Banned!

Salacious! Lascivious! Blasphemous! Smutty! These are the words that enemies of literature and free thought have extolled on some of the world’s coolest and most important books over the centuries, everything from Shakespeare and the Bible to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Harry Potter. That’s why it’s so important that we take action during Banned Books Week—September 27 through October 4, 2008—to keep all books on the shelves and to remember that winning our right to read hasn’t always been easy.

A lot of banned books in America have been axed because of local efforts to wipe out material considered to be immoral rather than heretical or politically dangerous. Some novels, such as J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, for example, have been banned for their language and sexually explicit content. Great works of Medieval poetry, including Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s The Decameron have been pulled from shelves for the same reason.

More often than not, however, Americans have banned books because of race. For much of American history, many people either preferred not to think about racial inequalities between white and black Americans, or they wanted to keep those inequalities intact. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, was banned throughout the South entirely because of its unfavorable depiction of slavery. In fact, this one book aggravated the preexisting tensions between the North and South so much that when Stowe visited the White House to meet Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, Lincoln remarked, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!”

Today, censorship is considered so taboo that concerned citizens and advocacy groups have turned to “challenging” titles they don’t like instead of banning them outright. A “challenge” is a formal complaint or request for removal lodged by parents, teachers, and even librarians themselves. Oddly enough, the most heavily challenged books in recent years have been mostly children’s and young adult books, including the books in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, Robert Cormier’s The Chocolate War, Olive’s Ocean by Kevin Henkes, and even Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The most startling book on the list, however, is Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three, a children’s book about two male penguins raising a baby penguin, which according to the American Library Association has been the most heavily challenged book in America for the last two years.

Book banning, of course, is as old as books themselves. In fact, there’s evidence suggesting that even the ancient Greeks and Romans banned books—er, scrolls—they found offensive. For the most part, though, early book banning actually entailed book burning as political and religious authorities attempted to completely eradicate alternative ideas and religious heresies. One Italian priest named Girolamo Savonarola, for example, destroyed so much art and burned so many books in Florence in the 1400s that the book-loving Florentines eventually rebelled and burned him!

Over zealous priests have certainly done their fair share of book burning, but they are by no means the only people out there who have wanted to squelch competing voices. Totalitarian governments are also notorious for trying to control what their people write, and read, and even think. These governments believe that if they can control ideas, then they can control the people and make them do what their leaders want. Nazi Germany’s infamous book burning campaigns in the 1930s and 1940s is perhaps the best—or worst—example of a government trying to control ideas. North Korea, Iran, and even China are all modern book-banning states. Censorship in these places can be so draconian it’s like something straight out of George Orwell’s books Animal Farm or 1984 (which, incidentally, are two of the most heavily banned books themselves).

Raymond Bradbury, in his sci-fi thriller Fahrenheit 451, warns us, however, that it’s not just governments who try to stifle new ideas—sometimes it’s the people themselves. This classic book on book burning takes place in a topsy-turvy, futuristic United States where firemen put out ideas rather than fires by burning banned books with flamethrowers. It sounds far-fetched, but so does banning a kiddy book about penguins. So celebrate Banned Books Week by exercising your right to read the most Outrageous! Indecent! and Scandalous! books you can find!