Coming-of-Age Fiction (Our Freedom to Read)

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Author: Steven Otfinoski

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our

Freedom to

Read

COMING - OF -AGE Fiction

Our Freedom to Read Coming-of-Age Fiction Outsider Fiction Classic Books Science Fiction and Fantasy

our

Freedom to

Read

COMING - OF -AGE fiction

Steven Otfinoski

Coming-of-Age Fiction Copyright © 2009 by Infobase Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Otfinoski, Steven. Our freedom to read / Steven Otfinoski. v. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Contents: [1] Classic books — [2] Coming-of-age fiction — [3] Outsider fiction — [4] Science fiction and fantasy. ISBN 978-1-60413-029-4 (v. 1 : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-1-60413-030-0 (v. 2 : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-1-60413-031-7 (v. 3 : acid-free paper) — ISBN 978-1-60413-032-4 (v. 4 : acid-free paper) 1. Prohibited books—Bibliography—Juvenile literature. 2. Challenged books— Bibliography—Juvenile literature. 3. Expurgated books—Bibliography—Juvenile literature. 4. Prohibited books—United States—Bibliography—Juvenile literature. 5. Challenged books— United States—Bibliography—Juvenile literature. 6. Expurgated books—United States— Bibliography—Juvenile literature. 7. Children’s stories—Censorship—United States—Case studies—Juvenile literature. 8. Young adult fiction—Censorship—United States—Case studies—Juvenile literature. 9. Children’s stories—Bio-bibliography—Juvenile literature. 10. Young adult fiction—Bio-bibliography—Juvenile literature. I. Title. Z1019.O84 2009 098'.1—dc22 2008032030 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Text design by Erika K. Arroyo Cover design by Ben Peterson Printed in the United States of America Bang KT 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

A Contents Introduction

The Learning Tree (1963)

7 15

Gordon Parks

Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (1971)

21

Judy Blume

A Day No Pigs Would Die (1972)

27

Robert Newton Peck

Julie of the Wolves (1972)

33

Jean Craighead George

A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973)

39

Alice Childress

Deenie (1973)

43

Judy Blume

My Brother Sam Is Dead (1974)

51

James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

Forever . . . (1975)

57

Judy Blume

One Fat Summer (1977)

63

Robert Lipsyte

Killing Mr. Griffin (1978)

71

Lois Duncan

The Great Gilly Hopkins (1978)

77

Katherine Paterson

The Alice Books (1985– )

83

Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

So Far from the Bamboo Grove (1986) Yoko Kawashima Watkins

89

Jack (1989)

95

A.M. Homes

Athletic Shorts (1991)

99

Chris Crutcher

We All Fall Down (1991)

105

Robert Cormier

Iceman (1994)

111

Chris Lynch

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things (2003)

117

Carolyn Mackler

Appendix 1: The American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000”

121

Appendix 2: The American Library Association’s “10 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2006” and the Reasons for the Challenges

125

Appendix 3: The American Library Association’s “10 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2007” and the Reasons for the Challenges

127

Appendix 4: Web sites on Book Censorship and Challenges

129

Appendix 5: Banned Books Week

131

Index

133

A Introduction “Coming of age” is one of the major themes of world literature. It has been the focal point of works by many of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, from James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway to J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee. Coming of age is a particularly central theme to contemporary young-adult (YA) novels. As they grow from adolescence into adulthood, many of these books’ readers are experiencing the same life changes as the protagonists they are reading about. The very nature of this journey makes it controversial for some young people, their parents, and their teachers. “Growing up” is not a course taught in most middle and high schools. Children often are on their own in dealing with sexual maturation, personal identity, awareness of death, and other major life issues. Many parents find it difficult to discuss these challenging subjects with their children, and young people sometimes look to the wrong models to learn about these things. The young-adult authors represented in this book are unafraid to tackle these serious issues, and that has led their books to face numerous challenges and attempts at censorship in schools and libraries. These authors refuse to sugarcoat or ignore life changes and how young people respond to them. For Judy Blume, one of the most challenged young-adult authors alive today, “puberty is not a dirty subject.” She once remarked, “When books are taken away from them [students] because the natural events of puberty are discussed, the message is that these biological processes must not be anticipated or discussed, even though they are going to occur. This is bowing to fear. This is giving the censors power. That bothers me more than anything.”

Coming-of-age Fiction

Aside from the inevitable issue of bad language, challenges to these coming-of-age novels have been based largely on material dealing with sex, death, racism, and violence. The writers insist they deal with these issues not to titillate and shock but to be honest about the world facing young people today. “We cannot protect our children from this world, which is a scary place,” said Katherine Paterson. “The only thing we can do is to help them develop an inner strength to meet the inevitable challenges they will face.” While many challengers are shocked by the controversial subject matter in these books, they fail to see that the author often takes a responsible approach to it. For example, while a girl’s first sexual experience with a boy is the central theme of Blume’s Forever, the book presents a responsible model for sexually active teens. The main character visits a Planned Parenthood center in New York City and learns about the consequences of unprotected sex. In a special note to an updated edition of the novel, Blume talks about AIDS and HIV and why young people need to protect themselves from these sexually communicable diseases. Similarly, in another Blume novel, Deenie, a teacher answers girls’ questions about sex, including about masturbation. In Blume’s Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, the boy protagonist indulges in voyeurism but comes to a more mature view of sex and female companionship. Sex also is an everyday fact of life for Newt Winger, the young protagonist in Gordon Parks’s The Learning Tree. In the novel’s opening scene, Newt has an unexpected sexual experience with an older woman. Newt’s mother’s wise advice helps him to sort out his mixed feelings about sex and to make responsible choices. Homosexuality is a theme in several stories in Chris Crutcher’s Athletic Shorts, and in Judy Blume’s Forever, a minor character is so confused about his sexuality that he attempts suicide. In A.M. Homes’s Jack, the central character struggles with the discovery that his father is a homosexual and has left his mother for another man. Homosexuals, in these books, are shown to be normal, average people, no different from anyone else. Death, often violent death, is a grim fact of everyday life in the small Kansas town of Cherokee Flats in Parks’s The Learning Tree and the rural farm in Robert Newton Peck’s A Day No Pigs Would Die. The young hockey player in Chris Lynch’s Iceman is so obsessed with death and dying that he tries to experience what it must be

Introduction

like by lying in a coffin in a nearby mortuary. The protagonist of My Brother Sam Is Dead, by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier, must face the senseless deaths of both his father and his older brother, who stood on separate sides during the Revolutionary War. In Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice books, young Alice must deal with the death of her mother and spends much of her time searching for a female role model to help her survive the various crises of adolescence. By coming to terms with death, many of these characters find a reason for living and are inspired to make something of their lives. As the man dying of AIDS in the story “In The Time I Get,” in Athletic Shorts, tells his nephew, “I think there’s only one lesson if you want the truth. I think we’re just supposed to see how far we can go in whatever time we get. . . . It don’t much matter when you step up and face things, it just matters that you do. I guess your time’s here for that.” Understanding hate and racism is equally important for the young protagonists in these books. Newt in The Learning Tree must learn not to hate the people who hate him, in contrast to his former friend and nemesis, Marcus, who is so consumed by hatred that it ends up destroying him. Gilly’s racist attitude in Paterson’s The Great Gilly Hopkins comes more out of her own anger at and alienation from the world than from any deep-seated feelings. The central character in Chris Crutcher’s “Telephone Man” has been indoctrinated in racism by his father and only changes his attitude toward black people after a ground-shaking personal experience. Violence, much of it meaningless, permeates several of these novels. Buddy, one of the four teens who trash a house for no good reason in Robert Cormier’s We All Fall Down, comes to regret the act and tries to make amends for it. Peer pressure causes another group of “normal” teens to kidnap their teacher in Lois Duncan’s Killing Mr. Griffin. When he accidentally dies in the incident, they pay a high price for their folly. An attempted rape drives the plot of Jean Craighead George’s Julie of the Wolves, while the heroine of Yoko Kawashima Watkins’s So Far from the Bamboo Grove sees other Japanese girls raped by vengeful Korean men as she flees wartorn Korea in 1945. Virginia, the overweight protagonist of Carolyn Mackler’s The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, must deal with the knowledge that her idealized brother is guilty of date rape. Peer pressure on the mean streets of Harlem drives Benjie, the

10 Coming-of-age Fiction

protagonist of Alice Childress’s A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich, to drug addiction and to stealing to help supply his habit. Eric, the central character in Iceman, comes to the realization that his unbridled violence on the hockey rink is a result of an inner anger that he can understand and control. Sometimes, however, violence is a necessary part of life. Bobby Marks, the overweight hero of Robert Lipsyte’s One Fat Summer, gains a new self-respect when he stands up to a bully and defeats him. Experience in the world helps to shape and mold these characters and to make them, in most cases, better human beings and more able to cope with the adult world they are about to enter. Parents, teachers, and school administrators who have challenged these books have done so with honest and good motives. However, they often miss the point that children cannot be protected from reality, however much we may wish to do so. Perhaps author Chris Crutcher put it best when he wrote: “The battle about censorship may seem simple: a conflict between two ways of thinking about child development and learning. But it’s way more than that. . . . Being against censorship doesn’t mean you don’t think there is a lot of trash out there or that there is a lot of material you’d simply ignore if you get the chance. Being against censorship, in my opinion, is more about respect, not respect for the material, but respect for humans and their abilities to make decisions and find quality in books and movies and television and have intelligent discussions. In the end, it’s simply hard to see how we can protect people by keeping them ignorant.” Among the 18 books represented in this volume, 10 of them made the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000.” Carolyn Mackler’s The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things; Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Alice books; and Chris Crutcher’s Athletic Shorts are in the ALA’s “10 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2006.” Several other authors in this book have been recipients of the prestigious Margaret A. Edwards Award for excellence in young-adult literature.

Challenges, Censorship, and This Book

What exactly is a challenge to a book? The American Library Association (ALA), founded in 1876, monitors challenges and defines a

Introduction 11

book challenge as a “formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.” According to the ALA, there were 546 book challenges in 2006, an increase of 30 percent from 2005. The organization considers that number in “the mid-range,” and rather low compared to the peak years of the mid-1990s, when book challenges numbered more than 750 annually. Some experts attribute the surge at that time to the appearance of the Harry Potter series, one of the most challenged book series of all time. Why does the ALA care about these challenges and monitor them so closely? “One of the things we believe is that materials need to be available to people so that they can make their own choices,” former associate director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom Cynthia Robinson has said. “Removing books suppresses that point of view. . . . The First Amendment is very important to librarians and one of our most important rights as Americans. It’s so fundamental I think people often take it for granted. . . . Supporting intellectual freedom [and] the right of individuals and their families to decide what they’re going to read is one of the association’s most important missions and by far one of its most public.” Most book challenges noted by the ALA are made initially by parents of students who become aware of a book’s content when their child brings it home to read or study. In many cases these challengers reject the honest depiction of the real world—and the language and behavior of those who inhabit it. Some adults do not care for their children to know what life is like in the netherworld of the drug addict or behind the locked gates of a boys’ reformatory or a psychiatric hospital. Other challenges arise over the very issues that the authors are challenging and criticizing, such as physical or sexual child abuse, racism, and bullying in schools. Still other critics resent the proposition put forth in a number of these books that it is largely the system—whether school administrators, misguided parents, or corrupt governments—that is to blame for the injustices depicted. They are disturbed by the authors’ sharp criticism of authority in all its forms. When a formal challenge is made, the school district takes it seriously. In most cases, the school board or school superintendent will turn the matter over to a special review committee for consideration.


The committee may already be established, or in many cases may only be formed when needed. The committee members may include school administrators, media specialists, teachers, parents, area residents, and even students. The challenged book may continue to remain in use in the school or in circulation in the school library while the committee is deliberating, although in some cases the book is removed during this period. After reading the challenged book, possibly hearing more from the challengers, and discussing the matter among themselves, the committee members come up with a recommendation that is passed on to the school board. The school board then meets to consider the recommendation and votes to either accept the recommendation as it is or to make another decision about the challenged book. Sometimes the school superintendent will play an important role in this process. Many challenges are rejected. According to Judith Krug, director of ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, only 30 out of the 546 challenged books actually were banned in 2006. These bans can take several forms. Some result in the complete removal of a book from the classroom and school library. In other cases, the book is taken from the classroom but is retained on the school library shelves, sometimes with limited access to certain grades or to be borrowed only with written parental permission. In still other cases, the challenged book is removed from one grade but taught in a higher grade, where it is considered more appropriate. Some book challenges are questionable or even absurd. In one case, parents in McKinleyville, California, challenged the joke book Laugh Lines in 1990 and wanted it removed from the elementary school library. The challenge claimed it was “demeaning” toward readers who read the riddles and couldn’t come up with the correct answers. Other challenges are trivial. One parent, noted in a “Landmark Challenge” in this series, complained about the single use of a swear word by a character in a novel. Some challenges are misguided. According to the ALA, the most challenged book in both 2006 and 2007 was the children’s picture book And Tango Makes Three, the true story of two male penguins that raise a baby penguin without a female. Parents complained that the book promoted a homosexual lifestyle. The same book was praised by the ALA as one of the best picture books of 2006.

Introduction 13

“So many adults are exhausting themselves worrying about other people corrupting their children with books, they’re turning kids off to reading instead of turning them on,” wrote Judy Blume in the introduction to a collection of stories by banned writers. “In this age of censorship I mourn the loss of books that will never be written, I mourn the voices that will be silenced—writers’ voices, teachers’ voices, students’ voices—and all because of fear.” The most important part of this volume is not the description of the challenges themselves but that of the courageous voices that rose up in opposition—to support these books and to defend them. In many cases they made the difference—ending a challenge or bringing a banned book back into the classroom or back onto the library shelf. These books are a cry for tolerance and justice in our world. They stand up for diversity and the differences that make us each unique individuals. If we deny ourselves their wisdom, wit, and power, we will all end up as the ultimate losers—estranged from one another, society, and ourselves. The format of this book is straightforward. Each entry covers a single banned or challenged book or series of books, presented in chronological order by date of publication. Entries start with a concise summary of the book in the “What Happens in” section. This is followed by “Challenges and Censorship,” which may include some or all of the following: the history of how the author came to write the book, its initial reception from reviewers and readers, and the main reasons why it has been challenged in schools. Next is one or more “Landmark Challenges” described in detail. Some landmark challenges include several related challenges. Finally, each entry concludes with a list of sources for “Further Reading” and a brief biography of the author or authors in “About the Author of.” Why a series about book banning? Can we learn something from these cases of challenges and censorship of fiction? The American Library Association thinks so, which is why it reports on challenges from around the nation and the world in its monthly Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, a publication now more than a half century old. The ALA also sponsors Banned Books Week each year to focus attention on books that have been banned. “Throughout history, there always have been a few people who don’t want information to be freely available. And this is still true,”


said ALA president Leslie Burger during Banned Books Week 2006. “The reason more books aren’t banned is because community residents—with librarians, teachers, and journalists—stand up and speak out for their freedom to read.” As long as we all recognize censorship when it arises and speak out against it, that freedom will remain secure.

A The Learning Tree (1963) by Gordon Parks What Happens in The Learning Tree

This autobiographical novel is set in the small Kansas town of Cherokee Flats in the 1920s. The central character, Newt Winger, is a sensitive, intelligent African-American youth who experiences life’s ups and downs over the course of several years. Throughout these experiences he tries to remember his wise mother’s advice. “Cherokee Flats is sorta like a fruit tree,” she tells him. “Some of the people are good and some of them are bad—just like the fruit on a tree. . . . No matter if you go or stay, think of Cherokee Flats like that till the day you die—let it be your learnin’ tree.” Newt learns much from the good people, like his parents, Judge Cavanaugh, and Doc Cravens, who is white but was raised by Newt’s mother and cares for her in her final illness. He also learns bitter lessons from the bad people, including his former friend Marcus Savage and Marcus’s good-for-nothing father, Booker. After Marcus beats Jake Kiner, a white neighbor who catches Marcus and Newt stealing peaches from his orchard, Marcus is sent to reform school for a year. He returns more bitter than ever and eager to get revenge on Newt, whom he believes ratted on him. Meanwhile, Newt falls in love with a new girl in town, Arcella. But Arcella is seduced by a white boy and becomes pregnant. She and her family leave town suddenly, and Newt is left heartbroken. Newt focuses on his future and refuses to let his white guidance counselor at school discourage him from aiming for college and a better life. To earn money, Newt goes to work for Jake Kiner. While 15


resting in Kiner’s hayloft, he witnesses Kiner’s murder by Booker Savage. Savage sets up another man, the town drunk Silas Newhall, for the murder. Newt doesn’t want to see the innocent Silas be unjustly condemned for the murder, but he is afraid that, if he tells the authorities that Booker, who is black, is the murderer, it will start a racial war in the town. With the support of his mother, Newt finally testifies on Silas’s behalf. Booker Savage, who is present in the courtroom during his testimony, seizes the sheriff ’s gun and flees. Pursued by a lynch mob, he shoots himself to death rather than face the mob’s fury. Marcus blames Newt for his father’s death and vows vengeance. Newt’s mother, who has a heart condition, worsens and then dies. Newt will go north to live with his older sisters and start a new life. But before Newt leaves, Marcus finds him down by the river and attempts to shoot him. The sheriff arrives, and Marcus falls to his death while trying to escape. Death, which has preoccupied Newt throughout the book, once more claims someone close to him. However, thanks to his mother’s courage in the face of death, he will no longer fear it. Parks adapted his novel into a major motion picture in 1969. In 1989 the film version was selected to the National Film Registry in the Library of Congress.

Challenges and Censorship

Since its publication in 1963, The Learning Tree has been praised as one of the best African-American coming-of-age novels for young readers. “Mr. Parks has given us the whole picture—the town life, the Negro family through whom the town is viewed, the young hero and his friends—in an admirable chronicle which is honest, remarkably balanced and mature, and often very entertaining, despite the inevitable tensions and tragedies, which are implicit in the novel’s theme,” wrote literary critic Maxwell Geismar. “[It is the] story of black people struggling against tremendous odds, a powerful novel from life, a book of great literary worth,” said Sam Sheats, at the time the only black member of the Board of Education in Pasadena, California. Sheats’s praise, however, was in response to an order to have the book removed from the supplemental reading list in local schools in 1972. That censorship and subsequent

The Learning Tree 17

challenges to Parks’s novel have been based on its language, sexual overtones, and numerous acts of violence, including fatal accidents, homicide, murder, and the suicide of a main antagonist.

Landmark Challenge: Trouble in Cheyenne

“The person who wrote [this book] must have been deviant,” declared Glenn Williams, a concerned parent challenging the use of The Learning Tree at McCormick Junior High School in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in 1976. “I could not in good faith say to any child, ‘Here, read this book, it will give you an insight into the colored man.’” But insight was exactly what Julie Luhr, who used the book in her ethnic literature class at McCormick, felt her students were getting. “With fifteen students I’ve gotten more responses to this book than with [Dickens’s] Great Expectations or Shakespeare,” she told board members. “I offer students a choice in books so I can make reading on the junior-high level a joy.” McCormick’s challenge led to a formal assessment of the book by a review committee. After due consideration, the committee recommended that the novel was valid as a document of one ethnic group and should be restricted to ethnic classes at the junior- and seniorhigh levels. Students in those classes who didn’t want to read the book, they added, should be excused from doing so. This didn’t satisfy parents opposed to the book. “I don’t feel this book is necessary to the teaching curriculum and will pursue the issue until the book is banned completely,” vowed parent Sandy Wallace. Assistant superintendent Leo Breeden sided with the parents, disregarded the review committee’s recommendation, and ordered copies of the book to be removed from all district schools. The Cheyenne Teachers Association filed a grievance with Laramie County School District No. 1, claiming that only the school board had the right to remove a book. Breeden was undeterred by the protest. The controversy drew the attention of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). “The point is that some of these book protestors do not even know who our black leaders are and apparently are not too interested in finding out,” said NAACP branch president Alberta Johnson, “and that kind of negligence and indifference is an insult to black people.”


Landmark Challenge: A Burning Issue in Burnsville

The Learning Tree was one of three books targeted for banning by Burnsville, Minnesota, school-board member Neil Charpentier and his wife in January 1992. The other two were Different Seasons, a collection of horror novellas by Stephen King, and The Great Santini, a novel by Pat Conroy. All three were being taught in a contemporary literature course at Eagan High School. The Reconsideration Review Committee closely examined the books and decided in June that The Great Santini should be removed but that the other two books should be kept in the high-school curriculum. Unsatisfied, the Charpentiers took their complaint to the school board. “I felt The Learning Tree was negative, violent, and nihilistic in its focus,” said Mary Charpentier. “My son, who reads only what is requested of him, is reading crude and objectionable books in the name of education.” Curriculum director Terry Tofte defended the review committee’s decision at the school-board meeting. “[L]iterary quality of the book as a whole outweighed concern over certain passages,” he said. “The matter before us tonight is not a matter of selection, it is a matter of censorship.” School-board chairman Don Westerhausen agreed with this assessment. “Selectors look for what is best,” he said. “Censors judge a book by a few passages they don’t like. Selectors review the material as a whole. I trust and encourage our professional staff to select the material that they use.” At their December meeting, the board voted to uphold the committee recommendation and keep The Learning Tree in the classroom and the school library at Eagan.

Landmark Challenge: A Clergyman Speaks Out

The Reverend Fleet Belle took his responsibilities as a member of the Mobile County, Alabama, school board as seriously as he took his clerical duties. So when he received complaints from parents and grandparents about the inclusion of The Learning Tree on a summer reading list for incoming freshmen at LeFlore High School in 2006, he was concerned.

The Learning Tree 19

At the next school-board meeting Reverend Belle said, “The language is inappropriate and unacceptable.” To demonstrate, he read several passages from the novel and declared, “This book should not have ever been on the reading list for our fine children in the Mobile County public school system. I take exception to that.” Lee Taylor, assistant superintendent for curriculum, said, “We could put a lot of other good books in their [students’] hands that don’t have the offensive language.” In a rare move, Random House, which had published the book under the auspices of Ballantine Books, came to the book’s defense. “We very proudly publish it, and we stand by the book as an important reading experience,” said the publisher’s spokesperson Stuart Applebaum. “Removing The Learning Tree from school reading lists would be a terrible thing because it might demotivate many prospective readers from enjoying and being inspired by a classic coming-ofage memoir. The book has been a nurturing and compelling reading experience for generations of readers, young and old.” Reverend Belle insisted the book be removed from all Mobile schools. “It’s too suggestive for ninth-graders to be reading,” he said. “Matter of fact, I would say it’s too suggestive for even a senior in high school to be reading as literature.” LeFlore principal D.H. Robinson said she would personally examine and screen every work of required reading for the school.

