Now I’d hate for you to think I favor printed garbage—I do not—but I do love the classics, many of which have been and continue to be censored and challenged as well as banned. My favorites include Lolita, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, All Quiet on the Western Front, Animal Farm, The Grapes of Wrath, 1984, The Ugly American, Madame Bovary, Women in Love, Of Mice and Men, The Scarlet Letter and To Kill a Mockingbird.

It’s hard to imagine none of those books being available, none of them making it into the fabric of my life. But not only was it possible I might never have experienced them, it is still frighteningly possible that others to come may not.

Twenty-five years ago, in 1982, the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association (ALA), the American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, the Association of American Publishers, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the National Association of College Stores set aside a week in late September for Banned Books Week (this year September 23-30). This week honors the authors, publishers, readers, booksellers and librarians who work to keep our First Amendment rights—the right to, among others, free speech—open to all of us. It also acts as an unfortunate reminder that this right has never, in the history of our allegedly free country, been in danger of finding itself dispensable. And it is particularly ironic that today’s government is so obsessed about its sense of self-righteousness that it is stomping constitutional rights into the ground with a fanaticism almost equal to that of Islamic zealots. And what truly scares me is the number of people meekly accepting these changes.

Fortunately, there are pockets—hopefully, larger pockets than might be perceived—of true democratic believers, of those who understand that freedom is not now nor never has been free, that liberty always extracts a cost, and that one of those costs is that books we might dislike, disagree with or even hate must be allowed to be available. It is something that can be hard to stomach at times—even for those, most often librarians, who lead the charge to keep that freedom available to all.

Admittedly, it’s easy to talk about defending the First Amendment, but it is another thing to actually practice it. Three times in my life, I have been in a censorious role. Three times, I have been faced with books so personally offensive that it took weeks of agonizing, of arguing with friends, of weighing the consequences of personal censorship against my values before I could make a decision. And each time I was faced with the same questions. Did I have the right to destroy a book with which I disagreed? Was it censorship if I only destroyed my copy and not others? Was I in danger of becoming the enemy of my beliefs? I still don’t know the answer to those questions, and the fact that I did destroy all three books continues to haunt me. I can only say that I found them complex, thorny and difficult decisions.

The fact that intentions are usually good—mine were—does not mitigate the actions. But what is to be feared by the truth? Some personal or public discomfiture? A chance that we might not be right? The possibility that our children may learn something we’d rather they did not? The risk that any enemy might use our freedom against us? Yes, these are all real possibilities. They are also necessary costs if we are to maintain our freedom of thought. John Stuart Mill held the truth in his hands when he penned these words: “This peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is . . . robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth; if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collusion with error.”

That’s not to say that letting everyone have access to everything is good. Children do need to be protected from certain things, and parents must have the right to determine what their children may and may not read. The problem, of course, comes when parents seek to impose their views beyond their family circle. Or when anyone’s personal beliefs and values are used to determine the availability of public material. It is an unpleasant reality to see books that are personally offensive in your child’s school or the public library, but what is the alternative? That no one see them? What would be the consequences of such a decision?

In a brilliantly argued essay entitled “The Bonfire of Liberties: Censorship of the Humanities,” Frances Leonard notes  that “for schools, libraries, even book stores, the question of what to select and what to bypass depends ultimately upon human judgment, preferably informed judgment. Notwithstanding the argument of some absolutists who see any process of making choices as a form of censoring that which is not chosen, there is—or should be—a profound difference between judgment and censorship. Judgment reviews the individual work in relation to its field (How well does this convey the history of organized labor in our state?), while censorship operates from an external set of standards (This gives favorable treatment to labor unions that are in conflict with capitalist goals; therefore, it subconsciously teaches socialism or even communism).”  

She further points out that “the first target of censors has always been the broad field of inquiry and knowledge that we call the Humanities—more specifically, works of literature, philosophy, ethics, religious studies, history, and other scholarly disciplines which take as their subject the human conditions and the relationship of humankind to the natural world and the divine . . . dedicated to raising questions, exploring possibilities, supposing alternatives to that which seems to be true. Through exercising the imagination and adding to one's store of knowledge, the student of the humanities strives to achieve wisdom. The end of censorship, however, is a peculiar form of ignorance, perhaps best summarized in the old adage, ‘What you don't know won't hurt you.’

“The obvious and painful truth is that what we don't know will  hurt us, and it will hurt even worse if we have been taught something other than the real facts of life . . . If we cannot learn to imagine what injustice does to the human spirit, if we cannot sympathize with the downtrodden, or suspect our own tendencies to tyrannize others, then we cannot deal with the world as it actually is. We are condemned to stand aside or follow orders given by those who have assumed power over us. And thus we come to the basic flaw of censorship: What begins as a protective embrace of fragile truth ends in the all-encompassing embrace of wishful thinking or, indeed, falsehood.”

My question to you, then, is what do you have to lose—or gain? Check out the lists of books on the ALA , ABFFE and Forbidden Library sites. All those books have been challenged, censored and/or banned somewhere, sometime, by some authority because someone thought what was wrong for one should be wrong for all. How would your life be different if she, he or they had wholly succeeded?


Almost since her childhood days of Mother Goose, Lauren has been giving her opinion on books to anyone who will listen. That “talent” eventually took her out of magazine writing and into book reviewing in 2000 for an online review site where she cut her teeth (as well as a few authors). Stints as book editor for her local newspaper and contributing editor to Booklist and Bookmarks magazines have reinforced her belief that she has interesting things to say about books. Lauren shares her home with several significant others including three cats, 750 bookmarks and nearly 1,000 books that, whether previously read or not, constitute her to-be-read stack. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it