Why "Lolita", "Alice", "Call of the Wild" and other books were banned at one time

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

As a rule, any work is a source of inspiration, knowledge and experiences laid down by the author. However, there are some books that do not carry much meaning and are often read on the road in order to kill time. But, as it turned out, among the seemingly harmless literature, there is one that abhors all principles and moral foundations, causing a wave of indignation not only from critics, but also from the public, demanding that it be banned.

1. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain is not the man most people think of when it comes to banned books, but the popular author has managed to earn a spot on the most contested list.

His popular novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was controversial for many reasons. Some readers object to strong and sometimes racist language and feel that it is inappropriate for children. However, most educators believe that, given the right context, a book is excellent reading. The history of people trying to censor a novel goes back much further than most people think.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was first published in 1884.

Twain's novel, a hilarious, reckless adventure story, is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novels ever written.

The book tells about the life of Huck - a poor, motherless boy with a cruel father and about his adventures, as well as about social status and love. Despite the accolades the book has received, it has proved to be a magnet for controversy.

In 1885, the Concorde Public Library banned the book, calling the novel "totally immoral in its tone."

Mark Twain, for his part, loved controversy because of its publicity. As he wrote to Charles Webster:.

In 1902, The Brooklyn Public Library banned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, claiming that "Huck was constantly sweating and itching."

In general, the debate around Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has focused on the basis of the book's language, which has been socially objected to. Huck Finn, Jim and many other characters in the book speak regional dialects of the South. It doesn't sound like Queen's English at all. More specifically, the use of the word n to refer to Jim and other African American characters in the book, along with the portrayal of these characters, has offended some readers who consider the book to be racist.

This book was the fifth most contested book in the United States in the 1990s, according to the American Library Association.

In response to public pressure, some publishers have replaced the term "slave" or "servant" that Mark used in his book, which is derogatory to African Americans. In 2015, an electronic version of the book, published by CleanReader, offered a version of the book with three different filtering levels: clean, cleaner, and squeaky clean - an odd edition for an author known to be fond of swearing and speaking the way it is.

2. Call of the ancestors

Published in 1903, Call of the Wild is Jack London's most widely read book and is generally considered a masterpiece of his early period.

Critic Maxwell Geismar in 1960 called the book a beautiful prose poem, and editor Franklin Walker said it should be on the same shelf as Walden and Huckleberry Finn.

But, as you might expect, such a classic of American literature will be on the list of the 100 most frequently contested classics of the American Library Association at number thirty-three.

Since the main character is a dog, it is sometimes mistakenly classified as children's literature, but the truth is that the novel carries a dark connotation, and the mature concepts explored in the story contain numerous scenes of cruelty and violence.

In this story, a domesticated dog named Buck returns to his primal instincts after serving as a sled dog in the Yukon during the famous 19th century Klondike gold rush.

The book is commonly contested in the United States for its violent scenes. Jack London personally experienced the Klondike Gold Rush, including its triumphs and horrors. The early 20th century Yukon was not a Sunday picnic.

Dogs like Buck were cheap and animal cruelty was common, leading some to criticize London for glorifying or condoning animal cruelty.

In addition, the actual atrocities committed against native tribes in the name of the Manifesto of Destiny were considered just and honorable after the great Indian wars that destroyed cultures across the United States.

This common ground is being explored in the tribe that hosts Baka. This tribe is entirely created by London, but some groups believe that the negative light it sheds on Yihat is a blow to all local tribes.

But most notably, according to the University of Pennsylvania, Jack's work was not approved by several European dictatorships in the 1920s and 1930s, as a result of which many regimes censored his work.

In 1929, Italy and Yugoslavia banned Call of the Wild for being too radical. London's works were also burned by the Nazi Party in 1933 because he had a notorious reputation as an outspoken supporter of socialism.

The writer devoted both of his novels "The Sea Wolf" and "Martin Eden" to criticism of Friedrich Nietzsche's ideas about the superman and radical individualism, which London considered selfish and selfish.

The themes in Call of the Wild, however, are often compared to Nietzsche's superhuman, because this person is improving himself to become something new, something more human than before. Nietzsche's perspective was for man to transcend the need for gods and become a god himself.

In Call of the Wild, Buck first breaks away from his comfortable existence, becomes a successful sled dog, and eventually becomes the leader of a wolf pack, an alpha male. Dogs are descended from wolves, being tamed, domesticated and selectively bred. In essence, they were created by the gods - humanity. Having discovered his true nature, his true self, God was now dead. Buck himself was a god.

While there have been several major incidents against Call of the Wild in recent years, the reasons above remain ominously close to many of the other names on this list. When headlines promoting individuality and self-discovery are often bumped into swift action to silence their words in fear that it will trigger a revolution, we must remain always vigilant about our right to read those words if we choose to.

Perhaps this is what most terrified Europe after World War I, when its ruling class fought to maintain power. The power of a dictatorship rests on the fact that its population is bound by the state. The last thing they wanted was a book floating in the air about how to find your true “I” and throw off the shackles of slavery.

3. To Kill a Mockingbird

The school board's decision to remove To Kill a Mockingbird from eighth grade curricula in Biloxi, Mississippi is the latest in a long string of attempts to ban Harper Lee's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Since its publication in 1960, a novel about a white lawyer defending a black man from being falsely accused of raping a white woman has become one of the most controversial books in the United States.

According to James Larue, director of the American Library Association's Office of Intellectual Freedom, critics over the past century have generally referred directly to the book's strong language, discussions of sexuality and rape, and the use of the n-word.

The Biloxi School Council simply says that this book makes people feel uncomfortable. Larue finds this argument unconvincing, arguing:.

