![]() Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man have been on banned book lists for decades for their frank explorations of racism. The most frequently banned books in the United States between 20, according to the American Library Association (ALA), were those in the Harry Potter series. Books containing profanity, disturbing events, and violence become targets. ![]() Ideas about race, gender, sexuality, religious views, Satan and witchcraft, perceived immorality, and subversion all attract attempts to censor and ban. ![]() Customs in 1928.Įxamination of the history of banned books reveals common themes that seem to spasmodically motivate people to censor, ban, or burn books. Some efforts to ban works have stretched from antiquity to modern times Ovid’s Ars Amatoria ( The Art of Love) was banned in 8 CE, burned in Florence in 1497, and banned by U.S. In 212 BCE, he burned all the books in his kingdom in order to establish that history began with him. In 259 BCE, the Chinese emperor Shihuangdi tried to bury 450 Confucian scholars in an effort to control the writing of history. Throughout history, innumerable attempts have been made to control ideas and people’s thoughts and exposures. I never can figure out why people who are into banning books (and ideas) don’t realize that the very attempt to curtail the dissemination of knowledge and ideas incites insatiable curiosity and makes those ideas and volumes all the more attractive. That’s what humans should do: They should go tearing after the latest banned book to see just what it is that other people don’t want them to know. True to form, when the McMinn County (Tennessee) School Board tried to ban cartoonist Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus-winner of the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for its daring and brilliance in chronicling the Holocaust and its legacy-I realized that I had never read this book, so I ran (metaphorically) right out and bought it from Amazon, where it had skyrocketed to the top of the bestseller charts. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Havelock Ellis’s The Psychology of Sex. Other spicy and intermittently banned books I discovered while prowling through the library included Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre, D. H. Those contraband copies of Miller’s novels sat in our family library among the many volumes of British, French, and American literature, every book Bertrand Russell ever wrote, and innumerable tomes on the philosophies of Baruch Spinoza and George Santayana. My father brought back two banned books-unexpurgated copies of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. When they returned, each parent brought back treasures: My mother brought back a trunk full of Danish wooden toys and Swiss dolls, along with a wooden crate that contained an exquisite German human skull that was perfectly articulated for study with tiny brass fittings. When I was six years old, my parents went to Europe for three months, leaving me in the tender care of my beloved grandmother.
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