the South in it. His interest in the Negro race is perhaps expressed best in one of his most delightful stories, "Huckleberry Finn." In this story, which contains many pictures of Southern life as it was fifty or sixty years ago, there is a poor, ignorant Negro boy who accompanies the heroes of the story, Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, on a long journey down the Mississippi on a raft.
It is possible the ordinary reader of this story has been so absorbed in the adventures of the two white boys that he did not think much about the part that "Jim" -- which was, as I remember, the name of the colored boy -- played in all these adventures. I do not believe any one can read this story closely, however, without becoming aware of the deep sympathy of the author in "Jim." In fact, before one gets through with the book, one cannot fail to observe that in some way or other the author, without making any comment and without going out of his way, has somehow succeeded in making his readers feel a genuine respect for "Jim," in spite of the ignorance he displays. I cannot help feeling that in this character Mark Twain has, perhaps unconsciously, exhibited his sympathy and interest in the masses of the Negro people.
My contact with him showed that Mr. Clemens had a kind and generous heart. I think I have never known him to be so stirred up on any one question as he was on that of the cruel treatment of the natives in the Congo Free State. In his letter to Leopold, the late King of the Belgians, in his own inimitable way he did a service in calling to the attention of the world the cruelties practiced upon the black natives of the Congo that had far-reaching results. I saw him several times in connection with his efforts to bring about reforms in the Congo Free State, and he never seemed to tire of talking on the subject and planning for better conditions.
As a literary man he was rare and unique, and I believe that his success in literature rests largely upon the fact that he came from among the common people. Practically all that he wrote had an interest for the commonest man and woman. In a word, he succeeded in literature as few men in any age have succeeded, because he stuck close to nature and to the common people, and in doing so he disregarded in a large degree many of the ordinary rules of rhetoric which often serve merely to cramp and make writers unnatural and uninteresting.
Few, if any, persons born in the South have shown in their achievements what it is possible for one individual to accomplish to the extent that Mr. Clemens has. Surrounded in his early childhood by few opportunities for culture or conditions that tended to give him high ideals, he continued to grow in popular estimation and to exert a wholesome influence upon the public to the day of his death.
The late Mr. H. H. Rogers, who was, perhaps, closer to Mr. Clemens than any one else, said to me at one time that Mr. Clemens often seemed irritated because people were not disposed to take him seriously; because people generally take most that he said and wrote as a mere jest. It was this fact to which he referred, I have no doubt, when at a public meeting in the interest of Tuskegee at Carnegie Hall a few years ago, he referred to himself in a humorous vein as a moralist, saying that all his life he had been going about trying to correct the morals of the people about him. As an illustration of the deep earnestness of his nature, I may mention the fact that Mr. Rogers told me that at one time Mr. Clemens was seriously planning to write a life of Christ, and that his friends had hard work to persuade him not to do it for fear that such a life might prove a failure or would be misunderstood.
As to Mark Twain's successor, he can have none. No more can such a man as Mark Twain have a successor than could Phillips Brooks or Henry Ward Beecher. Other men may do equally interesting work in a different manner, but Mark Twain, in my opinion, will always stand out as an unique personality, the results of whose work and influence will be more and more manifest as the years pass by.
Booker T. Washington.
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The New York Times, December 6, 1959
THE LITERARY ADVENTURES OF HUCK FINN
by Norman Podhoretz
Mr. Podhoretz, a New York editor and fiction critic, first read Mark Twain at the age of 8 or 9, when the works arrived at his home, a volume at a time, as a bonus for a newspaper subscription.
"Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted," wrote Mark Twain in a notice at the head of "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"; "persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." This month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of "Huckleberry Finn," and by now the number of candidates for prosecution, banishment and shooting must be very large indeed - far greater than Mark Twain could ever have anticipated. No other American novel (with the possible exception of "Moby Dick") has been so thoroughly ransacked for motives and morals, so lovingly examined, so jealously claimed as an ally in so many different polemical campaigns.
In the early years of the century, Van Wyck Brooks (who had not yet become the leading patriot of American culture) cited it in support of his contention that the crudity of life in the West had combined with the emasculating gentility of the East to cripple the genius of Mark Twain and prevent his proper development as an artist. Some time later, Bernard de Voto, rushing to the defense of the West, pointed to "Huckleberry Finn" itself to refute Brooks, and far from indicting American life for the destruction of Mark Twain, gave it full credit for having produced and nourished him.