One of the earliest and most visible problems was in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1966. In this case, the school board said it would remove the book from district schools, citing rape in the book and the accusation that the novel was immoral.

However, the council backed down after residents complained about it in letters to local newspapers. One of the most prominent critics of this decision was Lee herself, who wrote a letter to the editor of the Richmond news leader. During the 1970s and 1980s, school boards and parents continued to challenge the book for its dirty or shoddy content and racial slurs.

4. Grapes of anger

John Steinbeck's 1939 classic The Grapes of Wrath, which chronicles the family's unhappy migration from Oklahoma to the West, is a perfect example of how the book association is once again struggling to remove objectionable reading material from bookshelves that opposes their ideas and outlook on life.

The book immediately became a bestseller across the country, but it was also banned and burned in a number of places, including Kern County, California - the final migration destination of the Jude family.

Although Steinbeck's novel was fictional, it is firmly rooted in real events: three years before the book was published, a drought in the United States forced hundreds of thousands of migrants to move to California. Penniless and homeless, many landed in Kern County.

When the book was published, some influential people felt that they were being portrayed unfairly, they felt that Steinbeck did not give them credit for the efforts they made to help migrants. One member of the district supervisory board denounced the book as slander and lie. In August 1939, the Council, by four votes to one, approved a resolution outlawing Grapes of Wrath in district libraries and schools.

Rick Worthzman, author of the new book Extreme Obscenity, says the events in Kern County illustrate the deep chasm between left and right in California in the 1930s.

One influential local who pushed for the ban was Bill Camp, head of the local associate farmers, a group of large landowners who were fiercely opposed to organized labor. Camp and his colleagues knew how to get the bill passed in the State Legislature, and they also knew how to behave physically.

Camp wanted to publicize the district's opposition to the Grapes of Wrath. Convinced that many of the migrants were also offended by their portrayal in the novel, he hired one of his workers, Clell Pruett, to burn the book.

Pruett never read the novel, but he heard a radio broadcast about it that angered him, and so he readily agreed to take part in what Worthzman describes as being burned on camera. In the photo, Camp and another leader of the Associated Farmers stand side by side, while Pruett holds a book over a trash can and sets it on fire.

Meanwhile, local librarian Gretchen Knife worked quietly to lift the ban. At the risk of losing her job, she turned to the county authorities and wrote a letter asking them to reverse her decision.

Her arguments may have been eloquent, but they didn't work. Supervisory authorities upheld the ban and it remained in effect for a year and a half.

5. Ulysses

James Joyce's Ulysses has tiptoed the line between obscenity and genius since its serial publication in 1918-20. The novel, which chronicles the life of struggling artist Stephen Daedalus, Jewish advertiser Leopold Bloom and Leopold's betraying wife Molly Bloom, was met with concurrent approval by Joyce's modernist contemporaries such as Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, and scorn by anti-obscurantists in English-speaking countries. Committees in the United States, such as the New York Society for the Fight Against Vice, worked successfully to ban Ulysses after a passage in which the protagonist indulged himself was published. As such, it was considered smuggled in America for over a decade, until a landmark obscenity decision was made in a US court.

One book called Ulysses lifted the ban in 1933. Britain also banned the novel until the mid-1930s for its overt intimacy and graphic depiction of bodily functions. Australia, however, forcibly repressed the novel from its publication until the mid-1950s, as the former customs minister argued that Ulysses was based on ridicule of the creator and the Church, and that such books had a detrimental effect on the people of Australia. While some may currently view the book as obscene and unfit for public reading, Ulysses is highly regarded by universities around the world for its skillful portrayal of stream of consciousness, as well as for its carefully structured storyline that intertwines various themes of modern human struggles.

6. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Some may be surprised to find Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" on the list of prohibited books. However, a children's book about a little girl's dream of following a rabbit down a burrow only to face an absurd world full of illogicality and various creatures of all shapes, colors, and sizes has been attacked and banned throughout time for several different reasons.

In 1900, in the United States, the school removed the book from its curriculum, claiming that it contained curses and hints of masturbation and other sexual fantasies, and also diminished the status of some authority figures in the eyes of children. Three decades later, on the other side of the world, a province in China banned the book for endowing animals with a human language, as the provincial governor feared that the consequences of raising animals on the same echelon with humans could be disastrous for society.

And back in the States, about a decade after Disney's animated production of Alice in Wonderland in 1951, the book was greeted with dismay again, this time by parents in America's changing culture in the 1960s, as they believed that she, along with the film, encouraged an emerging drug culture with its open allusion to the use of hallucinogenic drugs. Despite similar admonitions from various cultural sects, Carroll's pun-filled work has stood the test of time and has been praised for its insightful and original criticism of the then emerging mathematical, political, and social systems.

7. Lolita

On the eve of the publication of "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov, even its author pondered whether it should be published. It took some persuasion from his wife to get the novel published, and it was released by the famous pornographic press in France in 1955. Lolita's controversial status fueled its success, placing it at the top of bestseller lists around the world.

However, its content, which was presented to readers in the form of the memoirs of a deceased European intellectual who fanatically yearned for a twelve-year-old girl, turned out to be too obscene for a number of authorities and was banned in the first decade of its publication in France, England, Argentina, New Zealand and South Africa, as well as in some American communities. One reviewer of the novel called it "highbrow pornography, embellished with English vocabulary that would have astounded the editors of the Oxford Dictionary." Despite harsh criticism, Nabokov's masterpiece did not go unread and earned the praise of scientists who glorified his reflections on the psychology of love. Today, Lolita enjoys prohibition-free status, coupled with the fact that it is known as one of the most innovative novels of the twentieth century.

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