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Censorship is part of the past
by June Adams
January 21, 2004
Banned Works in the recent past On its release in 1885, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was banned by the Concord, Massachusetts public library. Library officials considered the book to represent “Trash . . . suitable only for the slums”—an apparent reference to the work’s mildly colorful language. The book, considered by many to be the greatest and most influential book ever written by an American, still regularly runs afool of school librarians who refuse to stock unexpurgated editions. In 1895, The New England Watch and Ward Society banned the sale of the playscript of Oscar Wilde’s drama Salome, as it felt the work would tend to corrupt the morals of its readers. The group later forced the cancellation of a planned Boston production of Richard Strauss’ opera Salome. In 1921, a New York physician was arrested and convicted of selling “obscene literature”—contraceptive activist Marie Stopes’ Married Love. John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was banned in St. Louis, Kansas City, and parts of Oklahoma and California in the late 1930s. Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, a landmark drama that criticized conventional societal mores, was refused a license for production by English authorities in the 1890s on the grounds that it dealt with venereal disease and was therefore obscene. As late as 1939, the play was heavily expurgated by the Spanish government.
Foreign-printed copies of James Joyce’s masterwork Ulysses, perhaps the greatest work of literature of the twentieth century, were seized by United States customs officials as late as 1933. (The seizure was later ruled improper in na landmark legal case that opened the door for the book’s mainstream release.) In 1944, a mail-order publisher was ordered by New York postal authorities to blot out references in its catalog to materials the authorities considered obscene (such as a paperback edition of Voltaire’s Candide). The order was obeyed, the catalogs were altered, and the approved mail was delivered. William Faulkner’s books Mosquitoes, Sanctuary, and The Wild Palms were seized from commercial bookstores by the Philadelphia Vice Squad in 1948. The raid was upheld by Pennsylvania courts even after Faulkner won the Nobel prize for literature in 1950. Massachusetts courts banned Erskine Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre from the state in 1950. A House of Representatives Subcommittee on Appropriations denied funding for reprints of the government publication Profile of America because it contained, among other suspect passages, an excerpt from Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude considered by committee members to be obscene. Theodore Dreiser’s classic Sister Carrie was banned in the state of Vermont until 1958. The California community of Riverside ordered all of the works of Ernest Hemingway removed from its school libraries in 1960. In 1966, future North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms forced the firing of a college teacher who had assigned Andrew Marvell’s poem “To HIs Coy Mistress” to students. High school administrators in Minnesota were physically attacked in 1968 by a group protesting the school’s inclusion of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye in the school library. The National Coalition Againt Censorship listed among many others the following books as subjects of censorship litigation in the mid-1980s:
In 1987, censorship groups used an extraordinarily broad reading of an amendment sponsored by Utah Senator Orrin Hatch to support the banning of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men from public schools in Texas and Missouri. In the fall of 1991, the U.S. Senate overwhelmingly approved an amendment prohibiting the National Endowment for the Arts from awarding grants for any work that describes or depicts “sexual or excretory activities or organs” in a way that could be interpreted as “offensive”.
Interesting Books to Read
This historical erotica of eleven stories discloses the titillating eroctic
renditions of the ancient events and mysteries—from the sensual rituals
of Minoan Parisienne, the love affairs of Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut, the harem
conspiracy during the Akhenaten’s reign, to the romantic lessons that
Hittite Prince Tudhalias learned from Lady Rapshelia.
This historical erotica of ten stories discloses the titillating eroctic
renditions of the ancient events and mysteries—from the sensual encounter
of Theseus and an Amazon warrior, the ravish of Ariadne, the sizzling lovemaking
of Achilles and Penthesileia, the love affairs of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus, the
secret love of Princess Electra, Helen's rapturous life with Paris, to the
romantic lessons that Odysseus learned from Egyptian courtesan.
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