Further Reading

“Burnsville, Minnesota.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, March 1993: 56. “Cheyenne, Wyoming.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, May 1976: 63. “Mobile, Alabama.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, November 2006: 290. Available online: https://members.ala.org/nif/v55n6/dateline. html. “Pasadena, California.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, November 1972: 155.

About the Author of The Learning Tree Gordon Parks (1912–2006) A true Renaissance man, Gordon Roger Alexander Buchannan Parks pursued many careers in his long life and succeeded at all of them. He


was born on November 30, 1912, in Fort Scott, Kansas, the youngest of 15 children in a poor farming family. After his mother died when he was 14, he went to live with an older sister in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Parks didn’t get along with his sister’s husband, however, and the husband eventually kicked out the rebellious teenager. Parks then began a wandering existence, working various jobs as he roamed from state to state. He worked as a busboy in a Chicago restaurant, played piano in a Minneapolis bordello, was a waiter on a transcontinental train, and played semi-professional basketball. At age 25, Parks bought a used camera for $7.50 and taught himself to take pictures. He began to work as a photographer for the Farm Security Administration and later served as a correspondent during World War II for the Office of War Information. In 1949 Parks became the first black photographer to work for Life magazine. He remained at Life for 20 years, documenting the civil rights movement in the States and important stories in France, Spain, and Italy. One of his last assignments at Life was covering the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. In 1969 Parks signed on to direct a film version of his novel The Learning Tree. He became the first black man to direct a major American studio movie. He went on to direct several more movies, including Shaft (1971), the first major movie to feature a black action hero, and Leadbelly (1976), a biographical film about the life of the legendary blues singer. Parks composed the musical scores for The Learning Tree and three other pictures. His serious compositions included Martin, a ballet in honor of the slain civil rights leader. Parks wrote novels, memoirs, and several volumes of poetry. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1988. He died of cancer on March 7, 2006, at age 93.

A Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (1971) by Judy Blume What Happens in Then Again, Maybe I Won’t

Thirteen-year-old Tony Miglione faces many changes in his life when his dad accepts a new job with a major business. The family moves from lower-middle-class New Jersey to upper-middle-class Long Island. Here Tony makes friends with Joel, son of the affluent family next door. While Joel is polite to his parents and teaches Tony how to play chess, he’s no angel. To his distress, Tony soon learns that Joel is fond of making crank phone calls and shoplifting. Then there’s Joel’s pretty sixteen-year-old sister, Lisa. Tony discovers that Lisa’s bedroom is right across from his own, and he soon finds himself secretly watching her undress at night. When Christmas comes, Tony’s only gift request is a pair of binoculars. He tells his parents he wants them for bird watching. Being attracted to older girls isn’t the only sign of Tony’s sexual maturing; he also is bothered by wet dreams and embarrassing erections at school. In addition, Tony has issues with his family and their new status in the world. He is disturbed by his mother’s social climbing and his older brother Frankie’s “selling out.” Frankie gives up a teaching career to go work for his dad’s new boss. It isn’t long before all this inner turmoil causes physical problems for Tony. He suffers stomach distress that eventually lands him in the hospital for a time; he also starts to see a psychiatrist. When Joel is finally caught shoplifting in a sports store, his father decides to send him off to a military academy in the fall to straighten him out. Tony begins to take an interest in Corky, a girl his own age who likes him. She isn’t as pretty as Lisa, but she really cares about 21


him. In the end, Tony, now 14, is growing up. He is more accepting of people for who they are. He even thinks about moving his binoculars to an inconvenient place so he won’t be tempted to look at Lisa when she’s undressing. He might stop looking, but then again, maybe he won’t.


Then Again, Maybe I Won’t, published in 1971, was Judy Blume’s second young-adult (YA) novel. “I decided it would be interesting to try out life as a 12-year-old boy,” wrote Blume. “I was curious about what might happen to a close-knit family who have always struggled to make ends meet, if suddenly they strike it rich. It was a complicated book to write. I had trouble pulling the story together.” Like her first YA novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, this book immediately aroused controversy. Most of the challenges to the novel relate to its sexual content and references to “wet dreams” (nocturnal male emissions), erections, and voyeurism, which is a central issue in the book. Some challengers have sought to limit access to the novel for grade-school children, for whom they find it inappropriate, but not for those in middle or high school.

Landmark Challenge: “Undesirable Attitudes” in Louisiana

For the mother of a seventh-grade student in Covington, Louisiana, “Judy Blume was trying to address subjects she is not qualified to address.” These subjects included an adolescent boy’s wet dreams, his embarrassing erections, and his habit of watching his next-door neighbor undress through a bedroom window. The parent’s 1983 challenge also extended to the young-adult novel Edith Jackson, by Rosa Guy. She found this story of an African-American girl growing up in Harlem in New York City “nothing more than trash” and “perverse garbage.” Officials in St. Tammany Parish (County) formed a review committee to investigate the complaint. On January 5, 1984, a staff memo from the superintendent of schools C.J. Schoen ordered libraries in all junior and senior high schools to remove the two challenged books from their shelves because “their treatment of immorality and voyeurism do not provide for the growth of desirable attitudes.”

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The action was protested vigorously by two Covington High School librarians, Bonnie Bess Wood and Susan Samson. In a letter to the district, they praised both books for “their widely acclaimed literary merit in dealing with the problems of adolescents” and expressed deep concern over the lack of information given on the members of the review committee and their findings. “Don’t we have a right to know who these books’ accusers are?” they asked. When their letter went unanswered, the librarians took their protest to the media. Local newspapers publicized their story and many residents supported their cause. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the St. Tammany Public School Librarians Association joined the chorus of disapproval, and an appeal of the decision was granted by the school board on March 20.

Landmark Challenge: The “Prudent Thing to Do” in Peoria

It didn’t take a formal complaint to get the library director in School District 150 in Peoria, Illinois, to remove copies of Then Again, Maybe I Won’t and two other Judy Blume novels from school library shelves. The actions were preceded by the recommendations of two review committees that found the books’ sexual content and strong language unacceptable. Associate superintendent of schools Dennis Gainey defended the action that shocked many by saying, “Did we have to do it? No. Do we think it is the prudent thing to do? Yes.” Among those shocked by the removal was author Blume herself. “It’s just the most incredible story,” she said. “I’ve never heard of anything like this.” The other two banned Blume books were Deenie and Blubber. The school board met on December 3, 1984, to consider what to do about the banning. Motions to leave the ban as it was and to restrict the books to older students both failed. Then a compromise was reached. The board voted 5 to 2 to return the books to the school library shelves, but only for the use of older students. Younger students could read them, but only with the written permission of parents. Before the vote, a number of residents were allowed to speak for or against the banning. None did so more eloquently than seventhgrader Jennie Crankshaw, who, like the protagonist in Deenie, has a


curved spine and wears a back brace. “The sexual content and language is not as noticeable as the administration seems to be making it,” Crankshaw said. “If the terms Ms. Blume uses are objectionable, then should the dictionaries, encyclopedias, and Bible, which also contain these terms, also be banned?” Some board members favored keeping the Blume books. “The committee was directed to look at the sexual content and the language,” said board member Marilyn Ketay after the vote. “I’ve read the books four or five times in the last two weeks, and I’m trying to figure out if I was missing something.” If the books’ language offended challengers, Ketay warned that “[t]hey better not go on our playgrounds or our school grounds and listen to the kids because it’s a lot worse than that.” Many of those present at the meeting were pleased with the school board’s final decision. “I think it’s wonderful,” said Barbara Van Auken, president of the Peoria chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “It vindicates my belief in elected officials. It’s a compromise that balances the rights of everybody concerned.” Judy Blume was less enthusiastic. “I’d rather that they weren’t restricted, but I’m pleased,” she reported. “Limited access is better than no access, because it means that the books are there. Any child that wants to read that book can.”

Later Challenges

Unlike some of Blume’s novels, Then Again, Maybe I Won’t has been successfully defended against numerous challenges. In 1989 parents in Salem-Keizer, Oregon, called the novel a “dismal tale of a young boy’s inability to cope and his very inappropriate responses to the changes taking place in his life.” They asked that it be removed from all local elementary and middle schools. The school board rejected their challenge. A similar challenge to remove the novel from elementary school libraries in Tyrone, Pennsylvania, in 1990 was voted down 6 to 2 by the school board. A second challenge to remove the book from a suggested reading list was considered by a review committee and also was rejected. For parents in Hartford, Wisconsin, in 1991, Blume’s novel “promoted shoplifting and voyeurism,” among other antisocial behaviors,

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and for these reasons they requested it be taken off the elementary school library shelves. A board-appointed review committee rejected the challenge and recommended keeping the novel in libraries.

Further Reading

“Covington, Louisiana.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, May 1984: 69–70. “Peoria, Illinois.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, January 1984: 8. Sova, Dawn B. Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds. New York, N.Y.: Facts On File, 2006. “A Split Decision: Judy Blume in Peoria.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, March 1985: 33, 58.

About the Author of Then Again, Maybe I Won’t Judy Blume (1938– ) No contemporary young-adult author’s books have been challenged and censored as frequently as those written by Judy Blume. She has been a pioneer in writing about the problems and feelings of growing adolescents that had previously been overlooked or ignored in children’s literature. She was born Judy Sussman on February 12, 1938, in Elizabeth, New Jersey. After attending the only all-girls public high school in the state, where she was a feature editor for the school newspaper, she enrolled at New York University (NYU) and earned a bachelor’s degree in education in 1961. At the end of her junior year she married lawyer John Blume. The Blumes settled down in suburban New Jersey, where Judy became a housewife and mother to two children. She still loved writing and was inspired after taking an NYU course in writing for children. Blume soon published her first work, a children’s picture book. The middle-grade novel Iggie’s House followed, and in 1970 her first young-adult novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, appeared. The latter is considered a pioneer in YA fiction for dealing honestly and candidly with issues that concerned adolescents, especially love and sex. Each subsequent novel broke new ground: Deenie (1973) was about a girl suffering from curvature of the spine, Blubber (1974) dealt with weight problems and peer pressure, and Forever (1975) described a high school senior’s


first sexual relationship. Less controversial were Blume’s middlegrade books, especially the best-selling Fudge series, which has been adapted for television and the musical stage. Blume’s books have sold more than 70 million copies to date and have been translated into 26 languages. Blume speaks out often against censorship of her books and those of fellow authors and is a supporter of the National Coalition Against Censorship and other organizations. She is concerned with the steady increase in challenges in school libraries and classrooms since the 1980s. “I feel badly for the children because it sends a message to them that there is something wrong with reading,” she has said, “that we don’t want them to read this book because there’s something in it that we don’t want them to know.”

A A Day No Pigs Would Die (1972) by Robert Newton Peck What Happens in A Day No Pigs Would Die

This powerful semi-autobiographical novel is set on a small Shaker farm in rural Vermont. It is the story of 12-year-old Robert Peck, who in one short year makes the difficult journey from childhood to maturity. As the novel opens, Rob successfully saves the life of a neighbor’s Holstein cow as she struggles to give birth to twin calves. For Rob’s good deed the grateful neighbor gives him a baby pig. Rob names his pet pig Pinky and dotes on her. Pinky grows to 300 pounds and wins first prize at a county fair for best-behaved pig. Haven, Rob’s father, hopes to breed Pinky with a 600-pound pig named Samson, but Pinky is hurt in the brutal coupling and turns out to be barren, unable to have babies. The family faces a difficult winter with a failed apple crop and Pinky’s fate is decided: the pig must be slaughtered to provide the Pecks with food. Although his heart is broken, Rob dutifully helps his father, the region’s official hog butcher, in killing his beloved pet and preparing the meat to be stored for the coming winter. For Rob, it is not the last death of someone close to him that he must endure. In the spring, his father, who has been suffering quietly from a terminal illness, dies in his sleep. Rob, now the head of the family, arranges his father’s funeral and digs his grave. Because Haven Peck was the local hog butcher, this will be “a day no pigs would die.” At age 13, Rob is ready to assume the adult responsibilities of running the farm and caring for his mother and aunt. 27



Since its first publication in 1972, A Day No Pigs Would Die has been hailed as a classic coming-of-age novel for teens, profoundly moving in its honest depiction of the harshness of rural farm life and the powerful effect of love and death on the life of a young boy about to become a man. “[This novel] is a stunning little dramatization of the brutality of life on a Vermont farm, of the necessary cruelty of nature, and of one family’s attempt to transcend the hardness of life by accepting it,” wrote critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. But that same “cruelty of nature” has proven to be a stumbling block to appreciating the novel for many parents and school officials, who have questioned the degree of realism Peck brought to his book, feeling it is too much for young readers. There were few challenges in schools for the first decade of the book’s life, but they have increased dramatically since then. The novel ranked seventeenth on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000.” It made the ALA’s “10 Most Frequently Challenged Books” list in both 1996 and 1997. Most of the challenges have centered on the violence done to and committed by animals. The pig-breeding scene has been particularly criticized. The raping of Pinky the sow by the boar, Samson, has been condemned not only for what it is, but also as a comment on human rape. “It’s written like an animal version of a woman getting raped rather than a description of natural animal behavior,” declared one challenger in Colorado in 1985. In 1992 a challenger in New Jersey went even further, saying the “book’s depiction of animal mating suggests that any man can force a woman to have sex against her will.” Other parts of the novel singled out for their graphic violence are the opening scene of the calves’ birthing and the death struggle of a terrier and a weasel.

Early Challenges

Many early challenges of Peck’s novel in school districts were harsh and vehement, but they did not manage to convince officials to remove the book from classrooms and school libraries. Parents in Jefferson County, Colorado, in 1988 staunchly condemned the book as being “bigoted against Baptists and women” and as depicting “violence, hatred, animal cruelty, and murder.” The school board nevertheless voted to retain the book.

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A parent of a ninth-grader in the Carbondale, Illinois, school district challenged the book for its profanity. The school board called a review committee to consider the complaint, but when the parent didn’t show up at a hearing, the matter was dropped and the book was retained. In 1992 a review committee in Califon, New Jersey, considered a challenge by a parent asking to remove the novel from a sixth-grade reading class based on the violence committed toward animals and the description of animals mating. The committee recommended keeping the book, and the school board voted unanimously to do so.

Landmark Challenge: A Teacher Takes a Stand

Veteran teacher Harriet Parks was only two years away from retirement and full benefits when she abruptly resigned from St. Lawrence Catholic School in Utica, Michigan, in November 1996. Students and parents were hurt and saddened by her sudden leave-taking, which school officials claimed was a straightforward case of early retirement. Three months later Parks went public with the real reason for her departure from St. Lawrence School. “I want to let my students know I love them and they had nothing to do with this,” she declared on February 2, 1997. What it did have to do with was an ugly example of book censorship. Parks was teaching A Day No Pigs Would Die in her seventhgrade literature class. The novel had been used in the school since 1991, but this was the first year that Parks had taught it. The class had read the first five chapters of the book when school officials received a complaint from an unidentified parent who objected to the violence in the pig-breeding scene. Officials immediately ordered Parks to stop teaching the book. Shortly after, Parks made the decision to leave the school out of anger over the handling of the banning. “They made the decision to remove the book from the classroom without talking to me or other teachers,” she said in a statement. “I just decided I was not going to teach there anymore.” What bothered her even more about the school’s decision was the fact that no one took the time to read the book before banning it. “If they had read the whole book, they would see it’s a beautiful story about a very loving, caring, and respectful family,” said Parks. “What


I wanted to bring out was the love and respect these family members showed for each other when they had nothing.” “In my memory, this is unprecedented,” said Howard Simon, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), commenting on Parks’s resignation. “I think this teacher deserves to be honored and applauded for having such courage of her convictions that she would quit her job.” Ned McGrath, a spokesperson for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Detroit, explained that it was church policy for individual schools to handle parental complaints as they saw fit. “If parents brought up problems with a book, the administration should take a look at it, no matter what book it is,” McGrath said. Parks, who worked at St. Lawrence School for 17 years and specialized in teaching the New Testament, didn’t know what the future held for her. “I’m just waiting to see what the Lord wants me to do,” she said.

Further Reading

“Anderson, Missouri.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, January 1997: 10. “Book Banned, and Teacher Quit Catholic School Kept It Under Wraps.” Detroit Free Press, February 3, 1997: 1A. Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries, Revised and Expanded Edition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Green, Jonathon, and Nicholas J. Karolides. Encyclopedia of Censorship, New Edition. New York, N.Y.: Facts On File, 2005. “Utica, Michigan.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, May 1997: 64. Young Adult Library Services Association. Hit List: Frequently Challenged Books for Young Adults. Chicago, Ill.: American Library Association, 1996.

About the Author of A Day No Pigs Would Die Robert Newton Peck (1928– ) Robert Peck, like the protagonist of his most famous novel, was born and raised on a poor farm in rural Vermont. His birth date is February 17, 1928, although he has never given the location where he was

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born. Some sources claim he was born in his mother’s hometown of Nashville, Tennessee, and later moved to Vermont with his family. Peck was the first person in his family to learn to read and write. He attributes much of his curiosity for learning to an influential grade school teacher whom he memorialized as the character Miss Kelly in his Soup series of novels. As a young man Peck worked as a lumberjack, a hog butcher, and a paper-mill worker. He served in the U.S. Army during World War II, seeing action as a machine-gunner in Italy, France, and Germany. After the war, he attended Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and graduated in 1953. At Rollins, he befriended fellow student Fred Rogers, who would go on to become the host of the popular children’s television program Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. When Peck married librarian Dorothy Houston in 1958, Rogers was his best man at the wedding. Peck worked as an advertising executive for a number of years, writing television commercial jingles. In 1972 he published his first novel, A Day No Pigs Would Die. Its critical and public success led him to quit his job and to devote himself full time to writing for children and young adults. Among his more than 50 books are the best-selling series of Soup novels, about a mischievous boy who makes life interesting in his small Vermont town. Another popular series is centered on Trig, an adolescent tomboy. Peck also has written several historical novels set in colonial and Revolutionary America, including Fawn (1975) and The King’s Iron (1977), plus five nonfiction books, numerous poems, and three television specials. Peck lives in Longwood, Florida, and is director of the Rollins College Writers Conference. He was diagnosed with oral cancer in 1993 but has since recovered. “My richest talent is making a kid smile,” he has said. “And getting him to read and write.”

A Julie of the Wolves (1972) by Jean Craighead George What Happens in Julie of the Wolves

Miyax, a young Eskimo girl (called Julie in English), lives in the Alaskan wilderness with her widowed father, Kapugen, a seal hunter. Kapugen teaches his daughter how to survive in their harsh environment and gives her a deep, abiding respect for the ways of nature. When Julie is nine years old, she goes to live with her aunt Martha, who enrolls her in a school. When she turns thirteen, Julie is to marry her father’s hunting partner’s son, Daniel. The arranged marriage is a tradition in their culture. While she learns to read and write and corresponds with a pen pal named Amy, who lives in San Francisco, California, Julie is miserable much of the time. Daniel’s family treats her poorly, and his father, Naka, turns abusive when drunk. Daniel, who is mentally weak, tries to rape Julie to prove his manhood. After this terrible experience, Julie flees their home and sets out for San Francisco, where she hopes to stay with Amy. She becomes lost on the frozen tundra and encounters a wolf pack. Following her father’s advice, Julie learns to communicate with the wolves and eventually gains their trust. They adopt her into their pack and even share their food with her. As she prepares to continue on her journey south, Julie sights a plane overhead filled with poachers. From the plane, they shoot and kill the wolf pack’s leader from the plane and wound his son Kapu. Julie decides to stay with the wolves and help nurse Kapu back to health so he can take over as leader of the pack, assuring its survival. 33


She then leaves the wolves and discovers her father living in an Eskimo village. Julie is disillusioned to see that Kapugen has given up the old Eskimo ways and has married a white woman. She leaves him and returns to the wilderness. Upon reflection, however, she realizes that the old way of Eskimo life is disappearing and that she, too, must learn to adapt. As the novel ends, Julie prepares to return to her father.


Julie of the Wolves, published more than 35 years ago, today is considered a classic of children’s literature. It won the Newbery Medal in 1973 and also was a National Book Award finalist. As of 2003 the novel had sold around 8 million copies. Author Jean Craighead George got the idea for her novel after reading about research on wolves at the Naval Arctic Research Laboratory in Barrow, Alaska. “I was fascinated by their findings,” she has said, “that wolves were actually friendly, lived in a well-run society, and communicated with each other using sound, sight, posture, and scent.” Intrigued, George traveled to Barrow in 1971 with her son Luke to see the research firsthand. She became so involved in the scientists’ work that she learned how to communicate with the wolves herself, as Julie does in the novel. When she finished the book, however, George had no idea how successful it would become. “I thought I’d be severely criticized because it dealt with communication between man and wolf,” she has said. “At that time, the first experiments were just being run on animal communication. I didn’t think an audience would tolerate it. But they did. They loved it.” Enthusiasm for the book, however, has not been universal. Julie of the Wolves has been challenged frequently in schools, coming in thirty-eighth on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000.” It ranked in tenth place on the ALA’s most challenged books for 2002–2003. Many of the challenges have been in reaction to the graphic rape attempt by Julie’s intended husband. Other challenges have focused on additional acts of violence, instances of language, and the book’s inappropriateness for certain age groups. Perhaps the most unusual challenge to Julie of the Wolves occurred in Mexico, Missouri, in

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January 1982, where parents complained that the book contained “socialist, communist, evolutionary, and anti-family themes.” The challenge was reviewed by the local school board and rejected.

