Banned Books

See our Fahrenheit 451 and Banned Books displays in the lobby and in the stairwell display area during April.

Censorship is a predominant theme in Fahrenheit 451. The freedom to read, guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, provides not only the right to make your own reading choices, but the right to have a full array of titles and subject matter to choose from. Still, challenges happen continually across the USA. According to the American Library Association (ALA), "Sex, profanity, and racism remain the primary categories of objections."

We most often hear about censorship when institutions such as public schools, libraries or publishers are at the center of a controversy. Censorship takes place in many ways. It happens when a publisher is coerced not to publish something or to edit the works of an author to remove controversial content. It happens when a book is removed from a school reading program or a library. In one community, members of a small but determined group kept a particular book continually checked out from the local library to prevent others from reading it.

Ironically, the outcome of an organized campaign to ban a book is sometimes to gain attention and readership for that book. From James Joyce's Ulysses to J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series, the protests of those who would censor only made others more interested in reading them.

A few famous banned books:
1984 - George Orwell
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
Call of the Wild - Jack London
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Lady Chatterley's Lover - D. H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Find out more about challenged and banned books at the ALA website:
http://www.ala.org/bbooks/challeng.html. For a more extensive list, and more details, see the American Library Association's publications on Intellectual Freedom.

The BIG READ is an initiative of the National Endowment of the Arts (see www.neabigread.org) in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and Arts Midwest. The South Dakota Big Read is sponsored by the South Dakota Humanities Council's Center for the Book (http://sdhc.sdstate.org/center.html)