Library & Information Science, Course 262: Resources for Young Adults.
Dr. David Loertscher
Summer, 1998

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I've been an inveterate surveyor of censorship every since I became a high school English teacher way back in the early 1950s. After being the subject of a censorial investigation the first year of my teaching in a small western Iowa town, I've kept lists of books or films or anything else under attack. If at first my lists and comments were unsystematic and sloppy, they've improved. Over the years I've published a few of my observations and surveys.

Surveys of Censorship

I've kept track of surveys, like Lee Burres' "How Censorship Affects the School" published by the Wisconsin Council outfitters of English in October 1963. As far as I know, this was the first statewide study, and it established some front-runners in complaints and attacks. J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye led all the rest by a comfortable margin, but George Orwell's 1984 had a number of people who wanted the book removed. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World was the only other one to receive more than a few votes in Burress' survey.

Three years later, Retha Foster examined Arizona censorship in the May 1966 Arizona English Bulletin and found that, again, The Catcher in the Rye led all the rest. In 1969 I looked at Arizona censorship in the February issue of the Arizona English Bulletin and The Catcher in the Rye maintained its standing as the chief irritation censors' lives. Brave New World, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Arthur Miller's The Crucible,, John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me, and Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl and polled enough votes to suggest that they might be in the running for some time to come.

Alfred Crabb's survey of censorship in Kentucky and my survey of Arizona censorship both appeared in February 1975 Arizona English Bulletin. Crabb's survey indicated that The Catcher in the Rye continued to be the favorite target of censors, but John Knowles' A Separate Peace and Go Ask Alice picked up several votes. My survey revealed Catcher was way ahead of any book as a censorial favorite, but Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter-house Five, Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice, Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, Brave New World were steadily gaining popularity with censors.

Since the early 1980s, the People for the American Way have yearly published Attacks on the Freedom to Learn providing yearly surveys of what is disliked.

But as everyone who tries to stay abreast of what's going on in censorship knows, the best source of material is consistently the American Library Association's Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom. Published six times a year, it provides more details about censorship than most of us have any right to expect from any source. So after admiring it for a number of years, I used it in 1990 for a survey of censorship incidents in the Newsletter from 1952 through 1989 which was published in High School Journal.

Recently I decided to do a ten-year survey from the Newsletter from the beginning of 1986 through December 1995. What I found will interest English teachers and librarians, but before I announce my little list, I need to sound a few caveats about the survey- most of them warnings about any survey.

Limitations of Surveys

First, the number of times a book comes under attack is worth noting, but it is no more an index of the book's worth for teaching or shelving in the library than a lack of protests proves that the work is losing popularity or literary status. John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men is far more widely protested than The Grapes of Wrath, mostly because the former is shorter and therefore a better candidate for common classroom reading. Which is the better book is something for critics to worry about.

Second, some books suddenly appear on censors' hit lists and drop off almost as speedily. Often, these books signal some sort of change in society's attitude. For example, Cleaver's Soul on Ice and Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land announced that African Americans were no longer quietly willing to accept injustices. Griffin's Black Like Me had earlier announced that some white people were horrified by the ugliness of racial prejudices. All three books are still worth reading, but time has passed, and they are less likely to be read than something new and hot of the presses.

One of the earliest attacks on racial prejudices, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, came under speedy attack, Louisa May Alxott and others thought the book vulgar and ungrammatical, and several libraries refused to shelve it. Those censors have disappeared, but HuckFinn is increasingly under attack because some readers find it offensive and hopelessly racist. Today's objections would likely puzzle Twain, but those objections are increasing in number and in anger.

Third, even though the Newsletter is helpful, it still does not have information on every protest. The editors rely on the ability and willingness of readers to send in news, but some incidents go unreported or are reported only in fragments. And there are good reasons why some episodes go unnoticed. Teachers are sometimes embarrassed by a censorship incident, or they may be too angry to warrant to report it, or they may know only pieces of the situation. Sometimes teachers and librarians may be more sympathetic to the censors than they are to the book. Many incidents never make it into the newspaper. Some students of censorship have guessed that maybe only one in ten or twenty protests make the newspaper. I'd guess the odds are moe like one in fifty, but we're never going to know exactly.