Landmark Challenges: Responses to a Rape

The attempted rape of Julie by her intended husband, the slowthinking Daniel, is one of the most controversial episodes in Julie of the Wolves and has led to numerous challenges in schools, some with very different outcomes. In Chandler, Arizona, elementary-school teacher Julie Hardy used the novel in an Antarctic studies unit for third-, fourth-, and fifth-graders. In 1994 some parents complained that the rape scene was inappropriate for the age group. In responding to the complaints, the school’s principal suggested that the book be removed from the third- and fourth-grade curriculum and retained in fifth grade, but only with teachers’ clear explanations of what was going on. In a December 1995 challenge sent to school officials, parents in Palmdale, California, felt that even fifth-graders were too young to be exposed to the rape scene. The novel already had been reviewed and approved for school use by three separate review boards when the new challenge was made. The Published Materials Reexamination Committee listened to the complaints and once again reviewed the text. They recommended that the book be used only in the seventh-grade curriculum. Sixth grade was the focal point in Pulaski Township, Pennsylvania, when parents Nellie and Bernie Vorderbrueggen challenged the book’s rape scene in March 1996. Superintendent John Ross formed a review committee that included teachers, librarians, administrators, and parents. The committee decided the book was appropriate for the curriculum. But the Vorderbrueggens refused to accept this judgment and appealed to the school board, which overturned the committee’s ruling and voted 5 to 4 to remove Julie of the Wolves. The outcome was more positive in Ramona, California, when parent Teresa Duncan made her challenge in October 1996. She objected to the book’s inclusion on a required reading list for sixthgraders at Hanson Lane Elementary School. The school allowed Duncan’s daughter to read an alternative title. Assistant superintendent Joe Annicharico, Jr., however, said that the district’s literary


review committee would change the novel’s status from “required” reading to “recommended” reading.

Further Reading

Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries, Revised and Expanded Edition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Karolides, Nicholas J. Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds. New York, N.Y.: Facts On File, 2006. Rockman, Connie C., ed. Eighth Book of Junior Authors and Illustrators. New York, N.Y.: H.W. Wilson, 2000. Steindorf, Sara. “For Her, Writing Comes Naturally.” The Christian Science Monitor, September 9, 2003: 18. Willliams, Karen. “Talking with Wolves, Then Writing About Them: Interview with Jean Craighead George.” The Christian Science Monitor, September 25, 1997: 82.

About the Author of Julie of the Wolves Jean Craighead George (1919– ) Jean Craighead George was born on July 2, 1919, near Washington, D.C. Her father was a naturalist with the Forest Service and studied plants and insects. She and her siblings grew up amid the wonders of nature, camping and canoeing on weekends. Jean’s first pet was a turkey vulture. “I was surprised when I got to kindergarten to find out that everybody didn’t have a vulture for a pet,” she has said. Later, her brothers Frank and John gave her a falcon to raise. They were among the first falconers—people who train falcons to hunt—in the United States and eventually became experts on the grizzly bear. She attended Pennsylvania State University and graduated with a B.A. in 1941. She became a reporter for the Washington Post and then met John George, a naturalist serving in the Navy during World War II. The couple married and had four children. The Georges moved to Chappaqua, New York, in 1957, where John got a job at the Bronx Zoo. Jean has lived in the same house ever since. The Georges’ home and yard were an animal lover’s dream, inhabited by 173 wild animals, including everything from owls to tarantulas. “I would just watch the animals and their stories

Julie of the Wolves 37

would roll out when I wrote,” George has said. Her first books were animal biographies written with her husband. In 1959 she published the semi-autobiographical novel My Side of the Mountain, about a boy who runs away from his New York City home to live in the forest, where he captures and trains a falcon. It became a Newbery Honor Book. After her divorce in 1964, George continued to write, turning out more books for young adults, as well as articles on nature for Reader’s Digest. Julie of the Wolves, published in 1972, became her most popular and celebrated novel. More than 20 years later she wrote a sequel, Julie (1994), and a third book about Julie, Julie’s Wolf Pack (1997). Among George’s more than 100 other books are 2 sequels to My Side of the Mountain and an autobiography, Journey Inward (1982). She also has written many books for younger readers, a number of which she illustrated as well. “It never struck me as anything I ever did to change lives; I’m not a preacher, I just told what I loved,” she has said of her writing. “I really believe in stories to bring children into knowledge; you can hang so much information on a good story, and they aren’t even aware they’re getting it, but pretty soon they know the whole ecology of the tundra and the life history of the wolf, and they want more, and they go to other books.”

A A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich (1973) by Alice Childress What Happens in A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich

Thirteen-year-old Benjie Johnson is growing up in the early 1970s on the mean streets of Harlem in New York City, where drugs and violence are a way of life. On a dare from his friend Jimmy-Lee, Benjie tries marijuana. The drug helps him escape from his problems at home with his mother, Rose, and his grandmother. Rose lives with a maintenance worker named Butler who tries to be a father to Benjie, but the boy doesn’t feel worthy or comfortable with his stepfather. At the urging of some gang members, Benjie tries heroin and becomes addicted to the powerful drug. His life begins to go into a tailspin. He loses interest in school and stops going to classes. A concerned teacher, Nigeria Greene, recognizes Benjie’s problem and contacts Rose about placing Benjie in a drug rehabilitation clinic. But when Benjie stops going to the clinic, Greene finally gives up on him. Butler seems to be Benjie’s last hope. The stepfather cares about him, but Benjie steals from him repeatedly. Butler finally moves out, fearing he will lose his temper and hurt Benjie. Benjie, however, pursues him to a boardinghouse and attempts to steal from him again. In a confrontation, Benjie almost falls to his death from the building’s rooftop, but he is saved by Butler. A grateful Benjie agrees to go back to the rehab clinic at Butler’s urging. As the novel ends, Butler is waiting for Benjie to show up for his appointment at the clinic. Will Benjie turn his life around and make a fresh start? The ending of this painfully honest novel leaves the reader guessing. 39



A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich, published in 1973, is Alice Childress’s most popular novel. It depicts ghetto life and its effects on youth with a brutal honesty that has made it a target for censors and challengers in schools. It was one of the 11 books singled out for banning by the school board of the Island Trees, New York, system beginning in 1975. While board members called the book “immoral” and “just plain filthy,” the two main objections were far less serious. The book was criticized for the use of the word “ain’t” in the title and for an episode in which George Washington was identified as a slaveholder (which he was). The case turned into a major censorship landmark when the Supreme Court ruled against the school board for banning the books. More recent challenges in school systems in Darlington, South Carolina, and Bel Air, Maryland, have been based largely on the book’s coarse language, sexual descriptions, and depiction of the drug culture on the streets.

Landmark Challenge: A Backward Review in Savannah

In early 1978, a mother of a student at DeRenne Middle School in Savannah, Georgia, complained about the “vulgar language” in A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich, which her child had to read in class. A media review committee was appointed to study the book and the complaint. The committee recommended that the book be retained in school libraries, but the school board turned a deaf ear. It ordered all copies of the novel to be removed from school libraries in the district as a “temporary” measure while the book was being further evaluated. Some community leaders, including State Representative Bobby Hill, objected to the action. “If they have a complaint,” he said at a public school-board meeting, “they should investigate it—not pull the book and then investigate it.” Hill found the review system “backward” and hoped to change it. School board president Donald Knapp did not back down, however. In April 1978 he made the temporary banning final. In his words, the book was “garbage.” “We don’t need people going around and calling other people ‘jive-asses’ and saying ‘Fuck the society,’” Knapp said.

A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich 41

These remarks incensed the Georgia Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee. They urged in a letter that the book be returned to school library shelves. The committee wanted to see a return of “the freedom of your students to read those materials which are, in the opinions of professionals in your system charged with their education, supportive of educational growth and personal development.”

Further Reading

“Savannah, Georgia.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, July 1978: 87. Sova, Dawn B. Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Social Grounds. New York, N.Y.: Facts On File, 1998.

About the Author of A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich Alice Childress (1916–1994) Renowned as a groundbreaking black actress, playwright, and children’s author, Alice Childress was an important African-American writer of her generation. She was born on October 12, 1916, in Charleston, South Carolina, into a middle-class family. Her parents separated when she was nine, and she moved to New York City’s Harlem to live with her maternal grandmother. Although uneducated herself, Alice’s grandmother knew the value of learning and encouraged her to read and write. After graduating from public high school, Childress studied drama at the American Negro Theater (ANT) in New York City. She began acting in ANT productions, and when their successful comedy Anna Lucasta moved to Broadway in 1944, Childress went with it. In 1950 Childress’s first play, the one-act Florence, was produced Off Broadway, making Childress the first black woman to have a play produced professionally in New York. Other plays followed, including Trouble in Mind (1955), which won the Off-Broadway award called the Obie for best original play, the first time it was won by a female playwright. Childress’s first novel, Like One of the Family, was published in 1956, but it wasn’t until the appearance of A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich in 1973 that her career as a young-adult author took off. The American Library Association named it the Best Young Adult Book of 1975. A film version starring Cicely Tyson, Paul Winfield,


and Kevin Hooks was released in 1978, with a screenplay by Childress. Later novels included A Short Walk (1979), Rainbow Jordan (1981), and Those Other People (1989), her sole adult novel. Childress also continued to write plays. One of her last stageworks was Moms (1987), a biographical play about the life of famed black comedienne Moms Mabley. Childress died of cancer on August 14, 1994. She wrote, she once said, “to interpret the ‘ordinary’ because they are not ordinary. Each human is uniquely different. . . . I concentrate on portraying have-nots in a have society, those seldom singled out by mass media, except as source material for derogatory humor and/or condescending clinical, social analysis.”

A Deenie (1973) by Judy Blume What Happens in Deenie

Deenie is the story of a 13-year-old girl with scoliosis. In the beginning of the story, Deenie Fenner’s mother wants her to be a model and takes her from one agency to another looking for modeling jobs. Deenie puts up with her mother’s aspirations for her, despite the fact that what she really wants is to be a school cheerleader. But when she auditions, she doesn’t make the squad. Soon after, Mrs. Rappoport, Deenie’s gym teacher, notices something wrong with Deenie’s posture and suggests that her parents take her to a doctor. They do, and a specialist diagnoses that Deenie is suffering from scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. To avoid surgery, the doctors recommend that Deenie wear a body brace for four years to correct the problem. At first, Deenie wants nothing to do with the brace, but when she realizes the alternative is to have a deformed back like an old lady she knows, she reluctantly agrees to it. Once she has the brace, Deenie finds it an embarrassment at school. Her friends try to ignore it, which only makes it worse for Deenie. She has a hard time getting to sleep at night in the brace and develops a skin rash from chafing because she refuses to wear an undershirt under the brace. Gradually Deenie comes to accept the brace and even goes to a school dance wearing it. She refuses to dance, however, until Buddy, a boy she has a crush on, asks her. He kisses her in the locker room, but Deenie feels uncomfortable in this situation with the brace on. Mrs. Fenner is relieved to find out that modeling agents will be willing to consider Deenie in four years, when the brace is removed 43


and she is 17. While Deenie tries to accept her mother’s meddling in her life, her older sister, Helen, rebels. Their mother disapproves of Helen dating a boy who works at their father’s gas station and effectively breaks up the relationship. Her father lets the boy go because he can’t afford his salary, due to Deenie’s medical bills. Deenie is afraid that Helen will blame her for this situation, but instead Helen hugs her. Their mother’s meddling has drawn the sisters closer together. In the final chapter, Deenie is off to a party at a friend’s house. She wants to remove her brace for the duration of the party, but her father insists that she must keep it on for her own good. She plans to remove the brace later at the party and brings a shopping bag with other clothes to change into. Once at the party, Deenie has second thoughts. She knows her father loves her, and she doesn’t want to lie to him. Buddy takes Deenie into a corner and kisses her again. He asks her if she can take off the brace, but Deenie refuses. When her father picks her up after the party, he asks what the shopping bag was for. Indicating her acceptance of the brace and herself, Deenie answers, “Something I thought I might need for the party . . . that I didn’t need, after all.”


By her own account, Judy Blume believes Deenie to be her most challenged book. This may be surprising, considering it is about a serious, noncontroversial subject—scoliosis, or curvature of the spine, a condition many teenage girls face. Furthermore, unlike other Blume novels, there is no bad language in the book. So why is Deenie ranked forty-sixth on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000”? The answer is a taboo subject that is described several times, albeit briefly, in the novel—female masturbation. Three times in the course of the novel Deenie touches a “special place” on her body that makes her feel good and relieves stress. In another scene, her gym teacher, Mrs. Rappoport, answers girls’ questions about sex. She reads this question submitted anonymously by Deenie: “Do normal people touch their bodies before they go to sleep and is it all right to do that?” In her answer, Mrs. Rappoport dismisses myths of how masturbation affects a young person’s health and tells the girls that it

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is normal behavior. “Nobody ever went crazy from masturbating but a lot of young people make themselves sick from worrying about it,” she says. Numerous parents, teachers, and administrators apparently feel very differently and have criticized Blume for bringing up this topic. Many of the challenges are based on the book being inappropriate for elementary-age students, not older ones. Even parents who see masturbation in a less controversial light have challenged the book. As one parent in Spring Hill, Florida, put it, “What she [her daughter] read isn’t bad,” she said. “I just don’t want her to learn about it from Judy Blume.”

Landmark Challenge: A Crack in the First Amendment in Gwinnett County

What started as a challenge against one book in 1985 turned into a much bigger challenge that potentially could have affected every school in Gwinnett County, Georgia. For some parents and educators, the challenge threatened the First Amendment rights of students and what they could read. Theresa Wilson, parent of a nine-year-old daughter at Beaver Ridge Elementary School, called Deenie “obscene” because it dared to talk openly about masturbation. She requested that the school media committee remove the novel from the school library. In June, the seven-member committee found the book “inappropriate” for elementary students and voted unanimously to take it off the shelves. School principal Gary Fairley, who supported the removal, did not, however, agree with Wilson’s assessment of Deenie. “We felt it was a well-done book with some value, but probably would not be understood by the younger children at our school,” he said. Fairley considered limiting access to the book to older students, but admitted that the school had “no way of segregating the materials at the library.” Wilson, however, was just beginning her crusade against Deenie. She asked the county school board to ban the book from all county school libraries. A special 13-member review committee convened and, on August 7, voted by a large majority against the Wilson proposal.


But Wilson and her supporters would not give up. They presented a petition with 800 signatures calling for the removal of Deenie from county school libraries. On August 9, the Gwinnett County school board rejected the committee’s recommendation and voted 4 to 1 to ban the novel as requested. “This is not a bookbanning issue, this is a parents’ control issue,” stated school-board member Bob Wood. “We have to do what parents want.” School superintendent Alton Crews said, “I think our system worked well.” At the same time, Crews admitted he was concerned about “the possibility of banning a book because one group has an opposition.” Some supporters of the novel pointed out that the issue of masturbation was a very small part of the book, which dealt with larger themes of parental expectations and how a teen lives with having a disability. Theresa Wilson was unimpressed. “You don’t have to read the whole book,” she declared. “Trash is trash, doesn’t matter what else is in the book.” But other parents, students, and teachers were angered by the board’s actions and the reasoning behind them. On September 2, 200 parents and students held a meeting to organize opposition to the banning of Deenie. Jimmy Highfill, a high-school senior, formed Students Advocating Freedom in Education (SAFE), a group opposed to book censorship. After appearing before a school-board meeting on September 17, SAFE leaders were told that the county board could not review the ban, but that the matter had to go before the state board of education. A week later, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), representing three Gwinnett County parents, asked the Georgia Board of Education to reverse the ban on Deenie. The ACLU accused the Gwinnett Board of Education’s actions of being “motivated by political, ideological, and religious pressures” and “not based upon a fair and rational assessment of the needs of students.” Jim Litchfield, one of the parents represented, claimed that “[t]he banning of Deenie represents a crack in our First Amendment rights, and if we allow this crack to remain, we may lose our First Amendment rights.” Wilson and her supporters went on the counterattack. In an October 15 school-board meeting, Wilson requested the establishment of a restricted shelf in each of Gwinnett County’s 52 school

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libraries. The shelf would fill up with not only books that addressed sexual matters, but also those dealing with drugs, the occult, communism, and globalism. After three hours, the board rejected her proposal in a 5 to 0 vote and reaffirmed the current policy of parents making individual challenges to books. For board member Jeff Moore, the process was still faulty. “Why don’t you put the burden on the parents who don’t want their children to read a book?” he asked. But Wilson was undeterred in her struggle. “It only makes us more determined,” she declared. “We are going to find every [objectionable] book in Gwinnett County and bring it before the board. We are going to keep them busy.” Good to her word, in December Wilson asked an elementary school committee to remove another novel, Norma Klein’s Confessions of an Only Child, from the Beaver Ridge school library. Her challenge was based on a father using one profanity in the book. The committee voted 9 to 1 on December 18 against the book’s removal.

Landmark Challenge: The Case of the Disappearing Books

When Jerri Trammell’s daughter read to her parts of Deenie, which was a part of the Accelerated Reader program at Spring Hill Elementary School in Florida, she was shocked. “It gave a very detailed description of it [masturbation], as well as a discussion,” Trammell said. “I feel that subject is not appropriate in any form in an elementary school.” Her complaint to school administrators in fall 2003 was passed on to a county committee that included a student, parents, and a curriculum specialist among its eight members. News of the challenge reached author Judy Blume, who was dismayed. “It’s been a while since I heard anything [negative] about Deenie,” said Blume. “I’ve had so many wonderful letters about Deenie recently. . . . It just really got to me this time.” While the committee prepared to do its work, copies of the book were checked out by a committee member and not returned. “I haven’t seen it and I haven’t heard a word,” said Spring Hill media specialist Margaret Cushing. “That is one effective way of censoring; just take all the copies.”


According to district policy, challenged instructional material is supposed to “remain available and in use unless otherwise directed by the superintendent or his designee.” “The only reason for pulling it right away was if the committee was going to review it right away,” said board member Gail David. “One parent has, for all practical purposes, decided the book won’t be on the shelves.” School principal John DiRienzo had an unusual solution to the issue. In a memo, he proposed that Deenie be kept behind the librarian’s desk and be available for reading only by teachers and parents. The Trammells, who claim never to have sought the book’s removal, said they would be satisfied if a warning label were put on the novel. Weeks passed and then months. The review committee claimed it could not get a full quorum of members for a meeting. In response, the St. Petersburg Times, the area’s largest newspaper, challenged the committee’s plans to meet in private. A circuit judge granted a temporary injunction against the meeting being held unless it was open to residents. Finally, on January 28, 2004, the committee met and recommended Deenie be removed from all district elementary schools. The school board met on February 17 and rejected the committee’s recommendation, ordering the book to be returned to the library shelves, with the stipulation that only students with written parental permission could borrow it. “I can’t see denying its availability if some parents decide it’s okay for their child to read,” said Jim Malcolm, school-board vice chairperson. “Some people are offended by the content. Others aren’t. I will defer to individual parental choice for their child.”

Further Reading

Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries, Revised and Expanded Edition. Westsport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. “Gwinnett County, Georgia.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, September 1985: 151; November 1985: 193; January 1986: 8–9. “Hernando County, Florida.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, May 2004: 95–96. Available online: https://members.ala.org/nif/v53n3/ dateline.html.

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“Spring Hill, Florida.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, January 2004: 8. Available online: https://members.ala.org/nif/v53n1/dateline.html. “Spring Hill, Florida.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, March 2004: 48–49. Available online: https://members.ala.org/nif/v53n2/dateline. html.

About the Author of Deenie

See biography in Then Again, Maybe I Won’t entry.

A My Brother Sam Is Dead (1974) by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier What Happens in My Brother Sam Is Dead

Timothy Meeker lives in Redding, Connecticut, where his father runs a tavern during the Revolutionary War. The town of Redding is known for its British sympathies. Tim’s father, Life, is a Tory (a supporter of the British monarchy), although he stays mostly uninvolved in the coming war. Tim’s older brother, Sam, however, leaves Yale University to join the patriot cause as a soldier. Despite his father’s pleas, Sam refuses to stay at home and joins up with American General Benedict Arnold’s army. Tim’s loyalties are confused and divided. While he looks up to Sam as a role model, he is shocked when Sam later returns home to take their father’s rifle to fight the British with. The missing rifle almost costs their father his life when patriot soldiers confiscate weapons from Tories in Redding and don’t believe Life’s story that his is missing. Fearful that he will lose another son to the war, Life refuses to allow Tim to carry “business letters” for Mr. Heron, a Tory who may be a double agent, down to the coastal town of Fairfield. Tim, itching for adventure and meaning in his young life, goes behind his father’s back and agrees to be Heron’s messenger. However, Sam’s girlfriend, Betsy, seizes the letter from him before he can deliver it, fearful it will reveal information to the British that will result in Sam’s death. Tim finally gets his chance for adventure when his father takes him along to Westchester County, New York, to sell cattle and buy needed goods for the tavern. On their way back to Redding, Life is captured—Tim believes by patriots—and the young boy must get the wagonload of goods back home by himself. Tim, convinced that his 51


father is in a rebel prison, takes over the duties of running the tavern with his mother. As they wait for word of Life’s whereabouts, British soldiers come to town and have a shoot-out with a group of local patriots. Tim is horrified by the brutal deaths of several local citizens at the hands of the British and decides to no longer be a Tory. Later, word arrives of his father’s death from disease on a prison ship. Ironically, he was being held not by patriots, but by the British. As the war drags on, Tim and his mother struggle to keep the tavern open, based on rising wartime prices and the scarcity of goods. Sam, now a veteran soldier, returns home. While checking on the cattle in their barn, the brothers catch two fellow soldiers stealing the cows. But the thieves beat Sam and accuse him of stealing his own family’s animals. Both Tim and his mother plead Sam’s case with General Israel Putnam, but their pleas fall on deaf ears. Sam’s innocence or guilt is less a question than the fact that an example must be set so other soldiers don’t loot and turn the local people against the patriot cause. Tim tries to free Sam from jail but fails in his efforts. He attends his brother’s execution by firing squad. In an epilogue, Tim, now an old man, looks back on his life and the senseless deaths of his brother and father. While he believes the Revolution was basically a good war that won American freedom, he still wonders “that there might have been another way, beside war, to achieve the same end.”


A historical novel set during the American Revolution would seem an unlikely book to be challenged in schools, especially a novel as well-researched and historically accurate as My Brother Sam Is Dead. The book is one of the classics of contemporary young-adult fiction, having been named a Newbery Honor Book and a National Book Award winner. Regardless, the novel has stirred up great controversy and has been challenged numerous times since its publication more than three decades ago. It ranked twelfth on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000.” It also placed high in People for the American Way’s annual ranking of most challenged books in 1994–1995 (tenth place) and 1995–1996 (eleventh place). So what is all the fuss about?

