In 1979, someone in Indiana tried to have Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” banned, saying the book “openly rejects traditional marriage and motherhood.”
In 1998, a Californian tried to ban J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone,” complaining it “opens a doorway that will put untold millions of kids into Hell.”
Attempts to restrict access to books go back further than that. In 1885, a Concord, Mass., resident called Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” “trash and suitable only for the slums.”
Banned Books Week has been observed annually since 1982 by the American Library Association, designed to call attention to censorship and celebrate books that have been challenged or banned. This year, the observance takes place Sept. 25 to Oct. 1.
Hartford Public Library’s ArtWalk gallery has an interactive exhibit showcasing 20 classic books that were targeted for banning. Book covers are accompanied by quotes from those offended by the books. Gallery visitors are encouraged to write their opinions about the books on sticky notes and attach them to the exhibits.
The ALA has found that it isn’t just books’ stories that many object to. Often, it’s the race of the author or the book’s characters. “It is estimated that over half of all banned books are by authors of color, or contain events and issues concerning diverse communities,” according to a press release issued by ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom. This year’s Banned Books Week theme is diversity.
Kenyon Grant, who curated the Hartford exhibit, gave as an example Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” It is included in the exhibit, alongside the complaint, made by someone in 1997 in Brentsville, Va., that the book was “sexually explicit.”
“There isn’t actually anything sexually explicit in this book,” Grant said. She added that the closest the book gets to eroticism was Janie’s musing: “She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage!”
Grant added that the complaint “was an opaque way of trying to get the book banned.”
Even Anne Frank’s Writings?
The exhibit features books by both white and nonwhite authors, including Toni Morrison, Judy Blume, James Baldwin, Richard Wright, Allen Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, J.D. Salinger, Lois Lowry, Isabel Allende and Harper Lee.
Comments from those who challenged the books are off-base and often morbidly funny. In 1963, Anne Frank’s diary, written by a Jewish teen hiding from Nazis, was called “a real downer,” as if it could be anything else. Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” was challenged in 1964 as being “too dark and frightening,” the writer forgetting that the kids’ book was being bought not by kids but by parents who can decide that for themselves.
In the library, some of the sticky-note comments are brutally dismissive. “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” by Dee Brown, brought the complaint “If something might be controversial, then why not eliminate it?” A commenter left the response “Just like we eliminated the American Indian?” Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” was called “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian.” A commenter retorted “practically a glowing recommendation!” “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which was challenged as “anti-white … a how-to manual for crime,” drew this response: “Why are those two concepts related?”
Another commenter, in her 60s, noted “My high school in Phoenix banned ‘The Wings of the Dove’ by Henry James and Webster’s Third International Dictionary. Go figure!”
Other comments are more inspiring. In 2010, Arizona House Bill 2281, which banned Mexican-American studies, suggested that “The Words of César Chávez” and other Chicano history texts promoted the overthrow of the U.S. government. A commenter at the library exhibit disagreed, calling the book “striking, handsome, impactful, necessary words.”
Bridget Quinn-Carey, the CEO of the library, said in the digital age, people often forget that books have been, and still are, being banned.
“It’s primarily school settings, but sometimes in public libraries, people try to limit what discourse is,” Quinn-Carey said. “Thoughts are still scary. There are groups still out there trying to limit thoughts. That’s anathema to why libraries exist.”
LOVE NOTES TO BANNED BOOKS will be up until Oct. 1 at ArtWalk at Hartford Public Library, 500 Main St. in Hartford. hplct.org.