"That may sound like a trivial matter, but for one of my students it suggested a truth about censorship that was simply not true. When I showed an early draft of this to one of my brighter students, she said:

I thought the censorship would be much worse. It's not really all that bad. Catcher has had only eighteen attacks - over ten years, that's fewer than two a year. Even Of Mice and Men has had only 29 incidences over ten years. I though this was supposed to be a serious problem, not a mer flare-up here or there."

That makes sense, of sorts, except for a couple of possible, and opposing, scenarios.

Scenario A: If you come under attack for using or recommending a book, you may be momentarily forgiven for considering the matter more than a mere flare-up. If you're luck and your department chair and your administrator and your librarian and the res of your department support you and the attacker turns out to be a friendly soul who's merely curious why you chose the book, then everything is fine, a mere incident, even a mere flare-up with no likely lasting effect. Chalk one up for the PR in the district.

Scenario B: If your department chair is afraid to support you, your administration is fearful of parents and unsure of you and distrustful of parents and unsure of you and distrustful of books and ideas generally, if your librarian and the rest of the department are gutless and unwilling to give you public support, and if the attacker turns out to be vicious and unwilling to grant you or your book any virtues, then this is no mere flare-up. After being lectured by the censor that teachers like you are the reason young people today are going to hell, and after being told that teachers raise their children in ways totally opposite to Christians (and I've heard both comments several times over the years), you might be in real trouble. Your job could be on the line, but given the books likely to be in your library, your job may not be worth holding onto anyway.

Scenario C: This is one I've seen happen many times - indeed t happened in the Phoenix area three times that I know of this last school year. The most striking example hit an English department where a mother objected to The Catcher in the Rye. The chair of the department asked me for help, I supplied some articles and comments, and after the incident (it went on only a day or so) the chair shared some details. That rarely happens - more often, I hear months later, if at all about an incident which never made the papers. Chasing down details about it is often difficult and frequently almost impossible. The Catcher episode was nasty, the parent was unyielding and unforgiving, but the administration and the staff supported the English teachers and that wa that, but it was no mere flare-up, and no one took it lightly. It was potentially explosive, but it never made the news.

Protests can seem trivial or even silly to others not involved in the episode, but it's almost never funny at the time it happens to the people involved. Possibly in retrospect, it may seem weird or laughable, but never at the time. I suppose there's an understandable temptation undergraduate classes to giggle about some title or some attack. Anyone who's worked with young people learns fast enough that protests of The Catcher in the Rye or Romeo and Juliet or Paul Zindel's The Pigman of Shel Silverstein's poem, "Little Abigal and the Beautiful Pony," in The Light in the attic are often almost unbelievable. Unhappily, those attacks are real, perhaps irrational and wacky, but real.

We calso cannot assume that censors always read a book all the way through before protesting. A Tennessee state representative objected to using Robert Lipsyte's The Contender in a summer program for high school dropouts, though he admitted he had never read the book. He announced that he was not familiar with the book, but a blurb a librarian read to him sounded "like pretty explicit stuff" (from the September 1989 Newsletter).

We shouldn't assume that once a book comes under attack that everything that follows is legal and above board. Censors often foret legal niceties since what they often do has nothing to do with legality. Sometimes an administrator or a board removes the book while it determines the book's innocence or guilt, a fascinating reversal of the American tradition that someone/something is innocent until proven guilty.

Anyone who's taught knows that some administrators are capable of acting and assuming that everyone else will accept the censorship. In Berlin, Maryland in 1990, an assistant superintendent of schools complained about Todd Strasser's Angel Dust Blues. A principal removed the book and gave it to a superior. Although district policy mandated a formal policy, the superintendent said the matter was now closed. "That book is in my office for the intent purpose of not being on the shelves." Responding to comments about the formal policy in place, the administrator said, "If we followed all of the policies all of the time, we would have a meeting of the censorship board every week."