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Numerous challenges have focused on the book’s use of profanity and violence. However, the appearance of words such as “goddamn” and “bastard” is infrequent, compared with the bad language in many contemporary young-adult novels. Most of the violence, while bloody, is brief, including the severing of a patriot’s head by a British officer. Underlying the challenges is something subtler that is not always verbalized by critical parents and school officials. The Revolutionary War, as depicted by the Collier brothers, is not the clear-cut black-and-white struggle that is often shown in novels and movies. It is as much a civil war as a revolution, pitting brother against brother and father against son. Historians, in recent decades, have confirmed this viewpoint as an accurate one. According to no less an upstanding American patriot than John Adams, our second president, one-third of American colonists were in favor of independence, one-third were against it and supported the British, and one-third remained largely undecided during the war. Tim Meeker, the young protagonist of the novel, belongs to this third group for much of the story. His brother, Sam, is a patriot, fighting for freedom from Britain, and their father is a staunch Tory, although largely a passive one, loyal to the British. Some Tories are shown to be decent people, and some patriots are shown to be opportunists, using the war as an excuse to steal, pillage, and murder. This confusing but historically accurate picture is not one some “patriotic” Americans find acceptable. As one 1992 challenge in Connecticut—the setting for the novel—put it, the book is “inflammatory propaganda” and “an inaccurate description of the Revolutionary War.” A 1995 challenge in California accused the authors of depicting Americans “as barbaric, unfeeling, and almost inhuman.”

Landmark Challenge: An “R” Rating for a Revolutionary Novel

Judy Nelson, parent of a fifth-grader at Bidwell Elementary School in Antioch, California, didn’t like the historical novel her son was reading in a social studies class. In 1996 she told the local school board that My Brother Sam Is Dead should be removed from elementary school libraries for its profanity and violence.


“If this was made into a movie, I’m fairly sure it would get an ‘R’ rating,” Nelson told the board. “It’s not so much to me banning books, it’s just that I feel the book is not appropriate—with the language and the violence—for 10-year-old kids.” The Antioch school district appointed a panel made up of teachers, parents, and administrators to review the novel. The panel came back to the board in June with an unusual recommendation. The members suggested that the book could continue to be taught in social studies classes, but the teacher should read it aloud, omitting any swear words and “editing the graphic details” of the deaths of Sam Meeker and the black patriot Ned. They further recommended that students, with their parents, be given a detailed overview of the book and how teachers would teach it in the classroom. On hearing of the panel’s recommendation, Nelson said, “I agree with what they did. I just wanted them to go further.” At a September meeting, the school board voted to accept the recommendations and also agreed to keep the novel on the shelves of elementary school libraries. “I’d never vote to take a book off the shelf,” said Rebecca Williams Knapp, a board trustee. “This is the United States. I’m not going to let that happen.”

Landmark Challenges: Two in Old Virginia

Virginia, home to many of the heroes of the Revolutionary War, is a state with a rich history. But that history didn’t stop two school systems from banning the Colliers’ Revolutionary War novel in the late 1990s. In March 1998, two concerned parents at McSwain Elementary School in Staunton, Virginia, objected to the book being taught in fifth-grade classrooms. “One of the things we are concerned about is that the teacher should have sent a note home that [the students] were reading it,” complained Linda Bailey. “I don’t think it’s appropriate for fifth grade. . . . [It’s got] a lot of bad language.” Beverly Dudley felt even more strongly about the book. “I don’t think it should be in the schools at all, especially not in elementary schools,” she said. “The violence bothers me but not as much as the language does.” At Tucker-Capps Elementary School in Hampton, Virginia, the novel was restricted to the program for gifted fifth-graders. But that

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still was unacceptable to two parents, who voiced their challenge at a December 2, 1998, school-board meeting. “We obviously have a concern about the decay in the way we speak to one another and express ourselves,” said Richard Antcliff. “What we’re trying to say is that it’s not okay.” “There is no book with this kind of language that’s meant for kids below high school,” declared Michael Harris. Ann Stephens, a school representative, disagreed. “It’s not like somebody’s bringing in a Penthouse [magazine],” she said. “These are books that have been deemed acceptable reading as part of the curriculum. They are not brought in for the express purpose of being lewd.” Lewd or not, the superintendent of schools agreed to remove the book from the gifted program until the media review committee could decide whether it was appropriate or not for the age group.

Further Reading

“Antioch, California.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom. January 1997: 25. Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries, Revised and Expanded Edition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Green, Jonathon, and Nicholas J. Karolides. Encyclopedia of Censorship, New Edition. New York, N.Y.: Facts On File, 2005. “Hampton, Virginia.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, March 1999: 40. Karolides, Nicholas J. Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds. New York, N.Y.: Facts On File, 2006. “Staunton, Virginia.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, July 1998: 110.

About the Authors of My Brother Sam Is Dead James Lincoln Collier (1928– ) Christopher Collier (1930– ) The Collier brothers have been a productive team, turning out superb historical fiction for young adults for three decades. They grew up in a literary family: their father was a journalist and an author of children’s books, while several aunts and uncles were professional writers.


James was born on June 27, 1928, and Christopher on January 29, 1930, both in New York City. The family moved to Connecticut in 1938. James attended Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, and graduated in 1950. Christopher attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and later earned a doctoral degree from Columbia University in New York City. James became a journalist, and Christopher became a history teacher. Christopher currently teaches at the University of Connecticut at Storrs. My Brother Sam Is Dead (1974) was their first collaboration. Their writing follows a regular pattern. Christopher thoroughly researches the historical period of each book and then provides his brother with his research and an outline of the story. James does the actual writing and fleshing out of the story. “Once I have digested the research, I sit down and write,” James has said. “Of course, even though I can go anywhere I want with the story, I write out of the historical background.” Subsequent historical novels by the brothers include The Bloody Country (1976), The Winter Hero (1978), and Jump Ship to Freedom (1981). James Collier also has written a number of young-adult novels on his own, including the contemporary novel The Hard Life of the Teenager (1972) and Give Dad My Best (1982), which is set in the 1930s during the Depression. An accomplished jazz trombonist, James is the author of a number of books on jazz for adults, including biographies of such jazz greats as Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington. Christopher Collier served as Connecticut’s official state historian from 1984 to 2004. His nonfiction book Roger Sherman’s Connecticut: Yankee Politics and the American Revolution (1971) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

A Forever . . . (1975) by Judy Blume What Happens in Forever . . .

Katherine and Michael, two high-school seniors, fall head over heels in love soon after they first meet at a party at a mutual friend’s house. The passion of their relationship leads from kissing to petting to sexual intimacy. Their relationship is paralleled by the relationship of Katherine’s friend Erica and Michael’s friend Artie. Artie, a talented actor, is ambivalent about his sexuality. Erica tries to gain his trust and love, but ultimately she finds Artie too complicated and ends the relationship. When she does, Artie attempts suicide and goes to a psychiatric hospital. Meanwhile, Michael takes Katherine on a ski trip to Vermont with Michael’s sister and her husband. Here they finally have sexual intercourse, the first time for Katherine. As their love deepens, the two pledge to love one another “forever.” To avoid pregnancy, Katherine goes to a meeting at Planned Parenthood in New York City and obtains birth control pills. She is determined not to end up like her brainy but overweight friend Sybil, who sleeps around and ends up pregnant. Sybil decides to have the baby, and then she gives it up for adoption. Summer comes and Katherine and Michael experience their first separation. He goes to work for his brother at a lumber company in South Carolina, while Katherine gets a job as an assistant tennis coach at a summer camp attended by her younger sister, Jamie. She writes to Michael every day to keep their relationship alive, but time and distance work against their love. Katherine finds herself falling 57


for Theo, the senior tennis coach who is entering his last year of college. This leads her to question her feelings for Michael. When Michael pays an unexpected visit to the summer camp, the results are disastrous. He gets angry with Katherine over her vacillating feelings, and the couple breaks up. They meet later by chance back home before leaving for their respective colleges. The two are polite to each other but can’t seem to deal with the death of their relationship. Katherine tells herself that she has no regrets about their time together, but she knows now it could not have ended differently. “I think it’s just that I’m not ready for forever,” she says. When she gets home, her mother tells her she has received a telephone call from Theo.


“I think Judy Blume’s books . . . encourage an unhealthy preoccupation with sex,” wrote a parent to her local school district in Salem, Oregon, in 1989. If this is so, then Forever . . . may be the most controversial book of her career. While other Blume young-adult novels such as Then Again, Maybe I Won’t and Deenie depict a growing interest in sex among adolescents as part of the maturation process, in Forever . . . it becomes the central focus. The book deals unsparingly and honestly with the first sexual experience of Katherine, a high-school senior. But while many critics view the book as “kiddy smut,” other parents and teachers have praised it as a serious look at a subject that too many teens already know too much about. “[T]he novel is hardly a tract for wantonness,” claimed college instructor Frank Battaglia. “It gives good insight into an array of joys and pains entailed in sustaining an intimate relationship.” While the majority of challenges of Forever . . . center on the sexual encounters, Battaglia and others feel that what bothers people even more than the sex itself is the fact that Katherine does not regret her affair with Michael.

Landmark Challenge: Censorship in the Lunchroom

The school library and the classroom are usually the focus of a book challenge, but that was not the case at Marion Junior High School

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in Marion, Illinois, on April 7, 1992. On that day student Deidre Butler brought Judy Blume’s Forever . . . into the school lunchroom and shared it with several friends. Another student pointed out the book to assistant principal Sam Rowell, who took it from Butler. “I picked it up and read a paragraph out of the book,” he later said. “It was very explicit and, being an educator seeing that and being very traditional, I took it from her.” Butler came to Rowell’s office to retrieve her book at the end of the school day—and she brought her parents with her. The Butlers thought Rowell was guilty of censorship. When he told them that their daughter should not bring the book back to school, the Butlers refused to follow orders. “I am not fighting for the content of this book,” Diane Butler made clear. “I am fighting for her constitutional right to read it. Other parents may not want their children reading this book; this is their right. She can, and it’s her personal property.” The matter came before school superintendent Thomas Oates, who agreed in part with the Butlers. Examining the novel, he found it not to be pornography and thus not subject to barring under the school district’s policy. “It’s up to her as far as reading the book,” Oates said, but then he qualified his approval. “If the intent is to pass it around to show a section that causes a disturbance, we’re not interested in that in school.”

Landmark Challenge: How to Get Rid of a “How-To” Book

Barbara Cross was nothing if not persistent. The parent of a student at Eisenhower Junior High School in Schaumburg, Illinois, she complained to the school principal about the reading of Forever . . . by seventh- and eighth-grade students in the fall of 1992. Cross demanded that the book be removed from all district junior highschool libraries. The principal passed her complaint along to a school committee. After deliberating, the committee dismissed the challenge and voted to keep the book in libraries. Undaunted, Cross took her challenge to a district committee. That committee also voted to keep the novel on library shelves. Next Cross took the matter to the highest court—the Schaumburg Township School District 54 school board.


“This book contains graphic sexual scenes,” Cross told the board at a February 25, 1993, meeting. “It’s basically a sexual ‘how-to’ book for junior-high students. It glamorizes [sex] and puts ideas in their heads.” The board deliberated for only half an hour before announcing its decision—to remove Forever . . . from all junior-high schools in the district. “I find it difficult to understand why I am here this evening,” said board member Pat Riley after the vote. “The first line in the book should have told somebody this was a red flag and that it should be pulled from the shelf.” For board member Carl Cox, the vote was not a matter of censorship. “What we’re saying is that it’s not age-appropriate,” he said. The patient parent who carried out the four-month fight was pleased with the vote. “I’m glad it’s off the shelves,” said Barbara Cross. “It gives me confidence in the board; they realize this book is not appropriate for children.”

Landmark Challenge: A Four-Year Battle in Elgin

Jean McNamara had no children at Eastview Middle School in Bartlett, Illinois. A conservative Christian, she homeschooled her three kids. But that didn’t stop her in late 1996 from demanding that Forever . . . be removed from the school library due to explicit sex, drug use, and profanity. Actually, McNamara was the second parent to complain about the novel. The first had withdrawn her challenge to save her daughter the embarrassment of the publicity. A committee of seven teachers, librarians, administrators, and parents met to consider the challenge. They reached a decision in February 1997, recommending that the novel be removed not only from Eastview but from all seven middle schools in Elgin School District U46. It was an unprecedented move. Previously, challenged books had been dealt with in each individual school by the local librarians. At the same time, the committee recommended that Forever . . . remain in all district high-school libraries. This did not please Jean McNamara, who wanted the book out of all public-school libraries. She also was disappointed that the committee turned down her proposal to establish a parents’ committee to participate in the district’s

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book review system. The committee confirmed the existing policy of giving individual school librarians the authority to approve books for their shelves. “Librarians obviously don’t have time to read every book they order,” said Sue Bernardi, district director of curriculum and a member of the review committee. “But we have a policy to follow. Part of it involves age appropriateness. Part is topic and content. Our librarians read book reviews from several sources.” Joan Devine, Eastview’s librarian and a committee member who voted against the banning, defended Blume’s novel. “The book is about normal sex,” she stated, “about feelings and relationships. A middle school has children playing with Barbie dolls and children having sex. I can’t only have books about Barbie dolls.” McNamara strongly disagreed. “[T]here is still the idea out there that we don’t censor children, that we have to put everything out there in front of them and let them decide what to read,” she said. She promised to continue to fight for more parental involvement in the books students are taught in school. In July, the U46 Board of Education confirmed the recommendation of the review committee in a 6 to 1 vote. The sole dissenter, Doug Heaton, felt the board didn’t go far enough in banning Forever . . . . “[T]hey said that book can remain in high-school libraries and, having read it, I don’t think it’s appropriate in any of our schools,” he said. Librarian Devine, however, wasn’t about to give up the fight to reinstate Forever . . . . She waited the obligatory two years to appeal the board’s decision. In 1999 a new district committee reviewed the case and recommended reinstatement, but the school-board vote on the matter deadlocked at 3-3. Devine then took her crusade to the public. She found support from the entire district’s middle- and high-school librarians as well as many parents and teachers. A new committee of school district staff and parents met on December 12, 2001, and voted unanimously to return Forever . . . to middle-school library shelves. “I’m very happy,” Devine said. “I think it’s a victory for the students.” When the school board held its next meeting on January 22, 2002, 50 people showed up both to support the recommendation and to oppose it. “Forever . . . sanctions promiscuity and sin, and therefore it shouldn’t be on the middle-school shelves at taxpayer


expense,” said L. Dean Hufsey of South Elgin. She suggested that those parents and their kids who wanted to read the novel should purchase it or take it out of the public library. “It is not their [opponents’] right to act as a moral compass for the entire community,” countered Lisel Ulaszek of Streamwood. “What one person finds objectionable, another person might find enlightening.” A number of speakers claimed that the book didn’t promote teen sex, but rather showed its consequences. “Parents who think their children are not exposed to such things are fooling themselves,” said eighth-grader Gina Palmisano. “The book can help teens talk to their parents.” When the speakers were finished, the school board voted. They accepted the committee’s recommendation to return Forever . . . to the middle schools in a 5 to 2 vote. Joan Devine felt fully vindicated, but Jean McNamara was angry. “This book is harmful . . . it shows teens committing sins,” she declared. She urged all Christian parents to follow her lead and homeschool their children, removing them from the “pagan school district.”

Further Reading

“Cedar Rapids, Iowa.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, September 1985: 167. “Elgin, Illinois.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, May 1997: 60–61; September 1997: 125; May 2002: 135. Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries, Revised and Expanded Edition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. “Marion, Illinois.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, July 1992: 110. “Schaumburg, Illinois.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, May 1993: 70; July 1993: 98. Sova, Dawn B. Banned Books: Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds. New York, N.Y.: Facts On File, 2006. Young Adult Library Services Association. Hit List: Frequently Challenged Books for Young Adults. Chicago, Ill.: American Library Association, 1996.

About the Author of Forever . . .

See biography in Then Again, Maybe I Won’t entry.

A One Fat Summer (1977) by Robert Lipsyte What Happens in One Fat Summer

Bobby Marks is fifteen and overweight. While most of the year can be misery for Bobby, whose fat body is the butt of jokes by his classmates at school, summer is the time of year he dreads the most. Afraid to reveal his flabby flesh in shorts, T-shirts, or a swimming suit, he suffers the summer heat in silence. Goaded by his best friend, Joanie, Bobby takes a summer job caring for the lawn and grounds of Dr. Kahn at Rumson Lake, New York, where Bobby’s family owns a summer home. Bobby finds Dr. Kahn an exacting and demanding employer, and his first day on the job is pure hell. As if this weren’t bad enough, Bobby must deal with the threats of the town bully, Willie Rumson, who resents Bobby for taking the lawn job from him. Bobby almost quits the job but sticks with it, works hard, and begins to shed pounds. He even loses his taste for binge eating. His perseverance, however, is put to the test when Rumson and his pals kidnap him and leave him naked on a nearby island. Willie’s cousin, Jim Smith, rescues Bobby from the island the next morning and warns him to give up the lawn job or face even worse at Willie’s hands. Bobby refuses. He enters into a pact with his sister, Michelle. She won’t tell their parents about his job so that he can later surprise them. In return, Bobby won’t tell them that she is dating Pete Marino, the town hero and an excellent swimmer and diver. Meanwhile, Joanie returns to Rumson Lake with a nose job. Bobby, whose appearance also is 63


changing, has mixed-up feelings about Joanie’s surgery and feels she is a different person from the friend he knew and could always confide in. Willie Rumson finally tracks down Bobby in the presence of Peter Marino and Joanie. He plans to take Bobby back to the island and shoot him in the knee. By now, Bobby realizes that Willie is a pathetic character who blames the more affluent summer people for all his troubles. Jim Smith manages to get Willie to back off, but as they turn to go, Pete jumps Willie and a fight ensues. Willie then attacks Bobby, but when they fall into the water, Bobby, with his new strength, gets the upper hand and nearly drowns Willie. In the end, Bobby blames Pete and his macho stance more than Willie. He realizes that to be a man is not exactly what he thought it was. With his newfound confidence, Bobby stands up to the difficult Dr. Kahn and demands that he pay him the original wage rate he was promised when he began working for him. Dr. Kahn agrees, and Willie decides that he likes the summer a lot more than he ever did before. Bobby Marks’s story is continued in two sequels—Summer Rules (1981) and The Summerboy (1982).


Robert Lipsyte is not an author whose works frequently find their way to the annual list of most challenged books. One Fat Summer is his most challenged book, although Lipsyte doesn’t understand why. “I always thought this was a benign book that was about the central fact of being a kid and not liking yourself,” he has said. He is quick to add that he himself was overweight and lost about forty pounds by mowing lawns during his fourteenth summer. Once his novel was published, Lipsyte received a flood of letters from teens who identified in some way with Bobby Marks. “During my school visits,” he wrote, “chubby apprentice writers, once they got past their mixed feelings that I had kept most of the weight off, asked me to recount particularly horrible ways to kill thin classmates, who themselves were listening with what seemed to be horrified interest and new empathy.” The challenges against One Fat Summer mostly have arisen over the use of some objectionable language, including derogatory terms

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for racial and ethnic groups; violence and threatened violence in the scenes with Willie Rumson; and one brief and discreetly described passage in which Bobby masturbates while having sexual fantasies.

Landmark Challenge: A Book “Outlives Its Usefulness” in Levittown

School superintendents often wield a lot of power and influence in school districts, and Herman Sirois of Levittown, New York, was no exception. But some people felt he wielded his power in an area he shouldn’t have—book censorship. In January 1997 Doreen Smith, whose 12-year-old son attended Jonas E. Salk Middle School, complained to school officials that One Fat Summer was “sexually explicit and full of violence.” Her son was reading the novel in developmental reading, and she wanted it removed from the school’s required reading list. “Why are we trying to stress these types of things?” she asked. “I was flabbergasted that this could be in a seventh-grade curriculum.” Superintendent Sirois appointed a faculty committee to read the book, review the challenge, and give a full report to him with its recommendations. “I started reading it, thinking that perhaps there was something wrong with it,” said committee member and English teacher Elizabeth Harrigan. “But as I went along, quite surprisingly I got very involved with it. And by the end I was quite an advocate of it.” The committee issued its report in February. “The few sexual references in this novel are within context, unsensational and realistic,” the report stated. “[The] realistic events of verbal and physical abuse ultimately lead to an understanding and maturity on the part of Bobby. He emerges from the bullying experiences stronger and a hero in his own right. To suggest that consequences were never suffered is an inaccuracy. The bully does not win. He is humiliated, and his self-esteem plummets.” One committee member, however, did not fully agree with this assessment. “The book seems to view adolescent life through mostly a male point of view,” wrote assistant superintendent for instruction Robert Davis in his minority report, “and while it deals with real concerns and real issues, perhaps a book with more positive vignettes would model a more optimistic lifestyle for the students.”


“I disagree with Mr. Davis,” countered fellow committee member Virginia Keen, another English teacher. “Most of the students like Bobby Marks. He’s the underdog who makes it to the top.” But for the superintendent, it wasn’t a matter of content but of reading level. For Sirois, the narrative structure of the novel wasn’t strong enough to help students attain reading fluency, the key goal of developmental reading. In March 1997, without further consultation, he removed One Fat Summer from the school’s required reading list, although he allowed copies to remain in the school library. “We did not find in favor of the parent’s complaint as such,” Sirois said. “That’s why it’s still on the library shelf. It’s not a book to which I had any personal objection.” Defending the actions of his boss, Davis said, “It outlived its usefulness. It wasn’t a terrific book for developmental reading.” While denying that the challenge was the reason for dropping the book, Davis admitted that, “had the complainant not come forward, we might not be cognizant of these issues.” Committee members and other teachers at Jonas E. Salk Middle School were aghast at the action and the reasons given for it. “I couldn’t believe it,” Keen said. “I thought that any adult reading the book would realize that this is what happens in life. I don’t think you should condemn a book when the author is trying to make it at least somewhat true to life.” “We were more than disappointed,” said Harrigan. “I feel there was nothing genuine about the administration’s request. They had no intention of paying attention to anything we wrote.” “There’s no question if a parent objects to a book, the teacher would offer another book,” said Don Parker of the Long Island Coalition Against Censorship. “But when you bring this to a particular committee, by professionals who 4 to 1 favored the use of the material as required reading, and the superintendent steps in and rejects the recommendation—once that happens, this is censorship.” “We’ve chosen not to require a book,” replied Davis, downplaying the controversy. “That happens thousands of times across Long Island. It was a fine book in its day. I’m sure the teachers can choose another book.” But some teachers didn’t see the need to do so. “There’s nothing wrong with that for a seventh-grade level,” insisted retired

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English teacher Marilyn Berman. Keen, who introduced the book to the school years earlier, was saddened and perplexed. “Right now the books sit on the shelves, and the students ask, ‘Are we going to read the book in class?’ And I tell them, ‘No, I’m sorry, we’re not.’ They know there’s some sort of controversy. You can tell by the smirks.” As spring progressed to summer, the controversy heated up. Sirois was sharply criticized in letters to the editor of the Long Island Weekly. In the August 3 edition of the New York Times, the besieged superintendent responded to his critics: “It is unfortunate that a couple of individuals chose to bring unfounded claims of book banning to the newspaper before the administration had the opportunity to communicate its final decision to school personnel. Had these individuals at least consulted with the district administration prior to taking such a precipitous action, they would have learned that . . . the district administration had not prohibited its assignment in any manner that would be instructionally appropriate. . . . When it comes to the attention of the district that its established guidelines have not been followed, the administration must take appropriate actions to fulfill its responsibility. To ignore a discrepancy solely because it came to our attention by way of a parent’s complaint would be a dereliction of duty.” While author Robert Lipsyte had little sympathy for Sirois, he did try to understand the challenger Doreen Smith’s point of view. “I’m kind of on her side in a way, that she’s taking this sort of interest in her kid’s education,” he said. “She may very well know that this book may not be good for him. That she would be reading over his shoulder is, I think, exemplary. What she has no right to do is to censor everyone else’s reading.”