More recently, the issue has shifted to deeper ground, and "Huckleberry Finn" is now read as a key to the very essence of the American imagination, a central document of our most primitive impulses. A few years ago, Leslie Fiedler gained a greater degree of notoriety than it is usually given to literary critics to achieve by suggesting that the relation between Huck and Jim expresses the homosexual attraction toward Negroes which Mr. Fiedler discovered hidden in the furthest recesses of the American unconscious. (It is amusing to speculate on the punishment Mark Twain might have thought up for this kind of motive hunting had he been prescient enough to know that it would some day come into fashion.)
Other contemporary critics, more restrained than Mr. Fiedler though hardly less exuberant, have spoken of Huck as an archetype or a mythic figure who embodies the nostalgia for innocence and the fantasy of flight from maturity that are said to be so characteristic of the American soul.
Sooner or later, it seems, all discussions of "Huckleberry Finn" turn into discussions of America - and with good reason. Mark Twain was the quintessential American writer, quintessential because he was more or less untutored - "a natural," as Wright Morris puts it, "who learned to write the way a river pilot learns the feel of a channel." And Richard Chase, in his remarkable book on the American novel, observes that "Huckleberry Finn" is constantly engaged in an "exorcism of false forms" through parody and burlesque, and that the chief exorcism performed by the novel is done upon "European culture itself."
Why did Mark Twain find it necessary to exorcise European culture? Partly, of course, in order to liberate himself from the grip of an approved literary style that bore no relation to living American speech, but also, in my opinion, because what he had to say about life could not have been said by a writer whose attitudes had been molded by the European sense of things.
Someone once quipped that the whole of philosophy is a footnote to Plato, and it might be remarked with equal justice that the whole of European literature is a commentary on the first sentence of Aristotle's "Politics." Man, says European literature in a thousand different ways and in tones ranging from dismay to jubilation - man is by nature a social animal. To conceive of the individual as existing apart from society is an illusion or at best a convenient fiction; there is no State of Nature and there never was one. It was this idea more than anything else, I believe, that Mark Twain was trying to exorcise in "Huckleberry Finn." He was asserting through the image of life on the raft that the State of Nature is a reality, and he was asserting through the character of Huck that the distinction between the individual and society is a true distinction and a necessary one.
Lionel Trilling, in his brilliant introduction to "Huckleberry Finn," takes rather a different view of the matter. Mr. Trilling, of course, recognizes that the novel is built on an opposition between nature and society, but he cautions us against thinking of that opposition as absolute. Huck, he tells us, "is involved in civilization up to his ears," and his flight from society "is but his way of reaching what society ideally dreams of for itself." This interpretation, I should say, is itself in need of exorcism, for it is an attempt to assimilate "Huckleberry Finn" into what I have characterized as the European sense of things.
Surely the fact that Huck "has not run away from Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas and his brutal father to a completely individualistic liberty" only proves that Mark Twain's idea of the State of Nature is not Freud's or Hobbes'. And surely the fact that "responsibility is the very essence of Huck's character" only proves that Mark Twain differs from Mr. Trilling in his view of what belongs to nature and what to civilization. The truth is that all the virtues civilization claims for itself (and which Mr. Trilling claims for it) - responsibility, love, loyalty, generosity and so on - are seen in "Huckleberry Finn" as properties of the State of Nature. Civilization, to be sure, has usurped credit for them, but what else does this novel demonstrate over and over again if not that civilization is really their mortal enemy?
No more devastating comment has ever been made on the fraudulent pretensions of civilization than the great scene in which Huck struggle with himself over the question of whether to turn Jim back to Miss Watson. Huck, of course, is not consciously a rebel against the values of his society, and he never doubts that he has done wrong in helping a runaway slave to escape. After he discovers that the Duke and the King have sold Jim back into captivity, he decides that the hand of Providence has slapped him in the face, "letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman's nigger that hadn't ever done me no harm." He tries to console himself with the reflection that "I was brung up wicked, and so I warn't so much to blame," but he is too honest to accept this as an adequate excuse, and finally he scrawls a note to Miss Watson telling her where she can find Jim.
The passage that follows the note is one of the supreme moments in all of literature: "I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking - thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time; in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind."
And he goes on remembering details of their voyage down the river together, until his glance falls on the note he has just written to Miss Watson. "It was a close place, I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: 'All right, then, I'll go to hell' - and tore it up. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.
We must not be misled by the humor of the concluding lines into supposing that Huck's belief in his own damnation is perfunctory or insincere. Mark Twain is using the device of comic exaggeration - reaching all the way down into hell - in order to make the contrast between the "civilized" values and Huck's natural feelings as stark as he possibly can.