Finally, anyone who is familiar with some of the vagariew and idiocies of book protests knows that it may take no more than one complaint to get a book removed. Columnist Marsha Mercer, writing in the September 13, 1989, Little Rock Texarkana Gazette, reported that a principal yanked Huckleberry Finn since "it looms with classic racism." The administrator added that she would remove a book if only one parent protested - "It doesn't take but on thoughtful inquiry. If a parent has a concern about our language or image, for instance, we try to meet it. We adapt our selections to social expectations."

Here are the books listed in the Newsletter protested/attacked/censored at least three times between the first of 1986 and the last of 1995. A few comments presumably justifying the attacks follow the titles.

Three Incidents

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale - "lurid," "too explicit."

Pat Conroy's The Great Santini - "obscene and pornographic."

William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying - "pure filth," "Questions God," "profane," a minister in Kentucky skimmed the book and announced that it was "pornography."

Stephen King's Dead Zone - "filth," the Shining - "foul language."

John Knowles' A Separate Peace - "profanity." Once a standard book for bright young people and the subject of numerous articles in the English Journal, this book seems deader and deader. Where censors once loved to attack it, it now goes almost ignored.

Bobbie Ann Mason's In County - "sexual act." Mason is one of the fines of our current fiction writers, probably less widely censored because parents and teachers don't yet know her work.

John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath - "full of filth" as a sergeant in a county sheriff's office said in early 1986.

Four Incidents

Judith Guest's Ordinary People - a remark heard in Boon County High School, West Virginia, in late 1987, "it's got them all beat. It's got the four-letter words and cuss words all through it. This one is absolutely filthy, dirty, vulgar, any word you can think of."

Jersey Kosinski's Being There - "The masturbation scene." This book of less and less frequently under attack as Kosinski's personal and professional reputation come under attack. Too bad - it's still a good book.

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye - in early 1994 in Fairbanks, Arkansas, the book was banned from Class use. A principal said, "It was a very controversial book, it contains lots of very graphic descriptions and lots of disturbing language. It seemed counter to what our school was about."

Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon - in West Chester, Pennsylvania, in April 1995, a parent said, "I don't believe tax dollars should be used to fund books that contain sexually graphic passages."

Walter Dean Myers' Fallen Angels - a former chaplain ion the National Guard said he had never heard any language like this install of his days in the service. He added that the book portrayed soldiers as "foul and profane."

Six Incidents

John Gardner's Grendel - "no educational value," "Too violent and graphic." A school board president said ten years ago, "We have a duty to the community and we must guard against the use of garbage being passed off as literature."

Seven Incidents

Go Ask Alice - "filthy and demeaning," "lesbian book." No matter what its age, it' still widely read and attacked.

Robert Newton Peck's A Day No Pigs Would Die - this book which many people find moving and delightful isn't always admired. "The book appeals to the erotic and at times prurient mentality," "bad language," "scenes of brutality. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter house-Five - "filth," "pure filth." Most of the attacks are not recent which is too bad because it's still worth reading and attacking.

Nine Incidents

Nancy Garden's Annie on My Mind - in late 1991 in San Ramon, California, the book disappeared into the vice-principal's office after he decided to "examine it." an even longer and more colorful incident began in August 1993 in Olathe, Kansas, where the principal decided to reject Annie. The best source of details on the Olathe case is the April 1996 School Library Journal article by Randy Meyer which has a good chronology of events.

Alice Walker's The Color Purple - "bad language," "crudeness," "trash and garbage."

Eleven Incidents

Robert Cormier's The Chocolate War - "negative view of life," "trash," "sexual explicit." Perhaps the most widely admired adolescent novel by a brilliant writer.