Further Reading

“Crystal River, Florida.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, January 2000: 11. Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries, Revised and Expanded Edition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. “Greenville, North Carolina.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, September 1997: 126.


“Levittown, New York.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, September 1997: 128–129. Lipsyte, Robert. “Writers on Writing: Novels with the Power to Change Young Lives.” New York Times, April 28, 2003. Available online: nytimes.com. Accessed May 30, 2008. Sirois, Herman A. “Another View of Book Removal.” New York Times, August 3, 1997. Available online: nytimes.com. Accessed May 30, 2008. Vinciguerra, Thomas. “A 1977 [sic] Comes Under Scrutiny.” New York Times, June 8, 1997. Available online: nytimes.com. Accessed May 30, 2008.

About the Author of One Fat Summer Robert Lipsyte (1938– ) As a boy, Robert Lipsyte was like his character Bobby Marks—fat, self-conscious, and lacking in confidence. He was born on January 16, 1938, in New York City. His father was a school principal and his mother a teacher. Like Bobby, at age 14 he worked for a summer as a lawn boy and lost 40 pounds. He attended Columbia University and went on to Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism. He got a job at the New York Times as a copyboy and eventually became a sports columnist, a position he held at the newspaper for 14 years. His first young-adult novel was The Contender (1967), about Alfred Brooks, a black high-school dropout who finds meaning in life through boxing. Sonny Bear, another young boxer who appears in The Contender and is half Native American, becomes the focal figure in a trilogy of further novels—The Brave (1991), The Chief (1993), and Warrior Angel (2003). In 1975 Lipsyte was diagnosed with testicular cancer. He recovered fully, but he suffered a second bout with cancer in 1991. His experiences inspired the novel The Chemo Kid (1992), a fantasy about a cancer-stricken high-school junior who becomes a superhero after receiving experimental hormone treatments. In 2001 Lipsyte was the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for a lifetime of achievement in writing for young adults. “There is a reader-writer connection in this [young-adult] category,”

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Lipsyte writes, “that simply does not exist in sports journalism, movies, television news and documentaries, and novels for older adults, genres in which I’ve been called a genius and a jerk because I stroked or ruffled someone’s feathers. . . . That’s why writing for them [young readers] is the most satisfying writing I do.”

A Killing Mr. Griffin (1978) by Lois Duncan What Happens in Killing Mr. Griffin

Brian Griffin is the kind of teacher that high-school students love to hate. Strict, unwilling to listen to any excuses, and a perfectionist who will accept only the best from his students, the English teacher is intensely disliked by many of his students, even the seniorclass president, Dave Ruggles. But the student who holds the biggest grudge against Mr. Griffin is Mark Kinney, whom Griffin flunked last year and who must now repeat senior English. It is Mark who comes up with an outrageous scheme to kidnap the teacher in order to scare him and teach him a lesson. Mark manages to persuade Dave, basketball player Jeff Garrett, cheerleader Betsy Cline, and brain Susan McConnell, who excels in Griffin’s class, to help him carry out his scheme. Susan lures Mr. Griffin out to the school parking lot, where the three boys seize him and drive him to a remote location in the mountains. When Griffin refuses to beg for his freedom, Mark and the others leave him at the hiding place bound and gagged. They plan to return later that night to release him. Susan feels guilty about her role in the kidnapping and persuades Dave to go with her to the mountains and release the teacher. To their horror, they find he has died from a heart condition. His death could have been prevented if Mark had not destroyed the vial containing his heart medication. The boys return that night to bury the body, but the police soon discover it and question the young people.

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A college ring Griffin wore is missing. Dave took it, believing that Griffin may have been his long-missing father; apparently his father went to the same college. The plot thickens when Dave’s grandmother discovers the hidden ring and comes to the same conclusion as Dave. Mark tries to get the ring back from her to destroy it as evidence, but she refuses to relinquish it. Desperate, he kills her. Then, afraid Susan will tell the police everything, he ties her to a chair at her house and sets the building on fire. The police arrive in time to rescue Susan and arrest Mark. The psychopathic Mark faces murder charges. The others are charged with second-degree murder. Susan will get off if she is willing to testify against her friends.


A book about students who kidnap a teacher and accidentally kill him would seem ripe for censorship in the era of school shootings and bloody massacres like the one that took place at Columbine High School in Colorado in April 1999. But Lois Duncan, who wrote Killing Mr. Griffin more than two decades before Columbine, disagrees with this criticism. “Killing Mr. Griffin doesn’t encourage violence in schools any more than the story of Cain and Abel encourages children to kill their younger brothers,” she said in an interview. “ . . . The occurrence of an event in a work of literature is not a mandate that the reader should go forth and do likewise. In most cases it’s just the opposite. The devastating consequence of the ‘senior prank’ that inadvertently led to the death of a fine man should make readers of Killing Mr. Griffin think twice before allowing themselves to be led down a dangerous path where there’s no turning back.” But many school systems have not seen it that way. Killing Mr. Griffin ranked thirty-third on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000.” It was the only one of Duncan’s more than 40 books to make the list, although her novel Daughters of Eve has also been challenged a number of times (see the Outsider Fiction volume in this series). Killing Mr. Griffin was adapted into a television movie in 1997 directed by Jack Bender. Like other screen adaptations of Duncan’s work, it was generally thought to be inferior to the novel.

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Landmark Challenges: Two California Communities Speak—One For, One Against

David and Mary Collins were disturbed when their son Jonathan showed them the book he was assigned at his middle school in Milpitas, California. They found Killing Mr. Griffin to “lack moral values and contain extensive profanity.” In response to the Collins’ challenge, the school board formed a special committee in early 1988. In its report, the committee found the novel to be “well-constructed.” Its theme, the report said, was “fully explored” and its values “clearly stated.” The committee found no evidence of the book’s “inappropriateness” and recommended that the school district’s trustees retain it. Before voting on the recommendation, the trustees at a May meeting heard students and other residents speak for and against the novel. One of the most persuasive speeches came from 12-year-old Karen Friedman. “Mr. and Mrs. Collins can’t deprive other children from reading the book and learning about peer pressure from it,” she told the trustees. After everyone had spoken, the trustees voted 3 to 2 to keep Killing Mr. Griffin in school libraries and to make it available to Advanced Placement (AP) English classes. “Let these people [the teachers and administrators who choose books] do the job they’ve been doing,” said trustee Robert Sandoval. “They’ve been doing a fine job up until this point.” The outcome of a challenge to the same book four years later in Bonsall, California, was quite different. The grandparents of an eighth-grade student at Bonsall Middle School were “disgusted” by the violence and swear words in Duncan’s novel. A committee of teachers and parents was formed by the school trustees to consider their challenge. The committee recommended that the book be taken off required reading lists. “I thought [that] while there was a value to the lessons taught in the book,” said school superintendent Terry Ryan, a member of the committee, “our material should be reflective of our community’s values and morals.” On November 11, 1992, the school’s trustees voted to accept the recommendation and to remove the book from required reading lists. “I’m ashamed of anyone who would present this material,


whether required or supplemental,” said trustee Dwight Thompson. The trustees did, however, allow the book to remain in the school’s library and be used as an optional title in some classes.

Landmark Challenge: Wounding Killing Mr. Griffin in Greenville

Complaints against Duncan’s novel and Blood and Chocolate, a werewolf novel by Annette Curtis Klause, from parents and teachers at Mauldin Middle School in Greenville, South Carolina, were brought before an advisory panel for the school district—South Carolina’s largest. The panel, which was made up of teachers, parents, students, and clergy, recommended keeping both books in school libraries. On June 12, 2001, the Greenville school board voted 6 to 2 to keep Killing Mr. Griffin on the library shelves, but restricted teachers from using it in the classroom. According to school superintendent Bill Harner, the novel could be misinterpreted by students in an age of escalating school violence. Among the book’s supporters was board member and former principal Marilyn Hendrix, who felt Killing Mr. Griffin “addresses some of the problems and moral issues middle-school and highschool students deal with on a daily basis.” She regretted that the book could not be taught in the classroom because that is “the very best place for this book to be discussed.” Trustee William Herlong disagreed with this opinion, calling the book “inappropriate as a teaching novel.” The board was harder on Blood and Chocolate, banning it from all Greenville classrooms and middle-school libraries by a 5 to 2 vote. One teacher called it “low-level filth that corrupts.”

Further Reading

“Bonsall, California.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, March 1993: 43. Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries, Revised and Expanded Edition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. “Milpitas, California.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, September 1988. “School Systems Across U.S. Challenge Books on Reading Lists.” Freedom Forum Web site. Available online: www.freedomforum.org/templates/ document.asp?documentID=14624. Accessed August 15, 2007.

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Young Adult Library Services Association. Hit List for Young Adults 2: Frequently Challenged Books. Chicago, Ill.: American Library Association, 2002.

About the Author of Killing Mr. Griffin Lois Duncan (1934– ) For more than four decades, Lois Duncan has been among the outstanding young-adult authors of books of mystery and suspense. She was born Lois Duncan Steinmetz on April 28, 1934, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her parents were the well-known magazine photographers Joseph Janney and Lois Steinmetz. The family moved to Sarasota, Florida, when Lois was very young. She took to writing at an early age and sold her first story to a magazine when she was 13. She attended Duke University in North Carolina for a year, but dropped out and married. While raising three children she continued to write, selling articles to such well-known magazines as Redbook, McCall’s, and Reader’s Digest. She eventually divorced her husband and moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico. She taught journalism at the University of New Mexico and met Don Arquette, whom she married in 1965. The following year Duncan published her first young-adult mystery, Ransom. Her writing career took off with the publication of I Know What You Did Last Summer (1973), about a group of teens who kill a young boy in a hit-and-run accident. It was made into a movie in 1997. Although the film version was a hit, Duncan was not pleased with it, calling it a pointless slasher film and not worthy of her novel. Among her other novels of suspense are Summer of Fear (1976), The Third Eye (1984), The Twisted Window (1987), Don’t Look Behind You (1989), and Gallows Hill (1997). In 1989 Kaitlyn Arquette, her youngest child, was shot in Albuquerque while driving home. She died of her wounds the next day. The police called it a random drive-by shooting, but Duncan believed her daughter was targeted by a gang of criminals that was involved with Kaitlyn’s estranged Vietnamese boyfriend. Duncan pursued the case on her own, hiring a private detective and psychic investigators. The story of her search for her daughter’s killers is movingly told in Who Killed My Daughter? (1992). The case remains


unsolved to date. Duncan’s involvement in psychic investigation led her to co-write Psychic Connections (1995) with William George Roll of the Psychical Research Foundation. Duncan was the recipient in 1991 of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement. “My primary message (I hope) is that reading is fun,” Duncan has said. “Another underlying message, which seems to work its way into many of my books, is the importance of taking responsibility for one’s own actions.”

A The Great Gilly Hopkins (1978) by Katherine Paterson What Happens in The Great Gilly Hopkins

Eleven-year-old Gilly Hopkins is the bane of the foster-care system. She is a child who only wants to make life miserable for each foster family she is placed with, in hopes that her mother will one day come and rescue her. Her tough exterior is really just a mask to cover the pain and misery she feels as a lonely and unwanted child. Gilly expects nothing to change when she is sent to her fourth foster family, the Trotters. Maime Trotter is a large, illiterate woman, and Gilly’s new foster brother is a helpless boy named William Ernest. Worst of all, from Gilly’s point of view, is that they live in Thompson Park, a predominantly black neighborhood. Soon Gilly has added racism to her list of sins. In time, however, she comes to see the Trotters as a real family that loves and accepts her. But the lesson comes too late: Gilly, in search of the mother she never knew, instead finds her grandmother and in the end is sent to live with her.


On the face of it, Katherine Paterson would appear to be the kind of children’s author whose books are praised by parents and teachers for their “family values.” After all, she is the child of missionaries, was a missionary herself, and is married to a minister. Paterson has even written a book for children about her belief in God. But while praised in some quarters, Paterson’s novels have been a target for challenges in others. Her novels Bridge to Terabithia and The Great Gilly Hopkins are listed on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000,” 77


in ninth and twenty-first place, respectively. Paterson calls herself “pro-Christian,” and yet many challengers of her books accuse her of having an anti-Christian bias. Why? While a devout Christian, Paterson does not sugarcoat the problems of today’s youth. Bridge to Terabithia deals with teens and their attitudes toward dying; it ends with a teen death. The Great Gilly Hopkins features a heroine who swears, steals, and hurts other people. But for Paterson, there is a decidedly Christian theme to the book. “I regard Gilly Hopkins . . . as my rewriting of the parable of the prodigal son,” she has said. “I thought it was so Christian that a secular publisher might not want to publish it.” The novel won the National Book Award for Children’s Literature in 1979.

Landmark Challenge: A Librarian’s Brave Stand

Liz Wilson is a hero to Katherine Paterson—and for good reason. It was Wilson who alone stood up against the banning of Paterson’s novel in the Salina, Kansas, school system. In 1982 parents Jay and Mary Eikleberry challenged the use of The Great Gilly Hopkins in Salina schools on the basis of foul language. According to the Eikleberrys, a fifth of the novel’s pages contained profanity spoken by Gilly, the book’s protagonist. Unified School District 305’s Board of Education created a committee to investigate the challenge. Committee members included two parents, two teachers, a principal, and school librarian Liz Wilson. After their deliberations, the committee voted 5 to 1 to remove the novel from the school library. Wilson was the sole dissenter. She felt strongly that Paterson’s book was worth keeping and decided to speak out on the matter. It took great courage to do so. As the only black teacher on the school staff, Wilson felt vulnerable. By taking a stand against the committee, she believed she could lose her job. Some teachers agreed with Wilson but looked for a way to get around the banning. Some even suggested students hide the book under their desks or that it be sequestered so teachers could read it in private. But that wasn’t enough for Wilson. She enlisted the support of other district librarians and brought the matter before the school board. The issue made news and came to the attention of Katherine Paterson, who followed it with great interest. On January 20, 1983—the

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day the school board was to vote on reinstatement of her novel—Paterson was attending a swim meet at her children’s high school. “I was sitting there at that swimming meet wondering what was going on in Salina,” she later said. When she heard the news, it was good. The school board had voted unanimously and vigorously to retain The Great Gilly Hopkins in school libraries. “Rather than banning this book, I would be more inclined toward making it required reading,” declared board member Gregg Svoboda. “If value judgments are to be made based on good versus evil, the good in this book far outweighs the evil.” Stefe Ascher, another board member, agreed. “I don’t find the language particularly offensive,” he said. “It’s certainly in context with the character.” Liz Wilson had won the fight, but her victory was a bittersweet one. Her stand against the committee had created hard feelings with colleagues, and she felt uncomfortable staying at the school. Wilson quit her job and later became a librarian at Lincoln University in Nebraska. Katherine Paterson did not forget Wilson or her courage. In a magazine article she wrote some years later, she called Wilson “one of my heroes.” After reading the article, Wilson called Paterson to thank her for the compliment. “She said,” Paterson recalled, “I might not have regarded her as a hero if I had known how frightened she was.”

Landmark Challenge: A Great Uproar in Cheshire

Gilly Hopkins brings trouble to almost everyone she meets in Katherine Paterson’s novel. And she lived up to her reputation in the town of Cheshire, Connecticut, in 1992, dividing the community into those who reviled her and those who embraced her. Sharon Kuehlewind’s fifth-grader came home one day that fall to tell his mother he had been reading a “bad book” in school. The book was The Great Gilly Hopkins. And it wasn’t the only “bad book” being taught to the fifth-graders at Highland Elementary School. A neighbor’s child was reading The Alfred Summer by Jan Slepian, another novel with profanity and disreputable teen behavior. Three parents, including Kuehlewind, met with school principal Diane Hartman, who had them complete complaint forms that went to the school district. At a November 7, 1991, meeting of the Cheshire Board of Education, 30 irate parents, led by Kuehlewind, spoke out against the books. They felt, in no uncertain terms, that


the books had to go. According to Kuehlewind, the books’ authors had “dragged God and the church in the mud and slyly endorsed unwholesome values such as stealing, smoking, drinking, and simply rebelling against authority.” Another parent was even more to the point. “We don’t need any more bureaucratic baloney,” she said. “Pull it and pull it now.” The righteous anger of the parents struck a chord with board vice chairman George Bowman, who admitted he had not read the offending books. “I want this trash removed from our school system, and find out who brought it in here and fire them,” fumed Bowman. “And I don’t want to hear some warm fuzzy words about liberal ideas—it’s trash.” School superintendent John Barnes hadn’t read the books, either, but he put trust in the people who had approved them for fifthgraders. “These are award-winning books,” he reasoned. “ . . . I don’t believe that they could be at all pornographic, like some of these parents believe.” But under pressure, he agreed to pull the books from the middle school’s and the town’s four elementary schools’ curriculum until a special review committee could assess them and make a recommendation. Kuehlewind remained unconvinced. “No matter what ‘phenomenal metaphors’ or ‘excellent themes’ could be taught through these ‘prize-winning’ books, they are totally inappropriate and unacceptable for our public school system,” she charged. “They are filled with profanity, blasphemy, and obscenities—gutter language.” To drive home the point for the review committee, she drew up a complete list of every profanity in each book and the page number it appeared on. By now the Cheshire challenge had drawn the attention of many people outside Connecticut, including author Katherine Paterson. She tried to explain who Gilly Hopkins was and why she did what she did. “Gilly is a foster child who is very angry about being treated as a disposable commodity in the world,” she said. “She lies, steals, bullies the handicapped, and is racially prejudiced. Her mouth needs to reflect her state of anger and lostness.” Others began to speak up for Gilly and against censorship. “If we were to start removing offending volumes from libraries upon the application of anyone who objected,” said an editorial in the Meriden Record-Journal, a local newspaper, “it wouldn’t be long before libraries no longer faced a space problem.”

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Historian and writer Christopher Collier, whose own novel My Brother Sam Is Dead would soon be challenged by parents at a January 1992 Cheshire school-board meeting, vigorously defended the two books. “Far from obscene or blasphemous, these books deal with family, love, and mutual respect,” he wrote. “They are exactly the books that parents concerned about old-fashioned family values should want their kids to read.” After three meetings in early 1992, the review committee reached its recommendation: that both novels be returned to the school library shelves. On February 6, 1992, before a crowd of 300 residents, the school board voted on the recommendation. In a 6 to 0 vote, it approved the recommendation and returned both books to the libraries—The Great Gilly Hopkins for fifth-graders and The Alfred Summer for sixth-graders. Board member Robert Brown put the question to parents and residents, asking “Should a parent or well-organized group of parents dictate what should or should not be in the curriculum? I submit the answer is clearly no. Parents have no right to impose moral judgments and values on the children of others.” The large crowd gave him a standing ovation. As for Sharon Kuehlewind, the vote was extremely disappointing. “I am very concerned for the children of Cheshire,” she said, “because what we teach at home will not be reinforced in the schools.”

Further Reading

“Cheshire, Connecticut.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, March 1992: 42. Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries, Revised and Expanded Edition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. “Salina, Kansas.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, July, 1983: 121.

About the Author of The Great Gilly Hopkins Katherine Paterson (1932– ) Katherine Paterson is one of the most critically acclaimed youngadult authors writing today and also one of the most controversial. She was born on October 31, 1932, in Qing Jiang, China, to missionary parents. She arrived in the United States with her family when


she was eight and later attended King College in Bristol, Tennessee, earning an English degree. She taught for a year in a rural Virginia community before going to graduate school in Richmond, Virginia. Following in her parents’ footsteps, Paterson became a missionary and traveled to Japan, where she lived for four years. She returned to the States to attend Union Theological Seminary in New York City. There she met Presbyterian minister John Paterson. The couple married in 1962. Paterson’s first published works were fifth- and sixth-grade curriculum materials for the Presbyterian church. A creative writing course inspired her to write her first novel for young adults, Sign of the Chrysanthemum, published in 1973. This and her next two novels were set in Japan. The third of these, The Master Puppeteer (1975), won the National Book Award for Children’s Literature. Bridge to Terabithia (1977), her next book, was set in contemporary America and dealt with the difficult subject of teen death. It won the Newbery Medal and was adapted into a film in 1985. A second film adaptation in 2007 was co-produced and written by her son David L. Paterson. Bridge to Terabithia and The Great Gilly Hopkins are her most challenged books to date. Among Paterson’s most recent books are the historical novels Preacher’s Boy (1999) and Bread and Roses, Too (2006). She also has published The Invisible Child: On Reading and Writing Books for Children (2001), a collection of speeches and essays. In 1998 Paterson won the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal for Writing for making “a distinguished contribution to children’s literature.” Active in the fight against book censorship, Paterson is vice president of the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance. “[T]he joy of writing outweighs the struggle,” Paterson has said, “and I know beyond any doubt that I am the most fortunate person in the world to have been given such work to do.”