The contempt for civilization that breathes through every page of "Huckleberry Finn" - both the particular civilization Mark Twain was writing about and civilization in general - is only matched in intensity by the reverence for nature embodied in the character of Huck and in the image of the river. The Mississippi, as Mr. Trilling rightly observes, is a god in this novel, and those who attune themselves to its ways are able to share in its power, its vitality and its beauty. There is also danger in the river and destruction and loneliness, for the god has his sullen moods and refuses to be placated. But though the river can maim and kill, it cannot do what society invariably does; it cannot warp a man's feelings into ugly and unnatural shapes, and it cannot distort the clarity of his vision of the truth.
Now that I have succeeded in adding myself to the violators of Mark Twain's ordinance against finding motives in "Huckleberry Finn," I might as well follow Huck's example and go the whole hog in wickedness by looking for a moral, too. The moral, I think, will be obvious to anyone who feels the sharpness of the opposition Mark Twain set up between nature and society. "Huckleberry Finn" is a celebration of the instinctive promptings of the individual against the conditioned self, and a refutation of the heretical idea that reality can be equated with any given set of historical circumstances. This heresy has become even more powerful today than it was seventy-five years ago, and there can e no better protection against the morality of "adjustment" than Mark Twain's uncompromising, hard-headed insistence on the distinction between nature and society.
For that matter, it might be a good idea to pass a law requiring social workers, guidance counselors and all the members of certain schools of psychoanalysis to read "Huckleberry Finn" at least once a year. There is no telling what might happen if the proponents of adjustment were forced into periodic contemplation of a character who is more civilized than his mentors and more mature than his elders precisely by virtue of his refusal to submit to their notion of what is necessary, "natural" and real.
Huck Finn's Fate to Be Decided
San Jose parents group wants book optional
AFRICAN-AMERICAN PARENT COALITION
A school group in east San Jose is to decide tomorrow night whether ``The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' should be removed from required reading lists in 11 area high schools in response to objections raised by African American parents.
The parents cite the classic Mark Twain novel's liberal use of racial stereotypes and racial epithets -- it uses the "n'' word more than 200 times -- which they say is damaging to their children. In one four-page passage, the word appears 15 times, the parents say.
Although supporters of the novel defend it as an indictment of racism in the 19th century United States, the African-American Parent Coalition argues that their children already are bombarded with racial slurs that erode their self-esteem and affect their performance in school.
``The word `nigger' has meaning for African American people that no one else can really get inside of,'' said Chester Stevens, a founder of the coalition, noting the word's association with lynchings, segregation and slavery.
The coalition wants the book removed from required reading lists in the 11 high schools or replaced with an alternate version that deletes racially offensive language. A 12-member committee of teachers, parents, students and administrators will meet tomorrow to make a recommendation to the superintendent of the East Side Union High School District. The school board makes the final decision, but the committee's recommendation carries considerable weight, officials said.
``We're not saying ban the book or take it out of the library, but we need some other books that reflect other images of African Americans,'' Stevens said.
Others argue against any restrictions on the novel.
``Restricting access to any material through the classroom is censorship,'' said Jean Hessberg, California director for People for the American Way, which has been tracking attempts to ban books since 1982. ``What people forget is that we can't take away parts of history as if they didn't happen.''
Charleen Silva Delfino, who coordinates the English curriculum for the school district, pointed out that teachers already can choose not to teach ``Huckleberry Finn,'' and parents can ask that their children read another book. The novel is one of five on a list from which two are selected. Delfino said she is withholding judgment about the book's fate until the committee makes a decision.
``I can tell you why I was in favor of putting it on the list in the first place,'' she said, describing Twain as a ``master of satire'' whose work has been used as a model by other American authors. The novel chronicles the adventures of Huck and the runaway slave Jim as they travel south on the Mississippi River. Huck, an uneducated teenager, is forced to confront his feelings about slavery and racism as he develops a deepening friendship and respect for Jim.
Controversial since it was published in 1885, "Huckleberry Finn" has been among the most frequently challenged books, according to People for the American Way. During the past year, attempts have been made to remove the book from schools in Connecticut, Texas, Georgia and in Santa Cruz, where the school board voted instead to expand diversity training for teachers.
People for the American Way found 458 attempts to censor books and curricula in the 1994-95 school year -- up from 153 attempts in the 1982-83 school year -- and censors were successful half of those times. Other novels that frequently make the ``most challenged'' list include ``Catcher in the Rye'' by J. D. Salinger, ``Of Mice and Men'' by John Steinbeck and ``I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings'' by Maya Angelou.