Thirteen Incidents

Judy Blume's Forever - an Illinois parent wanted the book banned because, "this is the Bible belt, and most people here have high moral standards. It's not just sexually explicit. It's arousing to a teenager. You can't just get them aroused and leave them with no place to go."

Eighteen Incidents

J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye - "lurid," "sexually explicit," "that prostitution scene." I would have guessed that the book was less and less widely read by kids, but as I checked on the dates of the objections, they're all over the place. I thought that the only thing that kept this charming but dated book alive is the censor. Maybe I'm wrong.

Twenty Incidents

Mark Twin's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - "classic racism," "the N word." Twin's masterpiece is increasingly under attack, and I wonder if we shall see the end of it in the next twenty years.

Twenty-three Incidents

Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - most of the attacks came in the 1990s as the book appeared in schools, usually taught as minority literature. In Moulton, Alabama in December 1995, the school superintendent banned the book after deciding that Angelou's description of the rape scene was pornographic. He said, "When it goes into describing sex organs and describing the pain and actual act of rape, I think it's pornographic."

Twenty-nine Incidents

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men - a steady litany of complains, mostly along the lines of "filth" or "obscene" or "harmful to children." It's a good book, and it's short, but hasn't anyone discovered In Dubious Battle?

Works Attacked Once or Twice

Many of the works attacked only once or twice were books that had once been widely censored. Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is a savage indictment of bookburning and censorship, but there was only one attack on it, suggesting that censors seemed no longer interested in the book or teachers no longer use or recommend it. Richard Bradford's Red Sky at Morning was censored only once in 1987, and I've assumed for years that the book gathers more dust than interest in libraries. But Steven Poling's brief comment about the book in the April 1996 SLATE Newsletter makes clear that some students still want to read the book and others want to read something in its place.

There were the usual attacks, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman, William Golding's Lord of the Flies, Terry Davis' Vision Quest, Daniel Keyes' Flowers for Algernon, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, but none of these titles seem to fascinate the censor very much. What was more intriguing was the lack of any titles by Hemingway, Hawthorne, Hardy, Cather, Woolf, or Wharton.

With the exception of Toni Morrison's books and Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and maybe Walter Dean Myers' Fallen Angels, there didn't seem to be widespread interest in attacking minority literature. A few of James Baldwin's books, but not the fiery The Fire Next Time, were mentioned. Gordon Parks' The Learning Tree came under attack twice, but surely deeply moving and profound book needs to be widely used. Possibly people accept it more easily, though once it was a source of trouble in many communities. But what of Ralph Ellison's magnificent Invisible Man, one of the seminal works of our time? For that matter, what of Bernard Malamud's The Assistant, another statement about love?

While the following books received only a mention or two by the censors, they might be taken as happy news that students are reading better and better books. I looked Cly Edgerton's Raney better than the once-attacked The Floatplane Notebooks (see the Marton Goldwasser article in this issue), but I'm glad someone out there is reading a brilliant and not all that well-known writer. It's a pleasure to note that someone is reading one of the great books of our time, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude. And that somewhere, somehow some student has found Nadine Gordimer's July's People, Jane Smiley's A Thousand Acres, William Wharton's Birdie, and August Wilson's Fences is joyful news indeed.

The persistence of people who do not like books or ideas or fear the consequences of reading on the terribly innocent young seems always with us. It gets worse, it gets better, and back and forth it goes, and on and on. It's part of an unsettled world that all of us who teach inhabit.

Danmn fools occasionally talk about the good old days when things were innocent and nobility reigned and evil was obvious and fought by all good people. There never was such a world as anyone w2ho truly remembers what life was like on the farm or in the city before World War II. Our world then was unsettled, just as it is unsettled now. That's the nature of the world, and it's the nature of the problem of censorsy\hip. Sometimes the censor is funny, almost always inadvertently so, but usually there's nothing funny about censorship. The only certainty is that censorship exists and we need to fight it. That's the way it works. That's the only way it works.

Ken Donelson, former co-editor of English Journal, teaches at Arizona State University in Tempe.

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