A The Alice Books (1985– ) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor What Happens in the Alice Books

Twenty-three books and counting, the Alice series began in 1985 with The Agony of Alice, telling about the life and hard times of a sixth-grader named Alice McKinley. Alice, who lives with her father, Ben, and brother, Lester, lost her mother to illness when she was four. In this first book, Alice is looking for an adult female to model herself after. In each subsequent book in the series, Alice faces new challenges in school and at home as she makes the awkward journey from childhood to adolescence. Along the way she looks for a boyfriend (Alice in Rapture, Sort of, 1989); tries to join the “in” crowd in seventh grade (All but Alice, 1992); turns 13 (Alice in April, 1993); tries to get over her fear of water (Alice the Brave, 1995); dresses up as a showgirl for a Halloween party and gets Frenchkissed by a boy in a closet (Outrageously Alice, 1997); looks for a new wife for her father (The Grooming of Alice, 2000); and, at age 16, tries to break out of her “good girl” image in high school (Dangerously Alice, 2007). Naylor continues to produce at least one Alice book a year and answers readers’ questions about their favorite character on an Alice Web site. “Girls beg me to keep the series going until she [Alice] is 60 years old and opens the time capsule her class buried in the school yard,” Naylor writes. “They want to know if and who she marries, whether or not she has children. I get a surprising number of letters from college girls and grown women who beg to know what will happen next, and say they grew up on Alice.” 83



One book about an adolescent girl growing up may stir the concerns of some parents. But 23 of them, all about the same girl, are sure to drive them to distraction. The Alice books focus on hormones, sex, peer pressure, and relationships, in an often humorous but honest manner. All that honesty helped to make the series the most challenged books of 2003, according to the American Library Association’s Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom. It ranked third on the ALA’s “10 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2006,” and tenth on the ALA’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books for 1990–2000.” Most of the challenges were due to “sexual content, using offensive language, and being unsuited to age group.”

Landmark Challenge: Not for My Daughter in Monroe

Some parents may find Alice’s many adventures charming, humorous, and relevant to young people today. Jackie Feldman of Monroe, Connecticut, was not among them. When she took a close look at Alice In-Between, which her 10-year-old daughter was reading, she was shocked. “[It’s] about a 13-year-old girl who dresses up like she’s 19 and takes a train trip,” Feldman told elementary school officials. “On the way, a 36-year-old man sits next to her and starts fondling her. That’s not the kind of material I want my 10-year-old reading.” Superintendent of schools Norman Michaud agreed after reading passages from this and two other Alice books. “This is not a book I would want my daughter reading,” he said, and he removed the books from the sixth-grade required reading list in July 1998. Some educators and librarians were opposed to the banning. “I don’t think these books should have been withdrawn from the list,” said Monroe Public Library Director Lynn Rosato. “The author is a Newbery Award–winner. You can’t judge a book by a couple of paragraphs taken out of context. You have to look at the entire content of the book.”

Landmark Challenge: The Banning of Alice, Webb City Style

Parents in Webb City, Missouri, challenged three of Naylor’s Alice books at an August 13, 2002, board meeting. The board took the

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challenges of sexual content and bad language seriously and ordered the removal of the three titles from the school libraries. Three other titles in the series were restricted to sixth-grade students with parental permission. “It’s not about banning books; it’s about choosing what’s best for our children,” emphasized Joy Davis, state director of Concerned Women of America. “ . . . If they are teaching tolerance or acceptance of behaviors that are harmful, then it’s wrong.” The books did remain available to all at the town’s public library, a fact that librarian Sue Oliveira noted. “It’s been on the hold list since the challenge,” she said. “The surest way to get everyone to read a book is to ban it.” Phyllis Reynolds Naylor got word of the banning and commented on it: “I get letters from kids about book banning that say, ‘Our parents have no idea what we think about. They still look at me as an innocent little girl or an innocent little guy.’ . . . I believe in honesty and telling kids what they need to know (about) what they ask. I’m going to keep on doing that.”

Landmark Challenge: Inside Alice on the Outside

Parents singled out Alice on the Outside for removal from East Middle School in Shelbyville, Kentucky, in 2005. The challenge focused on a passage in which Alice, struggling to reach maturity, asks an adult family member how sexual intercourse and masturbation feel. Joe and Candy Riley, who led the challenge, felt that the book was too explicit for middle-school students. The school’s Book Challenge Committee reviewed the challenge. The committee consisted of the school’s principal, librarian, two teachers, and two parents. On March 22, 2005, the committee members came up with a compromise: they recommended that the book remain on the library shelves but be restricted to students with written parental permission. The committee was hardly unanimous in its decision. “I understand a child would seek answers to these questions,” said parent member Sandy Phillips. “But the sex is way too much for this age group. I wouldn’t let my daughter read it.” “Reading is a choice,” countered librarian Louise Watts, “and as such, I think it should stay on the shelf. I think they [students] have the right to make choices. It’s called intellectual freedom. We don’t want to get into rating books.”


School superintendent Elaine Farris made the final decision to keep the Naylor novel on the library shelves.

Further Reading

Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries, Revised and Expanded Edition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. “Monroe, Connecticut.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, November 1998: 182. “Shelbyville, Kentucky.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, May 2005: 108. Available online: https://members.ala.org/nif/v54n3/dateline.html. “Webb City, Missouri.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, November 2002: 256. Available online: https://members.ala.org/nif/v51n6/ censorship_dateline.html.

About the Author of the Alice Books Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (1933– ) Phyllis Reynolds Naylor is one of the most popular and prolific authors of picture books, middle-grade fiction, and young-adult novels. She was born on January 4, 1933, in Anderson, Indiana. Her father was a traveling salesman and her mother an elementaryschool teacher. As a child she loved to read and write; her first story was published at age 16 in a church school newspaper edited by her former Sunday-school teacher. She contributed many features and stories to the paper, including a weekly column that ran for 25 years. At 18 she married her first husband, who was 8 years her senior. They moved to Chicago, Illinois, where he worked toward his PhD. During this time Phyllis helped support them by working as a clinical secretary in a university hospital and as a third-grade teacher. When she was 23, her husband showed signs of mental illness and was later diagnosed as an incurable paranoid schizophrenic. The couple divorced and Phyllis went to American University in Washington, D.C., to become a clinical psychologist. She later published a book about her troubled marriage, Crazy Love: An Autobiographical Account of Marriage and Madness (1977). In 1960 Phyllis married Rex Naylor, a speech pathologist. She published her first book, The Galloping Goat and Other Stories, in

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1965. She was soon writing an average of two books a year. Her mystery Night Cry (1984) won an Edgar Award for Best Young Adult Mystery Book. The following year she began her best-selling series of Alice books. Naylor’s best-known work is Shiloh (1991), a Newbery Medal winner about a beagle and the young boy who adopts him in West Virginia. Shiloh Season (1996) and Saving Shiloh (1997) completed the trilogy. Among Naylor’s many other young-adult books are The Grand Escape (1993), about two cats in search of adventure, and the Witch series, beginning with Witch’s Sister (1975). Her books for adults include the novel Unexpected Pleasures (1986) and The Craft of Writing the Novel (1989). Naylor lives in Bethesda, Maryland, with her husband. They have two grown sons. When asked why her books have not gone out of date, Naylor replied, “I concentrate on feelings and relationships.”

A So Far from the Bamboo Grove (1986) by Yoko Kawashima Watkins What Happens in So Far from the Bamboo Grove

This semi-autobiographical novel is the story of 11-year-old Yoko and her family as they flee North Korea in the last days of World War II, making their way home to their native Japan. Yoko’s father is a Japanese government official stationed in Japanese-occupied North Korea during the war. As Japan’s power crumbles, the Communists in North Korea seek vengeance on the Japanese who have tortured, raped, and killed their people. Yoko, her sister, Ko, and their mother flee for their lives. Her brother, Hideyo, who works in a Korean ammunitions factory, is separated from them and must make his own way back to Japan. As they travel to Seoul, they encounter one danger after another and see the chaos of a lawless countryside where Japanese are tortured, raped, and killed by Koreans. They eventually reach Pusan in the south and take a ferry to Japan. They make their way to Kyoto, where their mother leaves the two sisters to go to Aomori to find their grandparents. She later returns to them with terrible news— both grandparents have been killed. Heartbroken, their mother dies later that day. The two girls are now on their own, waiting for the return of their brother. Yoko has grown from a frightened girl into a determined and brave young woman. She and Ko finally are reunited with Hideyo in Maizuru, and their long nightmare ends.


When it was first published in 1986, So Far from the Bamboo Grove won accolades from critics and readers alike. Publishers Weekly 89


called it a “riveting novel.” School Library Journal compared Watkins’s novel to Holocaust survival stories and declared that she was “able to describe scenes of death, rape, and other atrocities with a simple directness, which has no trace of sensationalism yet in no way diminishes their horror.” The horror of these events, however, has resulted in a number of book challenges in schools. But the rape and violence that her heroine observes and barely escapes in her flight from wartorn Korea are only parts of the reasons behind most challenges. In recent years many of the complaints against the novel have come from Korean-American parents and their representatives. While it is true that Japanese people living in Korea at the war’s end were attacked, raped, and tortured, critics point out that these acts of vengeance came after 35 years of Japanese domination of Korea. During this dark period of Korean history, the Japanese completely subjugated Korea, forcing many of its people into slave labor and prostitution. Watkins makes barely a mention of the Japanese tyranny that Korea suffered under in her book. As Carter Eckert, a professor of Korean history at Harvard University, wrote in a newspaper editorial in December 2006: “[T]o teach So Far from the Bamboo Grove without providing historicization might be compared to teaching a sympathetic novel about the escape of a German official’s family from the Netherlands in 1945 without alluding to the nature of the Nazi occupation or the specter of Anne Frank.”

Landmark Challenge: Historical Fiction vs. Historical Fact

As it had been in a number of other states, So Far from the Bamboo Grove was a part of the Massachusetts school system’s recommended reading list for sixth-graders for more than a decade. That situation changed in the Sherborn school system in 2006. Parents of sixth-graders at Dover-Sherborn Middle School, some of them Korean-Americans, strongly objected to the novel’s depiction of Koreans as rapists and torturers. The matter went to a subcommittee given the charge of reviewing the novel and considering the challenges against it. At one of its meetings, the subcommittee listened to testimony from the challenging parents. Henry Jaung, father of a sixth-grader, objected to the book on two levels. He felt the violent subject matter was inappropriate for sixth-graders who “aren’t equipped” for such reading.

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He also objected to what he considered to be the novel’s distorted view of Asian history. “You’ll notice throughout the book these acts [of violence] are committed by Korean men—it is a pretty disturbing connotation of a group of people,” Jaung said. “The first impression you imprint in a child’s mind is typically very hard to erase.” “For me, the issue is about a child’s self-image with respect to their ethnicity,” said Sam Yoon, a member of the Boston City Council and an influential member of the Korean-American community. “This book doesn’t put that story in that context. It’s confusing. . . . One ethnic minority is portrayed as . . . the bad guys.” Other speakers stood up for the book. Parent Karen Masterson stated that her children had read the book years earlier and still remembered it as “one of their best educational experiences.” English teacher Scott Walker pointed out that author Watkins, who lives on Cape Cod, visited the school each year to talk with students and discuss her book. “She is a gift our youngsters hold onto far beyond their time in our classroom,” he said. After the last speaker had spoken, the committee met in closed session and voted unanimously to remove the novel from the curriculum, while keeping copies in the middle-school library. “The decision was not made lightly,” said parent Sheila Jung in a letter sent to parents. “It was based on reams of research and facts. It was morally right to make this decision.” Review-committee member and middle-school headmaster Frederick Randall said, “I won’t represent it as being an easy process on any of us. As a committee, we did the best we could with it, to remain objective.” Reaction to the decision from many teachers and others was predictably angry. “This is not a racist book,” insisted English teacher Amanda Gees in an e-mail. “It is not meant to deny what the Japanese people did to the Koreans, and it is not meant to vilify the Koreans or other combatants who worked to liberate Korea. It is meant, instead, to provide a glimpse of the horrors of war from one young girl’s perspective.” But the Sherborn case had drawn international attention, and the issue was no longer confined to one local school district. The South Korean Consulate in Newton, Massachusetts, wrote a letter to the state department of education in mid-January 2007, asking it to remove the novel from more state middle schools. The letter claimed


the book gave “a false and distorted view of Korea as a country and of the Korean people” and said it created a “hostile environment” for Korean-American students in the classroom. In a Korean edition of the novel, the publisher omitted certain details that might offend Korean readers. In South Korea, the media condemned the book: a television program declared that it depicted Koreans as “evil” and presented an “unhesitant, outrageous distortion” of Koreans, while two newspapers claimed that the author’s father was arrested in 1945 as a high-ranking war criminal and spent six years in a Siberian labor camp. Watkins has flatly denied the charges against her father. On February 3, 2007, even the normally reclusive North Korean government got into the act. In a public statement to the United States, it called the book “an intolerable insult and mockery of the Korean nation and an act of going against history and justice.” Meanwhile, South Korean consulates in Honolulu, Hawaii, and San Francisco, California, wrote letters of protest to their state’s respective education departments. Finally the author herself, who remained mostly silent during this matter, stepped into the fray. Seventy-three-year-old Yoko Kawashima Watkins held a press conference at the Peace Abbey in Sherborn before a partly hostile crowd of about 60 people on February 15, 2007. “I am extremely sorry for causing the commotion over So Far from the Bamboo Grove,” she said. She then told listeners that she would call her publisher to see if a new foreword including more history of Korea and Japan could be added to the next edition of the novel. The book itself seems to be only part of the problem. “Yoko has become a symbol for the problems between Japan and Korea,” said Wellesley Middle School principal John D’Auria. He added, “There’s no author that has . . . made more of a positive change in children than this woman.”

Further Reading

Eckert, Carter. “A Matter of Context.” Boston Globe, December 16, 2006: A15. Kocian, Lisa. “Author Defends Memoir on Korea, Apologizes for Furor.” Boston Globe, February 16, 2007: B4.

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Kocian, Lisa. “Korean Officials Join Fray on Book.” Boston Globe, February 15, 2007: 1. Kocian, Lisa. “School Board to Vote on Korea Book.” Boston Globe, December 31, 2006: 9. “Sherborn, Massachusetts.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, January 2007. Available online: https://members.ala.org/nif/v56n1/dateline. html. Watkins, Yoko Kawashima. Study Guide for So Far from the Bamboo Grove. New York, N.Y.: Glencoe/McGraw-Hill, 2000.

About the Author of So Far from the Bamboo Grove Yoko Kawashima Watkins (1933– ) Yoko Kawashima Watkins, a Japanese writer now living in the United States, has transformed the turmoil of her early life into two memorable books. She was born in Harbin, Manchuria, in northeastern China to Japanese parents in 1933. Manchuria had been under Japanese control since 1931. Like her character Yoko in So Far from the Bamboo Grove, she moved to Nanam, Korea, with her parents in 1941 during World War II, where they lived in a bamboo grove. Four years later, as Japan was losing the war, she fled with her mother and sister to Seoul, Korea, and then back to Japan, which lay in ruins. In her teens, she studied at Kyoto University and learned English. After getting a job as a translator at a U.S. Air Force Base in Aomori (in U.S.-occupied Japan), she met and fell in love with an American pilot, Donald Watkins. They were married in 1953 and moved to the United States in 1955, eventually settling in Massachusetts, where they raised six children, including two Taiwanese orphans. It wasn’t until 1976 that Watkins first began writing about her experiences as a child in Korea. Her semi-autobiographical novel So Far from the Bamboo Grove was published to great acclaim in 1986. She continued her family’s story in a second autobiographical novel, My Brother, My Sister, and I (1996). She also has written Tales from the Bamboo Grove (1992), a book of Japanese folktales. A staunch pacifist who is opposed to all wars, Watkins frequently visits schools to give lectures and talk with students about her books and her life. “I competed with life and death when young. And I won,” she has said.

A Jack (1989) by A.M. Homes What Happens in Jack

Teenager Jack doesn’t quite understand why his parents have divorced, until his father takes him out in a rowboat on a lake and tells him he’s gay and has left his mother for another man. The news shocks Jack, whose distaste for his dad’s new lifestyle is matched by his own fears of being branded a homosexual. For a time he dates a girl he cares nothing for, simply to display his masculinity. Jack finds a sympathetic listener in his mom’s new boyfriend, Michael, a laidback carpenter who sometimes drinks too much but is wise in the ways of the world. Jack also forms a meaningful relationship with Maggie, a beautiful girl at school whose father is gay, too. But not everything goes well for Jack. During a basketball game, he takes a fall and seriously injures his ankle. When his father, attending the game with his roommate Bob, rushes to his side, Jack is deeply embarrassed. Forced to get around on crutches for a time, he is delighted when his best friend, Max Burka, invites him to spend a weekend with his family on Max’s uncle’s farm. Jack is attracted to Mrs. Burka, Max’s mother, in a way he would rather not acknowledge. But the happy Burka family is not what it seems. The idyllic weekend’s peace is shattered when Steve Burka strikes his wife in the face, leaving an ugly bruise. Jack learns, to his shock, that the abuse is ongoing. Mrs. Burka leaves with the children, determined not to go back to her husband. The traumatic experience and its aftermath bring Jack’s parents closer together as they both come to Mrs. Burka’s support. On Jack’s sixteenth birthday, he gets his learner’s permit to drive and has a family birthday dinner. In attendance are the Burkas, 95


Maggie, and both his parents and their respective partners. But the best birthday gift Jack receives is the one he gives to himself—a new sense of identity and maturity. “Okay, so I knew I was Jack, all alone,” he says in the book’s closing pages. “Jack singular. I don’t mean that all of a sudden I was an orphan or anything . . . but more than anything I was plain Jack, no strings attached.”


When it first appeared in 1989, Jack was compared to J.D. Salinger’s classic coming-of-age novel The Catcher in the Rye, and its hapless protagonist Jack to Salinger’s Holden Caulfield. Reviewers praised the book and its young author, A.M. Homes. “Ms. Homes handles the big subjects subtly, deftly, and with an appealing lack of melodrama,” wrote Crescent Dragonwagon in the New York Times Book Review. Novelist and critic Madison Smartt Bell called the book “honest, uncompromising, and savagely funny,” while the reviewer in the gay periodical Christopher Street hailed it as “triumphantly original.” “I think there’s a clarity to it and a purity that there’s no way I have now,” Homes has said, looking back at her first novel. “I know too much. The clunkiness with which that book was written I still remember. It amazes me that I could speak at that age, much less write a book. It’s a very sweet book. It’s a nice story.” The problems facing a teenage boy whose father declares his homosexuality and moves out of the house, however, have not been seen as so sweet and nice by many parents and school administrators. They find the novel’s homosexuality an inappropriate subject for students. This subject matter, along with profane language and other sexual references, earned Jack the seventy-fourth ranking on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000.” Jack was made into a movie for the cable network Showtime in 2004, with a script by Homes. Actress Stockard Channing, who played Jack’s mother, Anne, won an Emmy Award for her performance.

Landmark Challenges: From the Summer Reading List to the Library Reserve Shelf

It’s usually a challenge from a parent that starts the process of a book’s removal from a school system, but that’s not what happened in Fairfield,

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California, in 1995 and 1996. The first year Jack appeared on a summer reading list for honors students, teachers and staff at the town’s schools removed it for its profanity and, according to school-board member Susan Heumphreus, its negative portrayals of characters. Inexplicably, the book appeared on the reading list the following year. Again, it was removed. The removal by school staff members was performed before the school board could vote on whether to keep it or not. Jack fared better in Spindale, North Carolina, in the summer of 1996. Elizabeth Blanton complained that the novel, chosen by her daughter from the library for a book report, was inappropriate due to offensive language. A school committee reviewed the book and recommended that it be moved to the library’s reserve shelf. Their recommendation was upheld and implemented by a county committee and then the board of education. The decision of whether to allow students to read or not read the novel, pointed out board member Roger Jolly, was best left to their parents. Jolly added, however, that he would not let his own child read the book.

Further Reading

A.M. Homes official Web site. Available online: www.amhomesbooks. com. Accessed September 21, 2007. Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries, Revised and Expanded Edition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Weich, Dave. “A. M. Homes Is a Big Fat Liar.” Powells.com Author Interviews, May 24, 1999. Available online: www.powells.com/authors/ homes.html. Accessed September 21, 2007.

About the Author of Jack A.M. Homes (1961– ) Amy M. Homes was born in 1961 in Washington, D.C. She was adopted as a baby and did not meet her biological parents until she was in her thirties. She wrote about the experience in a memoir, The Mistress’s Daughter (2007). Homes wrote her first novel, Jack (1989), when she was 19 and an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College in New York. It was begun, she says, as part of a homework assignment. She later attended the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.


Her other novels include In a Country of Mothers (1993) and Music for Torching (1999). Perhaps Homes’s most controversial novel is The End of Alice (1996), which is about a convicted child molester and murderer with a disturbingly attractive sense of humor. She also has published two collections of short stories, The Safety of Objects (1990) and Things You Should Know (2002). Her nonfiction works include Los Angeles: People, Places, and the Castle on the Hill (2002). Homes has written for the Showtime television series The L Word and in 2007 was developing a new series for HBO about life in Long Island’s exclusive Hamptons community. Several of her novels and stories have been adapted to the screen. “People always talk about, ‘How can you write about marriage? How can you write about a boy dating a Barbie doll? You’re none of these things,’” Homes said in a 1999 interview. “That’s because I’m a fiction writer. I’m a big, fat liar. . . . You can write what you know for about an hour and a half—then it’s over.”