``Huckleberry Finn'' is the second textbook challenged by the African-American Parent Coalition. They persuaded school officials to move Theodore Taylor's novel ``The Cay'' from required to optional reading lists in middle schools in San Jose's Oak Grove School District.
Advisory Panel Says `Huck Finn' Should Stay
Jamie Beckett, Chronicle South Bay Bureau
The novel that Ernest Hemingway called the source of modern American literature -- Mark Twain's ``The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn'' -- should remain on reading lists in East San Jose high schools, an advisory committee said last night.
The panel rejected a request from a group of African American parents that wanted the literary classic either removed from the reading lists in 11 East San Jose high schools or replaced with an edited version deleting what they consider offensive language.
Acknowledging that ``some students may be adversely affected'' by the novel, the committee recommended a host of conditions on how the book should be taught, including requiring special training for teachers.
Although supporters of the novel defend it as an indictment of racism in the 19th-century United States, the African-American Parent Coalition says the book erodes their children's self-esteem and affects their performance in school because it uses the word ``nigger'' more than 200 times and contains stereotypes of blacks.
Last night's action angered coalition members.
``This district has little respect and regard for African American children if it goes ahead with this recommendation,'' said Chester Stevens, a founder of the group.
But Joi Cunningham, the only African American student on the committee that issued last night's recommendation, defended the book: ``It reflects how it was in the 1800s, and I think everyone should know that.''
She said she was not troubled by the book in her class, which read the original text but substituted the term ``black man'' for discussions and papers.
The committee's recommendation will be used by East Side Union High School District Superintendent Joe Coto and the school board to determine the novel's fate. School officials named the 12- person committee of teachers, parents, students and school administrators to respond to the parent coalition's concerns.
Both the American Civil Liberties Union and People for the American Way were among the opponents of removing the book, which tells of the adventures of Huck and the runaway slave Jim as they travel south on the Mississippi River. Huck, an uneducated teenager, is forced to confront his feelings about slavery and racism as he develops a deepening friendship and respect for Jim.
Beyond teacher training, other conditions that the committee recommended for using the book include student input into how the book is taught and convening a committee on teaching literature in a ``culturally sensitive manner.''
Charleen Silva Delfino, who coordinates the district's English curriculum, pointed out that teachers already can choose not to teach ``Huckleberry Finn,'' and parents can ask that their children read another book. The novel is one of seven on a list from which two are selected as required reading by the teacher.
``I can tell you why I was in favor of putting it on the list in the first place,'' she said, describing Twain, or Samuel Clemens, as a ``master of satire'' whose work has been used as a model by other American authors.
The school board is expected to decide on the recommendation within the next 30 days.
Controversial since it was published in 1885, ``Huckleberry Finn'' has been among the most frequently challenged books, according to People for the American Way, which has been tracking attempts to ban books since 1982. During the past year, attempts have been made to remove the book from schools in Connecticut, Texas, Georgia and in Santa Cruz, where the school board voted instead to expand diversity training for teachers. ``Huckleberry Finn'' is the second textbook challenge by the African-American Parent Coalition. Earlier, they persuaded school officials to move the novel ``The Cay'' from required to optional reading lists in middle schools in San Jose's Oak Grove School District.
|Winter 1996 |Volume 23, Number 2 |
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M. Jerry Weiss, Editor
Jersey City State College, Jersey City, New Jersey
WHAT JOHNNY CAN'T READ
Censorship in American Libraries
by
Suzanne Fisher Staples
Among my happiest memories are of rainy summer days tucked up under the eaves of our family's rustic lake cottage, a gentle patter overhead, reading a book. The Hardy Boys. Black Beauty. Treasure Island. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Anything by Rudyard Kipling. The Encyclopedia Britannica Junior's illustrated volume on anatomy and The Catcher in the Rye. I was allowed to read what I liked. It helped me to learn who I was and where I fit into the world.
Today many of the books I loved as a child have been banned in school libraries across the country. Black Beauty has been removed from the shelves because it depicts cruelty to animals. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has been banned because it contains the word "nigger." Most frequently, books are challenged because they contain curse words or violence, sex, homosexuality, the occult, or rebellious children.
Banning books has become commonplace in the 1990s. From 1991 to 1994 the number of formal demands for the removal of books from public and school libraries has increased by more than 50 percent. There were as many as 4,500 instances of book challenges last year, and 42 percent of the complainants were successful in having the offending books banned (ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom Data Bank).
We're not talking soft porn, racist drek and subversive witchcraft propaganda. Among the most-banned books are some of the best-loved modern classics. In addition to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a list of the ten most-challenged titles for 1994 compiled by the American Library Association includes Forever by Judy Blume, the Newbery Award-winning Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson, The Chocolate War by Robert Cormier, Scary Stories To Tell in the Dark, More Scary Stories, and Scary Stories 3 by Alvin Schwartz, and The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (ALA).
