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  • On Being a Banned Writer
  • Norma Klein (bio)

Perhaps the proudest moment of my literary career was during the summer of 1982 when I read in Publisher's Weekly that I was one of the most banned writers in America. Judy Blume and I were the only women writers on the list, as well as the only authors of books for children. We also comprised almost half of the five living writers, the other three being Alexander Solzenitsyn, Richard Brautigan, and Kurt Vonnegut. The remaining four writers were D.H. Lawrence, Daniel Defoe, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. My first thought was: I'll never be in such good company again. My second was to envision a talk show, somewhere in outer space, with all ten of us, each privately wondering what the connecting link was binding us together.

I would venture to say that Judy Blume and I were on the list primarily for two reasons: we write for children and adolescents and our books are popular with them. Books for children are judged differently from books for adults in ways that are not always helpful to their true audience. Unlike adult books, which are reviewed by adults, children's books are not reviewed by children. They often contain elements of life that children find true, real, and involving, but which adults find disturbing. Thus, there has often been a large body of children's literature deemed proper and fit by librarians and reviewers but almost never read by children. On the other side of the spectrum are writers like myself who incur the wrath of the children's book establishment, but have ardent readers among the kids themselves. There are truths about life which children accept, because they are living them, but from which adults flinch or hide their eyes.

Recently the head of a library in the Midwest wrote me asking if I'd mind if one of my books was not removed from the shelves but put on a special list of "objectionable books" which would be tacked in a prominent spot near the checkout counter. I replied that since, to my mind, there is no book in the library which is not objectionable to someone, I felt unworthy of being thus singled out. I myself find half the books I read (and I read almost constantly) objectionable in one way or another: poorly written, sexist, idiotic. The only kind of censorship which makes sense to me is the kind all of us practice —putting down a book without finishing it because it seems boring or not worth the time. One might add to that, if one believes in censoring the reading matter of one's children, as I do not, preventing or attempting [End Page 18] to discourage them from reading certain books. What I dislike most about censorship is the attempt of a single person to impose his or her literary or moral standards on others who do not share them at all.

In the spring of 1983 a novel I had written for teenagers, Breaking Up, was banned in Salem, Oregon. (A friend said I should have been glad it wasn't Salem, Massachusetts.) Actually, the local school board merely voted to remove the book from middle school shelves and retain it on high school shelves. PEN, the writer's organization, sent me to Oregon to defend the book's and my honor. I appeared on a panel with the school board member who had defended the book, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and the two school board members who had voted for restriction. What was dismaying was that the two who had voted for restriction backed down in about two seconds once they saw that the tide of public opinion was against them. They loved my book, they earnestly assured me, and disagreed with every one of the points made by the parent who had protested.

I was then shown the lists of protests by this parent. Here are some of them:

  1. 1. Girl dates without asking her parents' permission. She is 15.

  2. 2. Girl gives a strange man her phone number.

  3. 3. Mother of girl says it's...

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