We’re in the middle of Banned Book Week. Independent Bookstores and libraries are busy
promoting books that many people don’t want you to read — books by such legends
a Mark Twain, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Ray Bradbury.
Banned Book Week
September 22 — 28
North Carolina was right on time when, according to the Los Angeles Times, a county school board
member joined the majority to ban Ralph Ellison’s classic about American racial
attitudes. Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953. One of the board members couldn’t “…find any
literary value” in a book that a national critics’ poll (1965) declared the
“greatest American novel written since World War II.”
It’s not all that surprising to hear about literary
censorship in the South, particularly if the subject is at least partially
about racism. It is more fun to talk about the unexpected. NUVO,
an alternative weekly in Indianapolis, reported some strange goings-on in the
red state’s capitol. Not only did the
anti-evolution, anti-gay governor Mike Pence officially proclaim Banned Book
Week in Indiana, the first lady read from the often-banned children’s book Harriet the Spy at the Kurt Vonnegut
Memorial Library. The book has been
criticized and challenged for its alleged portrayal of the main character as a
disobedient child with lesbian overtones (or undertones?).
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| Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Indianapolis |
Indiana’s previous governor, Mitch Daniels, now president of
Purdue University, was in the censorship spotlight recently by revelations that
while in the state’s highest office he searched for ways to remove books by
historian Howard Zinn from college curriculums.
Incidentally, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library honors the
Indiana author of Slaughterhoue Five,
banned by the state of Missouri and one of the most challenged, as well as
honored books in American literature.
The library, featuring a week-long program on the subject of censorship,
opened two years ago.
September 26, 2013 UPDATE: The decision in North Carolina to ban Invisible Man was reversed today. The book is back on the shelves.
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