Banned
Books Week occurs this year from September 27 to October 3. It is an annual event
celebrated by communities across America, and it was launched in the 1980s. Schools
and libraries plan annual celebrations that highlight past and current attempts
to censor books.
As
an English teacher, I often taught challenged or banned books in my classes. Some
of my favorites were The Great Gatsby, The
Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Native Son. Other banned books were on my
book report list highlighting “you should read this before you go to college” books.
This list included Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Breakfast
of Champions. I won’t ever forget his novel because it put me in the middle
of a textbook example of a parental book challenge, a situation that forced me to
consider what I believed, and made me wonder if the school district and the town
would be on my side.
This
textbook challenge happened twenty-five years ago this November, but I remembered
it as if it were yesterday.
However, before she
could do so, her parents discovered the book, decided it was inappropriate, and
determined that they wanted to protect all the children of the district from reading
it. They enlisted the local media, giving the newspapers out-of-context information
about the book and why they considered it to be pornographic. The parents also contacted
the principal, superintendent, and school board. Guess whom they didn’t contact.
Their viewpoint was that they were taxpaying citizens who should be able to decide
what books were healthy for the school libraries. They were protecting their child
as well as those of other families in the district.
Besides the local newspapers,
they called on the help of a television station in a metropolitan area an hour north
of us. The media coverage put a great deal of pressure on the school district. It
is interesting to note that the television station did not contact me, nor did two
of the three newspapers covering the story locally.
Over the six weeks
of media flurry, the school board received a great deal of mail, mostly on the anti-banning
side of the issue. Interested citizens had a pro-banning meeting at the YMCA, and
another group of citizens had an anti-banning meeting at the Warren County Public
Library. I’m not sure books had been discussed so much in the entire history of
the town.
My own point of view
was that I had to provide materials that were suitable and recommended for all students
in the high school. So if a family objected to material for their own student, I
suggested alternative books that would convey the spirit of the assignment. But
in the Vonnegut incident, the parents went right past me. It was my own belief that
the Vonnegut book should be available for students who wanted to read it, and one
set of parents should not prevent that. Several of my past students had read Breakfast of Champions and loved it.
Halfway through the
storm, one of the college students who worked at the local newspaper decided to
call Kurt Vonnegut and get his take on the issue, a decision that resulted in a
piece of satire in the local newspaper. Their conversation was hilarious, and Vonnegut
was shocked that they were not going after Slaughterhouse-5.
This emboldened me to write a letter to Kurt Vonnegut, and I added some of the more
inflammatory newspaper clippings.
The end of the “tempest
in a teapot” came when the school board voted neither to ban the book from the library
nor to allow parents to go into the school libraries and take out materials. Besides
their support, throughout those six weeks I had the backing of both the superintendent
and principal because they trusted my judgment. That was a wonderful gift.
However, a second gift
came in my school mailbox. Kurt Vonnegut had received my letter and clippings, and
he wrote me the loveliest and funniest letter in return, commenting on book censorship.
In part, he stated, “You and your students are lucky to be in Norman Rockwell’s
America, where Jeffersonian debates are possible and usually entertaining. One community
banned Slaughterhouse-5, and a reporter
called me to find out what I had to say about it, and I said that the head of the
School Committee was a piss-ant, and he dropped dead the next day.” *
The entire story of
the book challenge, including excerpts from the media, Vonnegut’s entire letter,
and details about the whole book incident can be found in my book, The Education of a Teacher (Including Dirty Books
and Pointed Looks.) In addition, on
October 31, 2012, Dan Wakefield’s book, Kurt
Vonnegut: Letters, was published, and guess whose letter appears in his
book?
*quotation used
with permission of the author.