A Athletic Shorts (1991) by Chris Crutcher What Happens in Athletic Shorts

Athletic Shorts is a collection of six stories dealing with adolescents in crisis. Five of the stories feature characters from Crutcher’s four previous novels. “A Brief Moment in the Life of Angus Bethune” is about a physically big and awkward boy whose divorced parents both are living with same-sex partners. While he loves his parents and accepts their life choices, Angus wants to be accepted as normal by his peers. A cruel classmate buys fellow students’ votes to get Angus elected king of the Senior Winter Ball. His queen is the beautiful Melissa Lefevre, whom Angus is hopelessly in love with. While her boyfriend, who set Angus up, wants to humiliate him, Melissa sympathizes with Angus and actually makes the evening memorable for him. After they dance, she asks him to escort her home. In “The Pin,” Johnny Rivers is pitted against his father, Cecil, in an exhibition wrestling match at school. Cecil is highly competitive, and Johnny is always trying to prove himself to Dad. In the end, the son wins the match and the father slaps him and leaves the mat a poor loser. Later, the son finds his father crying over an album of family photographs. He explains that he wanted to be a better father to Johnny than his father was to him. In “The Other Pin,” another school wrestler, Petey Shropshrire, a friend of Johnny Rivers, faces the dilemma of having to wrestle Chris Byers, a girl. Win or lose, Petey is convinced he’ll come out of the match a loser. He convinces Chris, who is ready to quit wrestling anyway, to give their wrestling match a comic turn by dressing up as 99


Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae, cartoon characters. The comic tomfoolery delights the spectators but angers the wrestling coaches. Petey’s coach punishes him by making him run the bleachers day after day, but the punishment doesn’t bother him—for he has a date with the beautiful Chris. “Goin’ Fishin’” is about the anger and guilt experienced by Lionel Serbousek, who alone escaped a boating accident in which his father, mother, and younger brother were killed. Neal Anderson, a rich friend who had been drinking, was responsible for the accident. Lionel, an orphan now, lives alone and harbors a deep hatred for Neal. When Neal, who has turned to drugs to ease his own guilt and pain, comes to Lionel seeking forgiveness, Lionel turns him away. Even after Lionel learns from Neal’s mother that Neal is dying, he cannot bring himself to forgive Neal. Only after being confronted by his good friend and former swim teammate Elaine Ferral does Lionel realize that he may not be so different from Neal. He finds Neal in a drugged daze on skid row and tells him he is taking him fishing. In “Telephone Man,” perhaps the most controversial story in the collection, Jack Simpson is a troubled youth and racist who is sent to a special school for rehabilitation. He is dubbed the “Telephone Man” by other students because he carries telephoneinstalling equipment around with him wherever he goes. When Jack has an accident in the boys’ room, he decides to go home to change his clothes, but he is jumped by a gang of Chinese-American troublemakers. Before they can beat him up, however, Jack is rescued—much to his surprise—by Hawk, a black student, who admires him for his eccentricities. Hawk’s friendship changes Jack’s attitude toward blacks. “[I]f my dad made a mistake about them,” he says at the story’s end, “I wonder if he could of made a mistake about the other colors, too.” In “In the Time I Get,” Louie Banks, an 18-year-old working in a bar in Trout, Idaho, for the summer, is just getting over the accidental death of his girlfriend when he faces another emotional crisis. The bar owner’s nephew, Darren, comes to work at the bar and tells Louie that he is gay and dying of AIDS. Because of Louie’s loss, Darren hopes he will understand what he is experiencing and be his friend. Louie’s first impulse is to avoid Darren completely, but in time he comes to admire Darren’s courage and visits him in the

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hospital. When an old friend and schoolmate warns Louie to stay away from Darren for his own good, Louie finds the courage to stand up for his new friend. Like Darren, he hopes to achieve something of value “in the time I get” from life.


Chris Crutcher is a writer who has never shied from controversy. He believes in telling young readers about life in all its grim reality. “Too often, the adults in your life don’t tell you the truth—they don’t tell you what the world is really like,” he has said. “So a lot of what I do when I write is describe the world as I see it, rather than how I might like it to be.” Athletic Shorts, published in 1991, is his most challenged book to date. It ranked seventh on the American Library Association’s “10 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2006,” and sixty-fourth on the “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000.” “The issues of father-son relationships, sexuality, and the testing of personal limits—all central themes in young-adult literature—are explored from an unconventional perspective in Athletic Shorts,” wrote a reviewer in The Horn Book. AIDS, homosexuality, and same-sex marriages are some of the unconventional topics that have been cited in many school challenges against the book. The frequent use of the word “nigger” by the racist narrator of “Telephone Man” may be the most cited reason. Crutcher claims he decided to use the “N” word to show it for what it is, “a sadistic weapon of a word that has been used in this nation’s history like a hammer. You don’t hide a word like that. You expose it. You tell the truth about it.”

Landmark Challenge: A Brief Moment for a Challenge in Anchorage

In February 1999, parent Sue Frances urged the school board of Anchorage, Alaska, to remove Athletic Shorts from the Goldenview Middle School library. She focused her challenge on the book’s opening story, “A Brief Moment in the Life of Angus Bethune.” She criticized the story for having “a lot of foul language in it, it’s disrespectful to parents and to authority.” But it was the mention of homosexuality, a minor theme in the work, that most angered her. “It makes


it seem like a normal thing,” she said. “This kid’s parents are both homosexual. And not only that, they both have partners.” Among the story’s defenders was social studies teacher Chad Sant, who used the story in an eighth-grade psychology unit. The piece was an excellent vehicle for discussing a number of emotions, he said. “The story is really about how Angus triumphs over prejudice and stereotyping,” Sant pointed out. The challenge was passed on to the district’s Controversial Issues Review Committee, made up of parents, students, teachers, and residents. They considered Frances’s motion, which would require teachers to let parents know before the stories were taught or read in the classroom. The committee voted this down 12 to 2. Then the group deliberated on removing the book from library shelves— and voted that down 14 to 0. Committee member Herb Berkowitz admitted that teachers could decide the book might be better for one grade and not for another. However, he saw no cause to place any other restrictions on its access.

Landmark Challenge: Struggling with the “N” Word in Grand Rapids

For Chris Crutcher, the racist slur “nigger” is something to expose, but for school officials in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 2005, it was something they didn’t want their middle-school students to be exposed to. And it cost teacher Patricia Bouwhuis her job. Bouwhuis had taught the story “Telephone Man” from Athletic Shorts for three years when one day a parent challenged its use, pointing to the main character’s frequent use of the “N” word. When school superintendent Bert Bleke heard the complaint, he immediately suspended Bouwhuis from teaching at the school and ordered all copies of Crutcher’s book to be removed from classrooms and from the school library. They would remain out of circulation for three months while a special committee considered the book’s fate. Hazel Lewis, president of the local branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), called for Bouwhuis to be fired for reading such “trash” in her classroom. While admitting that the story itself took a stand against racism, Lewis did not see how middle-school students could distinguish between the

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author’s intent and the voice of his narrator. “College students can handle stuff like that, but not our babies,” she said. A number of parents of students who had read the story, however, disagreed with her. “Our son came away with strong feelings that racism is wrong,” said Cindy Tett. “We are not in the book banning business,” Bleke made clear in response to parents’ defense of the book. “We will be careful about this and thoughtful about this. But it will not intrude in a classroom like this ever again.” The issue quickly gained the attention of national organizations opposed to censorship, including Freedom to Write and the National Coalition Against Censorship. “They may not want to be seen as ‘book banners’ but that’s exactly what they are,” said attorney Stephen Rohde of Freedom to Write. “ . . . I venture to guess that the same people who are banning this book are the last ones who are willing to tackle difficult subjects such as racism. The ‘Out-ofsight-out-of-mind Mentality’ leads to censorship and to ignoring our nation’s problems.” As for author Crutcher, he has faith that students will recognize the message of his story. “Unlike the people challenging the story, I have confidence in our children’s intellectual ability to understand that.” Patricia Bouwhuis returned to teaching in Grand Rapids but was transferred to another school.

Further Reading

“Anchorage, Alaska.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, May 1999: 65. Barillas, C. “Fiction Fights Back.” Anchorage Daily News, February 24, 1999. Chris Crutcher official Web site. Available online: www.chriscrutcher. com. Accessed August 14, 2007. “Grand Rapids, Michigan: Book Pulled from Classrooms, Libraries.” PenCenter USA, February 8, 2005. Available online: http://penusa. org/go/news/comments/grand-rapids-michigan-book-pulled-fromclassrooms-libraries. Accessed August 13, 2007. Young Adult Library Services Association. Hit List for Young Adults 2: Frequently Challenged Books. Chicago, Ill.: American Library Association, 2002.


About the Author of Athletic Shorts Chris Crutcher (1946– ) Chris Crutcher was born on July 17, 1946, in Dayton, Ohio. His father was an Air Force pilot and his mother a homemaker. Later, the family moved to Cascade, Idaho, a small logging town north of Boise, the state capital. He attended Eastern Washington State College and earned a degree in sociology and psychology. Crutcher was a swimmer and distance runner in college, and sports play a major role in much of his fiction. Crutcher taught at a California alternative school before moving to Spokane, Washington, where he worked as a child and family therapist. His first young-adult novel, Running Loose, was published in 1983 and was named an American Library Association (ALA) Best Book for Young Adult Readers. His next three novels—Stotan! (1986), The Crazy Horse Electric Game (1987), and Chinese Handcuffs (1989)—were similarly honored, as was Athletic Shorts. In 1998 Crutcher received the Intellectual Freedom Award from the National Council of Teachers of English. He also was the recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award in 2000 for excellence in young-adult literature. Some of his most recent novels include Whale Talk (2001), The Sledding Hill (2005), and Deadline (2007). His fascinating “ill-advised” autobiography, King of the Mild Frontier, was published in 2003. “I won’t back off on a story because I think someone will be offended by it,” Crutcher has said. “I may be judicious in what I should write about; but once I decide, I won’t leave anything out.”

A We All Fall Down (1991) by Robert Cormier What Happens in We All Fall Down

The Jerome family comes home one night to find their home has been invaded and trashed, and their younger daughter, Karen, had been attacked and left in a coma. The police don’t know who committed these heinous acts, but an 11-year-old neighbor boy does. He witnessed the break-in and decides to go after the four teenage boys responsible on his own. The boy, who calls himself “The Avenger,” is even more disturbed than the four teens who broke into the Jerome house. He uses his grandfather’s gun to shoot a school bully. When his grandfather suspects him of the murder, “The Avenger” kills him as well. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Jane Jerome, Karen’s older sister, is traumatized by the home invasion and has trouble getting her life back together. Just as troubled is Buddy Walker, one of the four teens responsible, whose parents’ separation has driven him to alcoholism and friendship with the reckless Harry Flowers, who masterminded the home invasion. Buddy is the only one of the group who feels guilty and regrets what has happened—especially the attack on Karen, which he was not a part of. Buddy starts to follow Jane, driven by feelings of guilt. The two meet and quickly fall in love. Buddy says nothing about his involvement in the attack on Jane’s home, knowing that she would never forgive him. At this point, the author reveals that The Avenger is not an 11-year-old boy but a mentally disturbed neighborhood handyman, Mickey Stallings. Psychologically, Mickey still sees himself 105


as the young boy who committed those terrible acts years earlier. When he sees Jane and Buddy together, he becomes enraged at Jane for going out with the person responsible for trashing her home. Mickey later lures Jane into an abandoned building and ties her to a chair. He tells her the truth about Buddy and then intends to kill her with a knife, but Jane stalls for time and tells him that he is not The Avenger or an 11-year-old boy, but Mickey Stallings. She accuses him of killing his grandfather, and Mickey breaks down and turns the knife on himself. As he dies, the police arrive and release Jane. Karen comes out of her coma and fully recovers, but the relationship between Jane and Buddy does not. Jane denounces Buddy, yet she does not tell anyone else of his crime. They meet one more time. He claims he has given up drinking, but she knows he is lying. He tries to get her to admit that their love was a wonderful thing, but she can’t. “As pity moved into that hole inside her, she discovered how distant pity was from hate, how very far it was from love. She stepped on the escalator and slowly ascended, not looking back, leaving him down below.”


“[We All Fall Down] is sure . . . to find a devoted following among the kids themselves, who will recognize and embrace the authenticity of the achingly awful adolescent world that Cormier has created,” wrote a reviewer of the novel in School Library Journal. That world—which includes alcoholism, alienation, suicide, and criminal acts—has caused many parents and school administrators to challenge the use of the book in classrooms. We All Fall Down joined two other Cormier novels, The Chocolate War and Fade, on the American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000,” checking in at the thirty-fifth position. Most of the challenges have focused on the book’s use of profanity, the violence of the opening home invasion and later incidents, and the sexual content. Robert Cormier was unfazed by the challenges to this and to his other novels. “I think it makes some people uncomfortable because I recognize that life isn’t always a series of happy endings,” he once wrote. “My books go against that. The hero doesn’t always win, and sometimes you’re not sure who the bad guy is.”

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Landmark Challenge: A Strange Way to Celebrate Banned Books Week

In the fall of 2003, Lori Krysztof, a kindergarten teacher and parent of a high-school freshman, wrote a letter of complaint to the Baldwin, Kansas, school district. She wanted We All Fall Down removed from a list of 18 recommended titles for a freshman orientation course being taught by Joyce Tallman, president of the teachers’ union in the Baldwin district. “I’m asking that the book be taken out of the curriculum for the class,” Krysztof made clear. “I have not asked that the book be banned.” In her letter she cited more than 50 passages she found objectionable, many of them having to do with bad language and sexual content. Based on Krysztof ’s complaint and that of another parent, school superintendent Jim White made the decision to pull the book from Tallman’s class, but he allowed it to remain on the school library’s shelf. White said he read passages of the novel and wouldn’t allow his own daughter or granddaughter to read it. He also pulled Running Loose, a sports novel by Chris Crutcher, from the orientation reading list. Members of the Baldwin district school board were disturbed by White’s decision, which he made without consulting them. “It’s a case where one or two parents are forcing their personal beliefs on all students in the district, and that’s wrong,” said board member Stacy Cohen, a former English teacher. To discuss the matter, the school board held a special meeting on September 22, ironically right in the middle of national Banned Books Week (September 20–27). The theme of the week that year was “Open Books for Open Minds.” According to Cohen, the board needed to work out a policy to cover challenges to classroom curriculum. At the time, the district only had a policy in place for the challenge of library materials. “We need a policy that works,” she said. At the meeting, the board voted 6 to 1 to empower a review committee at Baldwin High School to evaluate Cormier’s novel and to recommend whether it should remain in the freshman curriculum or be dropped. However, the board agreed to make copies of the book unavailable to students while the review was underway, even though students had not finished the novel in Tallman’s class. Cohen suggested in a motion that copies already confiscated be returned to Tallman to distribute to students who


wanted to finish the novel on their own. The motion received no second and was dropped. Many of the 100 people who attended the meeting were more in sync with the district’s curriculum director, Connie Wehmeyer, who questioned if the book belonged in a freshman class. Cohen countered that We All Fall Down offered students an opportunity to discuss a lamentable but real-life situation—home invasion and the factors surrounding it. “They’re thinking about this kind of stuff,” she said. But fellow board member Baline Cone was not convinced. “Do you have to lend credence to it?” he argued. The controversy over the book banning was just getting started. Five days after the meeting, with no notice of intent issued to the public, the board voted to disband the review committee prior to its first meeting. Superintendent White convinced a majority of members that there were no proper rules for appointing such a committee in force. Others, including Baldwin High School librarian Jana Jorn, disagreed. “I feel it was approved,” Jorn said of a policy she helped develop in 1998. “The procedures are clear.” At the board’s October 13 meeting, White and curriculum director Wehmeyer presented a new draft of policy for book challenges. Only after the new regulations were adopted would the review committee be called to evaluate the book. Part of the drafted policy called for teachers to notify parents of any “potentially objectionable material” before it was used in the classroom. While reinstating the committee, the board refused in a 4 to 3 vote to allow the book to be returned to the class, despite existing policy that stated challenged books must be made available until the resolution of the evaluation process. Many students and their parents were angered by the decision. “Our problem is that an individual can take a book out of the classroom” without any formal review, said Baldwin High sophomore Lynne Lanners. To draw attention to the challenge, Lanners and three fellow students handed out copies of the novel before and during the first half of a Baldwin High football game to parents who had purchased the book online for their children to finish reading. Only one copy was available in the school library. “We support the use of We All Fall Down because it is realistic about the issues students face today,” said Lanners. “In doing this, we hope to continue to raise awareness of the book.”

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Finally, at a meeting in November, the school board voted 5 to 2 in favor of the review committee’s recommendation that the novel be returned to Tallman’s classroom. The board, however, made the novel a supplemental curricular title for the course instead of required reading. Superintendent White saw the board’s next job as developing a new policy for handling classroom material challenges. That policy may not bode well for We All Fall Down or any other challenged book. “There is a great deal of interest in a new policy,” White said. “They would like to have a more rigid policy that is explicit on how challenges are handled.”

Further Reading

“Arlington, Texas.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, March 2000. Carpenter, Tim. “Book Ban Ignites Censorship Debate.” LJWorld.com, September 14, 2003. Available online: www2.ljworld.com/news/2003/ sep/14/book_ban_ignites. Accessed August 24, 2007. Kerr, Kadi. “Book Spurs Giveaway of Books in Baldwin.” LJWorld.com, October 30, 2003. Available online: www2.ljworld.com/news/2003/ oct/30/ban_spurs_giveaway. Accessed August 24, 2007. “Leesburg, Florida.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, March 2000. “Tamaqua, Pennsylvania.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, November 2000.

About the Author of We All Fall Down Robert Cormier (1925–2000) Robert Cormier is considered by many critics and readers to be the finest young-adult author in America. In his unforgettable novels and stories he fearlessly plumbs the depths of good and evil and explores the corruption of the world and its values. He was born into a French-Canadian family in Leominster, Massachusetts, where he lived all his life. He attended parochial primary and secondary schools and had his first literary efforts—several poems—published in the Leominster Daily Enterprise, a newspaper. Cormier attended Fitchburg State College, where a professor submitted his story “The Little Things That Count” to a Catholic magazine that published it and paid the author $75.


After a two-year stint writing scripts and commercials for a Worcester, Massachusetts, radio station, Cormier became a local reporter for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette. He became wellknown in the region for his weekly human-interest column “A Story from the Country.” In 1955 he moved to the Fitchburg Sentinel, where he covered city hall and local politics. In 1960 Cormier published the first of three well-received adult novels. He intended The Chocolate War (1974) as an adult novel as well, but his agent decided that it would best appeal to younger readers since it was about high-school students. The Chocolate War became a huge success and established Cormier as a major writer for young adults. He followed it with the equally popular I Am the Cheese (1977) and After the First Death (1979). In 1980 he received the coveted Margaret A. Edwards Award for young-adult literature. The award cited these three works as “brilliantly crafted and troubling novels that have achieved the status of classics in Young Adult literature.” Cormier’s other works include the story collection 8 Plus 1 (1980), The Bumblebee Flies Anyway (1983), Tunes for Bears to Dance To (1992), and Tenderness (1997). His last novel, Frenchtown Summer (1999), won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Young Adult Fiction in 2000. Robert Cormier died on November 2, 2000, at age 75. In an interview shortly before his death, he said, “My dream was to be known as a writer and to be able to produce at least one book that would be read by people. That dream came true with the publication of my first novel—and all the rest has been a sweet bonus.”

A Iceman (1994) by Chris Lynch What Happens in Iceman

Hockey is 14-year-old Eric’s life, but it’s not much of a life. His explosive temper and violent behavior on the ice disturb even his teammates, who refer to him as “Iceman.” Eric’s brutal behavior while playing hockey is encouraged by his father, who is driven by his own demons. Eric’s mother, a former nun, offers him little relief with her cold religiosity. The only person to escape this dysfunctional family is Eric’s older brother, Duane, who has turned away from his father and the family sport, but he retains a healthy sense of humor about himself and life in general. Searching for answers to life’s problems, Eric forms an unlikely friendship with McLaughlin, a mortuary worker, and finds peace by lying in a coffin and imagining himself dead. But McLaughlin, a loner Eric admires, ultimately proves unworthy of emulation, and Eric abandons his idea of a career in mortuary science. With the support of Duane, Eric finally finds the strength to face the anger that has driven him to violence and to resolve his problems. He becomes a better hockey player and person and leads his team to victory in the climactic game.


As one of its first reviewers pointed out, Iceman might appeal to hockey fans, but it “is clearly about much more and is no advertisement for the sport.” Author Chris Lynch has often built his novels around sports and athletes, but he has ambivalent feelings about the pursuit of sports in high school. Sport provides “a tremendous 111


potential for channeling energy,” he has said. “But instead it mostly encourages the macho ethos and schools let athletes run wild. This carries through life, and results in Mike Tysons—people who were never told what they could not do.” Eric, the protagonist in Iceman, clearly fits this description. On the ice rink he is a ticking time bomb, ready to explode. “The novel,” according to Jack Foreman in School Library Journal, “is an unsettling, complicated portrayal of growing up in a dysfunctional family” and “a thought-provoking book guaranteed to compel and touch a teenage audience.” The novel’s effect on some parents and school officials, however, was markedly different. The book’s vulgar language, its depiction of violence, and its central character’s preoccupation with death have all contributed to numerous challenges in schools and school libraries.

Landmark Challenge: An Embattled Librarian in Windsor Locks

Cheryl Ward, the librarian at Windsor Locks Middle School in Connecticut, was one of the school system’s shining stars. The school librarian for nine years, she was twice nominated as the district’s teacher of the year and was beloved by parents and students alike. For these reasons, it came as a shock for many to learn in June 1998 that school superintendent June Hartford-Alley was transferring Ward to South Elementary School to teach fifth grade. School officials claimed the transfer was to utilize Ward to help raise reading scores on the Connecticut Mastery Test, but Ward and her supporters saw it as punishment for standing up to a new policy they claimed instituted book censorship. It all started a few months earlier, when Kathy Blackburn, parent of a 12-year-old student at the middle school, complained to a member of the school board about Chris Lynch’s Iceman being part of a summer reading list. She said the book was too violent and filled with vulgar language. The school-board member, Ann Levy, happened to be Blackburn’s sister, and Levy went directly to the superintendent with the complaint. Levy suggested that a new policy be instituted whereby controversial books such as Iceman be segregated from other books and that students be allowed to

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borrow them only with parental permission. Ward opposed the change, claiming that the existing policy, based on the American Library Association’s Library Bill of Rights, was sufficient. Within a matter of days, her transfer was announced for the next school year. Ward was not the first person to be moved abruptly from Windsor Locks Middle School. In the previous two years Hartford-Alley had replaced two principals, two vice principals, and a guidance counselor. At a June 1998 school-board meeting, parents and teachers spoke out in support of Ward and opposed the transfer. They called her “a rock-solid professional” and someone “too valuable to lose.” Their support was to no avail, however, and Ward decided to counterattack. On July 16, she filed a civil rights suit against the school officials of Windsor Locks, charging that her First Amendment right to free speech had been violated. The same day, U.S. District Court Judge Dominic Squatrito issued a temporary restraining order against the transfer until the case was resolved. He held a hearing about two weeks later to help decide the issue. “[T]he punishment for the exercise of her free-speech rights is removal of her from her position,” argued lawyer Ronald Corilico, representing Ward, “ . . . so that she can no longer exercise those free-speech rights.” Speaking on her own behalf, Ward told the judge that Iceman, the book that had started the controversy, was “a wonderful story for those students I deal with who are . . . at risk, and who don’t want to read the classics.” Following the two-hour hearing, Squatrito left the restraining order intact and told the lawyers on both sides to submit briefs to support the preliminary injunction that Ward sought. On August 26, the judge handed down his ruling. He denied Ward her request for an injunction to block the transfer. Squatrito claimed that Ward had not shown that her transfer would do “irreparable harm” and declared her argument that other teachers would be discouraged from exercising their free speech was purely “speculative.” Superintendent Hartford-Alley was pleased with the ruling, deeming it “good news for the children because Mrs. Ward will be in that [fifth-grade] classroom and there was some uncertainty about that.” More certain, perhaps, was a new policy of censoring books in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, schools.


