by Shannon Riffe, Associate Dean, External Relations
This is Banned Books Week across the nation, which celebrates the freedom to read and brings awareness to banned or challenged books and their authors.
By focusing on efforts across the country to remove or restrict access to books, Banned Books Week draws national attention to the harms of censorship and its infringement on the constitutional right to free speech.
In a time of intense political polarization, library staff in every state are facing an unprecedented number of attempts to ban books. ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom ALA documented 1,269 demands to censor library books and resources in 2022, the highest number of attempted book bans since ALA began compiling data about censorship in libraries more than 20 years ago.
The unparalleled number of reported book challenges in 2022 nearly doubles the 729 book challenges reported in 2021. Of the record 2,571 unique titles targeted for censorship, most were by or about LGBTQIA+ persons and Black, Indigenous, and people of color.
"The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison was the number three on the list of most-banned books of 2022, the recipient of 73 challenges for depiction of sexual abuse, EDI content, and sexually explicit content.
While books have been and continue to be banned, part of the Banned Books Week celebration is the fact that, in a majority of cases, the books have remained available. This happens only thanks to the efforts of librarians, teachers, students, and community members who stand up and speak out for the freedom to read.
Listed below you’ll find access to a selection of books available in the library catalog that have been the target of book bans. All print materials are available for check-out and electronic resources may be viewed online.
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
Diamond, Lydia; Morrison, Toni (2007)
About the tragic life of a young black girl in 1940s Ohio. Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove wants nothing more than to be loved by her family and schoolmates. Instead, she faces constant ridicule and abuse. She blames her dark skin and prays for blue eyes, sure that love will follow.
With rich language and bold vision, this powerful adaptation of an American classic explores the crippling toll that a legacy of racism has taken on a community, a family, and an innocent girl. - Publisher's Description
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Out of Darkness
Pérez, Ashley Hope (2015)
"This is East Texas, and there's lines. Lines you cross, lines you don't cross. That clear?"
New London, Texas. 1937. Naomi Vargas and Wash Fuller know about the lines in East Texas as well as anyone. They know the signs that mark them. They know the people who enforce them. But sometimes the attraction between two people is so powerful it breaks through even the most entrenched color lines. And the consequences can be explosive.
Ashley Hope Pérez takes the facts of the 1937 New London school explosion―the worst school disaster in American history―as a backdrop for a riveting novel about segregation, love, family, and the forces that destroy people. - Publisher's Description
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Maus: A Survivor's Tale
Spiegelman, Art (1997)
A brutally moving work of art—widely hailed as the greatest graphic novel ever written—Maus recounts the chilling experiences of the author’s father during the Holocaust, with Jews drawn as wide-eyed mice and Nazis as menacing cats.
Maus is a haunting tale within a tale, weaving the author’s account of his tortured relationship with his aging father into an astonishing retelling of one of history's most unspeakable tragedies. It is an unforgettable story of survival and a disarming look at the legacy of trauma. - Publisher's Description
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Of Mice and Men
Steinbeck, John (1937)
They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation.
Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him. - Publisher's Description
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To Kill a Mockingbird
Lee, Harper (1960)
The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of conscience that rocked it, "To Kill A Mockingbird" became both an instant bestseller and a critical success when it was first published in 1960. It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1961 and was later made into an Academy Award-winning film, also a classic.
Compassionate, dramatic, and deeply moving, "To Kill A Mockingbird" takes readers to the roots of human behavior - to innocence and experience, kindness and cruelty, love and hatred, humor and pathos. Now with over 18 million copies in print and translated into forty languages, this regional story by a young Alabama woman claims universal appeal. Harper Lee always considered her book to be a simple love story. Today it is regarded as a masterpiece of American literature. - Publisher's Description
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Critical Insights: The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
Atwood, Margaret - Author; Bouson, J. Brooks - Editor (1960)
This volume in the Critical Insights series collects some the novel's best critics to introduce high school students and undergraduates to one of Atwood's most widely read novels. Edited and with an introduction by J. Brooks Bouson, a widely recognized Atwood scholar. The Handmaid's Tale won international acclaim when it was first published in 1985; with it, Margaret Atwood won Canada's Governor General's Award as well as the Arthur C. Clarke Award and was nominated for the Booker Prize. Written in the midst of the anti-feminist backlash and the culture wars of the 1980s, readers recognized it as a timely and chilling dystopian novel depicting a future in which the American government has been overthrown by religious fundamentalists who have, in turn, erected a patriarchal theocracy.
Though Atwood had doubts about the novel when she was writing it, and though both conservative and liberal critics have found fault with it, the years following The Handmaid's Tale's publication have been rich with critical discussion. Analyzing Atwood s novel from various critical and theoretical perspectives, these essays offer fresh insights not only on the sources of the novel, its critical reception, and its dystopian and parodic elements but also on its complicated feminist politics, its narrative strategies, and its literary and linguistic complexities. - Publisher's Description
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Animal Farm
Orwell, George (1960)
Overworked and mistreated animals one day gather and take over the farm where they live. They finally have a say, determined to create a more just and equal society on the farm. They begin to work to establish this new order under the leadership of the pigs.
Although this order helped the farm to develop at first, problems that the animals could not foresee will arise over time and a more brutal regime will be established than before. "Animal Farm" is George Orwell's second well-known modern classic novel and a striking political satire. One of the best critiques of the system ever written, this novel reveals how a liberation revolution can evolve into one-manhood. George Orwell's allegory remains relevant today in every situation and place where freedom is attacked. - Publisher's Description
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Feature image by Jasmine Coro on Unsplash