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Censorship is part of the past
    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.

Humans became pigs in Odyssey (odyspigs.jpg--370x406)

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:

  • The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
  • The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, Langston Hughes, ed.
  • A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  • The Fixer, Bernard Malamud
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
  • Our Bodies, Ourselves, Boston Women’s Health Collective
  • Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
  • Young and Black in America, Alexander and Lester, eds.

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”.

 

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When did chasity belts come into use?

    - Mary Jones


If you’re interested in the topic, please choose the same title among the above related link. I explained in that page.

    - June

 
 
Copyright June Adams
About this author:

June Adams (juneada2.gif) She has been gone through many jobs such as a girl Friday, a short-order cook, a waitress, an aerobics trainer, a bit-part actress, a model, a receptionist, a bookkeeper and a saleslady at a boutique. She now works as freelance-writer and counselor for foreign students.

She took some courses for journalism and creative writing at community college. Though not educated extensively, June has been quite active in writing since her childhood. More than anything else, she loves to read fascinating, intriguing and yet amusing stories, and now decides to turn her life experiences into stories.

In addition to writing, she likes listening to nice music, traveling in Europe and Far East as well as meeting people with different cultural background.


A Brief History
of Presidential
Love Affairs
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Interesting Books to Read

Erotica Odyssey Book title (erosttl.jpg--255x360) 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.

Erotica Odyssey Book 2 title (eros2ttl.jpg--240x292) 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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