At the head of the list was Daddy's Roommate by Michael Willhoite, about a day in the life of a boy whose divorced father is in a monogamous homosexual relationship. One challenger in Mesa, Arizona, said the book "is vile, sick and goes against every law and constitution." The passion evident in this parent's complaint typifies the language of formal book challenges filed with schools and public libraries all over the country.
But by far the most common type of censorship involves books quietly disappearing from libraries. Sometimes a parent who objects to a book but doesn't want to go through a formal challenge just slips it off the shelf. Frequently a librarian who may fear for her job removes a book that has become controversial. Because of the nature of "stealth censorship," it is difficult to document and impossible to quantify.
These quiet book bannings affect every aspect of the book world. Librarians, who buy at least half of hardcover literary trade books published for children and young adults, have ever-tightening budgets and face a constricted job market. Under pressure from administrators not to land their schools in the midst of controversy, many librarians have become increasingly cautious about the kind of books they order.
Publishers, who have been cutting their lists because of economic pressures, respond by rejecting many manuscripts that contain problematic language and stories on tough subjects like sexual abuse. And authors censor themselves, weeding out curse words and steering away from difficult areas, regardless of feelings that such omissions affect the credibility of their work.
It is surprising how limited the thinking of teachers and even librarians can be about censorship. Many well-meaning professionals have inadvertently made innovative strides in the banning of books. The high school librarian in one town in Florida told me, "We don't have a problem with censorship here." She said she had avoided controversy by "putting bright pink slips in every book we think is controversial" to warn parents to scrutinize the book before their child reads it.
Parents who insist books they disapprove of should be unavailable to all children are not necessarily acting on their own. Political-religious group such as the Christian Coalition and Citizens for Excellence in Education have circulated lists of books with the aim of removing them from libraries (People for the American Way).
Many parents confuse a book's subject matter with the notion that the author or publisher advocates a particular moral agenda and have come to regard books as enemies. For example, a book that contains profanity may be seen as one that encourages kids to use bad language. Or a book that portrays a rebellious child is seen as urging children toward anti-family behavior.
With few exceptions, literature's best, most important books are believable and compelling because they do contain material that readers may find troubling. Take Katherine Paterson's National Book Award winner, The Great Gilly Hopkins, which was banned in school libraries in Albemarle County, Virginia, because it contains curse words and "takes God's name in vain." The book is about a tough-talking, angry foster child who is redeemed by love. The parent who filed the complaint listed the profanities in the book without reading it. The school board convened a panel of educators, who reviewed the book and twice recommended it be kept on the shelves. The school superintendent ordered it removed anyway.
In an open letter to the Albemarle County School Board, Katherine Paterson wrote, "Though Gilly's mouth is a very mild one compared to that of many lost children, if she had said `fiddlesticks' when frustrated, readers could not have believed in her and love would give them no hope."
One fifth-grade reader (whose teacher described him as `the Gilly of my class') wrote in a book report of The Great Gilly Hopkins, "This book is a miracle." There is little doubt that if Mrs. Paterson's Gilly hadn't cussed like a trooper that lost boy would have been denied his miracle.
One librarian at a conference on children's literature in Virginia this summer speculated as to why parents react so forcefully to books they perceive as offensive. "They feel helpless sending their children into a world that seems increasingly plagued with hazards over which they have no control," she said. "They see the books available to their children as an area where they can have control."
Parents' attempts to protect their children from books that offend are misguided. For one thing, librarians say the primary effect of keeping kids from reading a book is that they want to read it above all others. Children are tough and discriminating. They hear language far worse than Gilly Hopkins' in the halls at school. Kids have eyes finely tuned for the subtle and are more capable of grasping complexity than most adults give them credit for. I read Black Beauty before I was twelve and learned a lot about compassion from it. I thought the Hardy Boys were sexist before I knew the word. And I knew Rudyard Kipling for a racist without having to be told by a well-meaning adult.
Like Katherine Paterson's fifth-grade fan, it was miracles I was after, the momentary magic of transcendence that fired my soul. Each book has its own gifts to offer, but the freedom to choose which to read teaches some of life's most important lessons -- trusting yourself, knowing what you believe in, tolerance -- all of which are more difficult to learn once you get beyond childhood.
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Suzanne Fisher Staples is a novelist who writes for young adults and lives in Florida. Among her novels is Newbery Award winning Shabanu: Daughter of the Wind
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