About BBW 2009
Banned Books Week
September 26−October 3, 2009
Banned Books Week (BBW) is an annual event celebrating the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Held during the last week of September, Banned Books Week highlights the benefits of free and open access to information while drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting actual or attempted bannings of books across the United States.
Intellectual freedom—the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular—provides the foundation for Banned Books Week. BBW stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints for all who wish to read and access them.
(Text from the ALA )
From 2008: I'm looking for *Bleep*
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Classics Banned or Challenged
| 1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald 2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger 3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck 4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee 5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker 6. Ulysses by James Joyce 7. Beloved by Toni Morrison 8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding 9. 1984 by George Orwell 10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner 11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov 12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck 13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White 14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce 15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller 16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley 17. Animal Farm by George Orwell 18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway 19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner 20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway 21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad 22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne 23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston 24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison 25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison 26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell 27. Native Son by Richard Wright 28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey 29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut 30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway 31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac 32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway 33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London 34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf 35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James 36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin 37. The World According to Garp by John Irving 38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren 39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster 40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien 41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally 42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton 43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand 44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce 45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair 46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf 47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum 48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence 49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess 50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin 51. My Antonia by Willa Cather |
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster 53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote 54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger 55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie 56. Jazz by Toni Morrison 57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron 58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner 59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster 60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton 61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor 62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald 63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf 64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence 65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe 66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut 67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles 68. Light in August by William Faulkner 69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James 70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe 71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier 72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams 73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs 74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh 75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence 76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe 77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway 78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein 79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett 80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer 81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys 82. White Noise by Don DeLillo 83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather 84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller 85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells 86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad 87. The Bostonians by Henry James 88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser 89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather 90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame 91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald 92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand 93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles 94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis 95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling 96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald 97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike 98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster 99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis 100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie |
List created by ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom. Books in bold have further description on why they were challenged or banned.
Ink vs Gunpowder
"Printer's ink has been running a race against gunpowder these many, many years. Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries."
---Chistopher Morley,
The Haunted Bookshop
Legal Decisions
Notable First Amendment court cases
Todd v. Rochester Community Schools, 200 N.W.2d 90 (Mich. Ct. App. 1972)
In deciding that Slaughterhouse-Five could not be banned from the libraries and classrooms of the Michigan schools, the Court of Appeals of Michigan declared: "Vonnegut's literary dwellings on war, religion, death, Christ, God, government, politics, and any other subject should be as welcome in the public schools of this state as those of Machiavelli, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Melville, Lenin, Joseph McCarthy, or Walt Disney. The students of Michigan are free to make of Slaughterhouse-Five what they will."
Right to Read Defense Committee v. School Committee of the City of Chelsea, 454 F. Supp. 703 (D. Mass. 1978)
The Chelsea, Mass. School Committee decided to bar from the high school library a poetry anthology, Male and Female under 18, because of the inclusion of an "offensive" and "damaging" poem, "The City to a Young Girl," written by a fifteen-year-old girl. Challenged in U.S. District Court, Joseph L. Tauro ruled: "The library is 'a mighty resource in the marketplace of ideas.' There a student can literally explore the unknown, and discover areas of interest and thought not covered by the prescribed curriculum. The student who discovers the magic of the library is on the way to a life-long experience of self-education and enrichment. That student learns that a library is a place to test or expand upon ideas presented to him, in or out of the classroom. The most effective antidote to the poison of mindless orthodoxy is ready access to a broad sweep of ideas and philosophies. There is no danger from such exposure. The danger is mind control. The committee's ban of the anthology Male and Female is enjoined."
Text from and more information at ALA's Notable First Amendment court cases.
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