Landmark Challenge: “Not An Inspiring Book”

Parent Maureen Heier objected to the foul language used in Iceman, but it was not the central focus of her challenge against the book to the Medford, Wisconsin, school board in late 1998. Iceman, she said, was simply “not an inspiring book” for middle-school students to read. The board formed a review committee to consider the matter. At a February 18 meeting, the committee voted 4 to 2 to recommend that the book be removed from the school library. This action was immediately challenged by the Medford Star-News, a local weekly newspaper. Attorney Frank Nikolay, representing the paper, claimed that the decision was invalid because members of the committee were not elected by citizens of the school district. “I would ask you to reverse the policy that’s in existence now, so that it can be settled at the administrative [board] level,” Nikolay told the board. “It is a very, very slippery slope that you start on once you start saying this kind of literature is not fit for anybody. I’ve read the book. There is some profanity in it. It’s comparable to what I hear when I’m working in the summer and the fall in my yard and kids are walking by the school. I hear it every day!” The board agreed in a 7 to 2 vote to review the policy.

Further Reading

Angel, Ann. “The Bad Boys of YA: Chris Lynch and Adam Rapp.” The ALAN Review, Fall 2000. Available online: http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ ejournals/ALAN/v28n1/angel.html. Accessed August 16, 2007. “Author Profile: Chris Lynch.” Teenreads.com. Available online: www. teenreads.com/authors/au-lynch-chris.asp. Accessed July 11, 2007. Foerstel, Herbert N. Banned in the U.S.A.: A Reference Guide to Book Censorship in Schools and Public Libraries, Revised and Expanded Edition. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. “Haysville, Kansas.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, March 1997: 49. Marks, Paul. “Librarian Loses Bid to Block Transfer . . . ” Hartford Courant, August 27, 1998: B1. Marks, Paul. “Librarian, School Board in Court Again; Briefs to Be Filed on Order Barring Transfer.” Hartford Courant, July 28, 1998: B1. “Medford, Wisconsin.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, May 1999: 69. “A Summer for Healing Windsor Locks.” Hartford Courant, June 29, 1998: A08.

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About the Author of Iceman Chris Lynch (1962– ) One of the so-called “Bad Boys of YA,” as author Ann Angel has called him, Chris Lynch writes about adolescents caught up in a web of violence and despair from which they struggle to escape. Lynch was born on July 2, 1962, in Boston, Massachusetts. His father, a bus driver, died when he was five, and Chris was raised by his mother, who worked as a receptionist. He attended Catholic elementary and high schools. “I hated high school—every minute,” he recalled. “It was . . . [a]n all-boys’ football factory. Nothing like the arts was encouraged in any way.” He hated it so much that he dropped out in his junior year. He later attended Boston University and then Suffolk University in Boston, graduating with a degree in journalism. Over the next six years, Lynch worked at a variety of odd jobs, including painting houses and proofreading financial reports. In 1989 he enrolled at Boston’s Emerson College in a master’s program in writing, where he began his first novel, Shadow Boxer, about a washed-up boxer and the legacy he leaves his two sons, one of whom wants to be a boxer, too. Shadow Boxer was published in 1993 to glowing reviews; it was followed by Gypsy Davey and Iceman, both published in 1994. All three novels were chosen as American Library Association Best Books for Young Adults. Lynch’s next novel, Slot Machine (1995), was about Elvin Bishop, a 13-year-old overweight misfit at a summer camp. Lynch continued Bishop’s story in two more novels, Extreme Elvin (1999) and Me, Dead Dad, & Alcatraz (2005). Freewill (2001), a mystery involving teen suicides in a high school, was written in a second-person narration. Perhaps Lynch’s most controversial novel to date is Inexcusable (2005), which is told from the point of view of a young man accused of date rape. It was a National Book Award finalist. Lynch is not discouraged that many of his books have been challenged in schools. “[A]t the end of the day, the response to being challenged has to be that it reinforces the writer’s determination,” he has said. “If I wrote something that stirred things up, don’t think that I necessarily said something brilliant, groundbreaking, subversive, clever, or even right. All it means to me is that, well, I’ve stirred something up.” Chris Lynch lives in Scotland with his wife and children.

A The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things (2003) by Carolyn Mackler What Happens in The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things

High-school sophomore Virginia Shreves comes from a family of overachievers. Overweight and confused, she doesn’t measure up to her adolescent-psychologist mother’s standards. Her dad is preoccupied with his work and golfing and is rarely around. Virginia is at loose ends at a private school in Manhattan after her best friend moves away. She puts up with her boyfriend, Froggy Welsh, who tries to grope her on his Monday visits, and gives body piercing a try. Then she learns that her brother, Byron, a big man at Columbia University, has been suspended for date rape. Throughout her struggles to lose weight and find her own identity, Virginia retains her sense of humor and finally finds the maturity and selfconfidence that have long eluded her.


The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things is Carolyn Mackler’s second novel. Critics generally praised the book. “Mackler writes with such insight and humor (sometimes using strong language to make her point) that many readers will immediately identify with Virginia’s longings as well as her fear and loathing,” wrote the reviewer for Booklist. “Virginia’s story will interest readers who are looking for one more book with teen angst, a bit of romance, and a kid who is a bit like them or their friends,” wrote the School Library Journal critic. The novel was named a 2004 Michael L. 117


Printz Honor Book by the ALA’s Young Adult Library Services Association and has received a number of other awards. The film rights have been optioned by Tannenbaum Productions and Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of the TV series Gilmore Girls. “So many of us feel like we don’t fit in, that we’re inferior to others,” Mackler has said about the theme of her novel. “But things happen. Bad things happen. And many of us end up learning the difficult but important lesson that the people we idolize may not be all they’re cracked up to be. And guess what? We’re not so bad after all.” Strong language and sexual content have caused the novel to be challenged in a number of schools. It ranked fourth on the American Library Association’s “10 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2006” for reasons of “sexual content, anti-family content, offensive language, and being unsuited to age group.” In response to these criticisms and challenges, Mackler claims that profane language and references to sex are ways that allow young readers to place themselves in her novels and get across to them her message of the importance of self-esteem. “As an adult writing for young people,” she insists, “I am aware of my responsibility. I don’t just throw in sexuality casually or irresponsibly.”

Landmark Challenge: A Superintendent Has Second Thoughts

School superintendents who actively get involved in a book challenge often find themselves in controversial positions. Such was the case in Carroll County, Maryland, in October 2005, when superintendent Charles I. Ecker decided to remove The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things from all district school libraries. The challenge to the novel from a parent and a student was originally taken up by a reconsideration committee made up of a dozen parents, students, administrators, media specialists, and a teacher. After careful deliberation, the committee decided that the book should remain on middle- and high-school library shelves. Disappointed in this decision, parents who supported the challenge turned to superintendent Ecker. He agreed that the novel’s profanity and sexual content were inappropriate for students and ordered the ban. His actions brought an immediate response from school librarians, students, and national organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Crystal Gardner, a student at Winters

The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things 119

Mill High School in Westminster, Maryland, started a petition drive in November to protest the banning. With two classmates, she collected approximately 350 signatures. Other supporters and opponents sent Ecker letters and e-mails. School librarians asked the superintendent to meet with them to hear their reasons for opposing the ban. Ecker agreed and listened thoughtfully to the librarians’ arguments against censorship and concerns that the banning set a “bad precedent” for future challenges to books. The meeting, along with the letters, caused Ecker to reverse his ban, at least partially. “I wish I could require parents to read it [the novel] with their kids because the book relates to families and how individuals feel about themselves,” he said. “As I’ve said all along, the book does have a good message. But I also think the use of vulgar words and statements that are sexual in nature could’ve been left out.” Because of the controversial parts, Ecker retained his ban in middle-school libraries but allowed the book to be returned to highschool library shelves. Many applauded the superintendent’s decision. “It was probably the best decision,” said Westminster High junior Anna Harvey. “I see his point with not wanting middle-school students to read it,” said Crystal Gardner. “But I thought it was irrational to take it away from high schools.” The book’s author had more mixed feelings. “He made a brave and intelligent decision,” Mackler admitted. “However, I’m disappointed that the superintendent has chosen to ban [my novel] from middle school libraries. Based on the many letters I’ve received from 12- and 13-year-old girls who have told me [the book] has helped them feel better about themselves and their bodies, I believe this readership also needs access to honest books that encourage empowerment and healthy self-esteem.” David Rocah of the Maryland ACLU was worried about three other books banned in Carroll County schools. “In our letter [to the superintendent], we point out four other books that have been banned,” Rocah explained. “That’s what’s disturbing. There seems to be a pattern here of pulling books off the shelves.” Ecker himself seemed to see a need for challenges and censorship in school libraries. “One thing I hope to come out of this is that parents will be concerned or inquire about what their children are reading,” he said. “A lot of people may assume that if [a book] comes from the school library, there’s nothing bad in it. Whether [their children] get it


at school, the public library, or buy it at a bookstore, parents ought to be more involved in what their children are reading.”

Further Reading

“Author Biography: Carolyn Mackler.” Teenreads.com. Available online: www.teenreads.com/guides/earth_my_butt2.asp. Accessed September 23, 2007. Carolyn Mackler official Web site. Available online: www.carolynmackler. com. Accessed September 17, 2007. “Westminster, Maryland.” Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom, March 2006. Available online: https://members.ala.org/nif/v55n2/dateline.html.

About the Author of The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things Carolyn Mackler (1973– ) Carolyn Mackler was born on July 13, 1973, in New York City. When she was a year old, her family moved to Syracuse, New York, and then Brockport, New York. As a child, she told stories into a tape recorder and had her mother transcribe them. She attended Vassar College, where she majored in art history. She returned to New York City in late 1995 and worked as a temp for a time, followed by an internship at a magazine. In 1997 Mackler took a class in novel writing at New York University. Her first young-adult novel, Love and Other Four-Letter Words, was published in 2000. Three years later she married her husband, Jonas, and published her second novel, The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things. Her other novels are Vegan Virgin Valentine (2004) and Guyaholic: A Study of Finding, Flirting, Forgetting . . . and the Boy Who Changes Everything (2007). Mackler lives in New York City with her husband and their young son. “People often ask me now why I write novels for teenagers,” she has said. “ . . . One of the biggest reasons is that I honestly believe that, along with certain friendships, I was saved by the books I read during those years. They spoke to me in a way that nothing else did. They helped me feel less alone. They made me laugh. They made me feel like there was a world bigger than my high school.”

A Appendix 1

The American Library Association’s “100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000” (Books and authors in boldface are included in the Our Freedom to Read series.) 1. Scary Stories series, by Alvin Schwartz 2. Daddy’s Roommate, by Michael Willhoite 3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou 4. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier 5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain 6. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck 7. Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling 8. Forever, by Judy Blume 9. Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Paterson 10. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor 11. Heather Has Two Mommies, by Leslea Newman 12. My Brother Sam Is Dead, by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier 13. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger 14. The Giver, by Lois Lowry 15. It’s Perfectly Normal, by Robie Harris 16. Goosebumps series, by R.L. Stine 17. A Day No Pigs Would Die, by Robert Newton Peck 18. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker 19. Sex, by Madonna 20. Earth’s Children series, by Jean M. Auel 121


21. The Great Gilly Hopkins, by Katherine Paterson 22. A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L’Engle 23. Go Ask Alice, by Anonymous 24. Fallen Angels, by Walter Dean Myers 25. In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak 26. The Stupids series, by Harry Allard 27. The Witches, by Roald Dahl 28. The New Joy of Gay Sex, by Charles Silverstein 29. Anastasia Krupnik series, by Lois Lowry 30. The Goats, by Brock Cole 31. Kaffir Boy, by Mark Mathabane 32. Blubber, by Judy Blume 33. Killing Mr. Griffin, by Lois Duncan 34. Halloween ABC, by Eve Merriam 35. We All Fall Down, by Robert Cormier 36. Final Exit, by Derek Humphry 37. The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood 38. Julie of the Wolves, by Jean Craighead George 39. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison 40. What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Girls, by Lynda Madaras 41. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee 42. Beloved, by Toni Morrison 43. The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton 44. The Pigman, by Paul Zindel 45. Bumps in the Night, by Harry Allard 46. Deenie, by Judy Blume 47. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes 48. Annie on My Mind, by Nancy Garden 49. The Boy Who Lost His Face, by Louis Sachar 50. Cross Your Fingers, Spit in Your Hat, by Alvin Schwartz 51. A Light in the Attic, by Shel Silverstein 52. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley 53. Sleeping Beauty Trilogy, by A.N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice) 54. Asking About Sex and Growing Up, by Joanna Cole 55. Cujo, by Stephen King 56. James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl 57. The Anarchist Cookbook, by William Powell 58. Boys and Sex, by Wardell Pomeroy

Appendix 1 123

59. Ordinary People, by Judith Guest 60. American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis 61. What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Boys, by Lynda Madaras 62. Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, by Judy Blume 63. Crazy Lady, by Jane Conly 64. Athletic Shorts, by Chris Crutcher 65. Fade, by Robert Cormier 66. Guess What?, by Mem Fox 67. The House of Spirits, by Isabel Allende 68. The Face on the Milk Carton, by Caroline Cooney 69. Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut 70. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding 71. Native Son, by Richard Wright 72. Women on Top: How Real Life Has Changed Women’s Sexual Fantasies, by Nancy Friday 73. Curses, Hexes & Spells, by Daniel Cohen 74. Jack, by A.M. Homes 75. Bless Me, Ultima, by Rudolfo A. Anaya 76. Where Did I Come From?, by Peter Mayle 77. Carrie, by Stephen King 78. Tiger Eyes, by Judy Blume 79. On My Honor, by Marion Dane Bauer 80. Arizona Kid, by Ron Koertge 81. Family Secrets, by Norma Klein 82. Mommy Laid an Egg, by Babette Cole 83. The Dead Zone, by Stephen King 84. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain 85. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison 86. Always Running, by Luis Rodriguez 87. Private Parts, by Howard Stern 88. Where’s Waldo?, by Martin Hanford 89. Summer of My German Soldier, by Bette Greene 90. Little Black Sambo, by Helen Bannerman 91. Pillars of the Earth, by Ken Follett 92. Running Loose, by Chris Crutcher 93. Sex Education, by Jenny Davis 94. The Drowning of Stephan Jones, by Bette Greene 95. Girls and Sex, by Wardell Pomeroy


96. How to Eat Fried Worms, by Thomas Rockwell 97. View from the Cherry Tree, by Willo Davis Roberts 98. The Headless Cupid, by Zilpha Keatley Snyder 99. The Terrorist, by Caroline Cooney 100. Jump Ship to Freedom, by James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier

A Appendix 2

The American Library Association’s “10 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2006” and the Reasons for the Challenges (Books and authors in boldface are included in the Our Freedom to Read series.) 1. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, for homosexuality, anti-family content, and being unsuited to age group 2. Gossip Girls series, by Cecily Von Ziegesar, for homosexuality, sexual content, drugs, being unsuited to age group, and offensive language 3. Alice series, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor, for sexual content and offensive language 4. The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, by Carolyn Mackler, for sexual content, anti-family content, offensive language, and being unsuited to age group 5. The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, for sexual content, offensive language, and being unsuited to age group 6. Scary Stories series, by Alvin Schwartz, for occultism/Satanism, being unsuited to age group, violence, and insensitivity 7. Athletic Shorts, by Chris Crutcher, for homosexuality and offensive language 8. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, for homosexuality, sexual content, offensive language, and being unsuited to age group 125


9. Beloved, by Toni Morrison, for offensive language, sexual content, and being unsuited to age group 10. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier, for sexual content, offensive language, and violence

A Appendix 3

The American Library Association’s “10 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2007” and the Reasons for the Challenges (Books and authors in boldface are included in the Our Freedom to Read series.) 1. And Tango Makes Three, by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, for anti-ethnic content, sexism, homosexuality, anti-family content, its religious viewpoint, and being unsuited to age group 2. The Chocolate War, by Robert Cormier, for sexual content, offensive language, and violence 3. Olive’s Ocean, by Kevin Henkes, for sexual content and offensive language 4. The Golden Compass, by Philip Pullman, for its religious viewpoint 5. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, for racism 6. The Color Purple, by Alice Walker, for homosexuality, sexual content, and offensive language 7. TTYL, by Lauren Myracle, for sexual content, offensive language, and being unsuited to age group 8. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou, for sexual content 9. It’s Perfectly Normal, by Robie Harris, for sexual content 10. The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky, for homosexuality, sexual content, offensive language, and being unsuited to age group 127

A Appendix 4

Web sites on Book Censorship and Challenges American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression www.abffe.org This site is useful for its Banned Books Week Handbook, which includes many interesting features such as “Stories Behind the Bans and Challenges.” American Library Association www.ala.org The official Web site of the ALA has a wealth of information on challenged and banned books, including yearly lists of the top challenged books and archives for the ALA’s Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom. National Coalition Against Censorship www.ncac.org This site includes updated news on censorship issues, including Supreme Court decisions. There is information on censorship of not only books, but also art, music, science, and entertainment.

129

A Appendix 5

Banned Books Week Early each fall, the American Library Association (ALA) sponsors Banned Books Week nationwide. It is an opportunity for everyone who loves to read—and cherishes the freedom to do so—to draw attention to that precious right. The first Banned Books Week was celebrated in 1981. Here are some ways the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom suggests you can celebrate Banned Books Week: 1. Read a banned book. Look for a favorite or something you’ve never read before on the book lists in Appendixes 1, 2, and 3. You might choose one of the books discussed in this volume. 2. Talk about the First Amendment in school. Make it the focus of a class discussion. The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” 3. Organize your own Banned Books Read-Out! at your school, public library, or a local bookstore. Invite a local author, banned or otherwise, to read from his or her work. Have adults and children read selections from banned books. 4. Join IFAN, the Intellectual Freedom Action Network, a grassroots group of volunteers who are willing to come forward in defense of the freedom to read in censorship controversies in your school or community. 131


5. J oin another organization that advocates intellectual freedom, such as the Freedom to Read Foundation. 6. Write or call your government representatives in Washington, D.C., and let them know you want them to protect your freedom to read in their role as legislators. If you have your own ideas for how to celebrate Banned Books Week, e-mail them to the Office for Intellectual Freedom at [email protected]. They’d be happy to hear from you!

A

Index a

ACLU 23, 24, 46, 118, 119 Adams, John 53 addiction 10 administrators, book challenges and 11–12 AIDS 100–101 Alfred Summer, The (Slepian) 79, 81 Alice books (Naylor) author of 86–87 censorship of 10 challenges and censorship of 84–86 death and 9 overview of 83 American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression 129 American Library Association 129 Anchorage, Alaska 101–102 Andersen Medals 82 Annicharico, Joe, Jr. 35–36 Antioch, California 53–54 Applebaum, Stuart 19 Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (Blume) 25 Arquette, Kaitlyn 75–76 Ascher, Stefe 79 Athletic Shorts (Crutcher) Anchorage, Alaska, and 101–102 author of 104 censorship of 10

challenges and censorship of 101 death and 9 Grand Rapids, Michigan, and 102–103 homosexuality and 8 overview of 99–101 “Avenger, The,” See We All Fall Down

b

Baldwin, Kansas 107–109 Banned Books Week 13–14, 107, 131–132 Barnes, John 80 Battaglia, Frank 58 Bell, Madison Smartt 96 Belle, Fleet 18–19 Berkowitz, Herb 102 Berman, Marilyn 67 Bernardi, Sue 61 birth control 57 Blackburn, Kathy 112 Blanton, Elizabeth 97 Bleke, Bert 102–103 Blood and Chocolate (Klause) 74 Blubber (Blume) 23, 25 Blume, Judy. See also Deenie; Forever . . . ; Then Again, Maybe I Won’t Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret and 25 Blubber and 23, 25 133

134 Coming-of-age Fiction on censorship 7, 13, 26 overview of 25–26 responsibility and 8 Bonsall, California 73–74 book challenges, overview of 8, 10–14 Bouwhuis, Patricia 102–103 Bowman, Georg 80 Breeden, Leo 17 Bridge to Terabithia (Paterson) 77–78, 82 “Brief Moment in the Life of Angus Bethune, A” (Crutcher) 99, 101–102 Brown, Robert 81 bullies 10, 63–64, 65, 105 Burger, Leslie 14 Burnsville, Minnesota 18 Butler, Deidre 59

c

Carroll County, Maryland 118–119 Catcher in the Rye, The (Salinger) 96 Caulfield, Holden 96 censorship book theft as 47–48 challenges and 10–14 Chris Crutcher on 10 Judy Blume on 7, 13, 26 challenges, overview of 8, 10–14 Channing, Stockard 96 Charpentier, Neil 18 I am the Cheese (Cormier) 110 Cheshire, Connecticut 79–81 Cheyenne, Wyoming 17 Childress, Alice 10, 41–42. See also Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a, Sandwich, A Chocolate War, The (Cormier) 110 Cohen, Stacy 107–108 Collier, Christopher 55–56, 81. See also My Brother Sam is Dead Collier, James Lincoln 55–56. See also My Brother Sam is Dead Collins, David and Mary 73

committees, book challenges and 11–12 Cone, Baline 108 Confessions of an Only Child (Klein) 47 Conroy, Pat 18 Corilico, Ronald 113 Cormier, Robert 109–110. See also We All Fall Down Cox, Carl 60 Crankshaw, Jennie 23–24 Crews, Alton 46 Cross, Barbara 59–60 Crutcher, Chris 10, 104, 107. See also Athletic Shorts cursing. See Language Cushing, Margaret 47–48

d

date rape 9, 115, 117 Daughters of Eve (Duncan) 72 D’Auria, John 92 David, Gail 48 Davis, Joy 85 Davis, Robert 65–66 Day No Pigs Would Die, A (Peck) author of 30–31 challenges and censorship of 28–30 death and 8 overview of 27 death Athletic Shorts and 100–101 Bridge to Terabithia and 78 Day No Pigs Would Die, A and 8, 27 Learning Tree and 16 My Brother Sam is Dead and 52 as theme 8–9 Deenie (Blume) author of 25–26 challenges and censorship of 23, 44–45 Gwinnett County, Georgia, and 45–47

Index 135

overview of 43–44 sex and 8 Spring Hill, Florida, and 47–48 Devine, Joan 61–62 Different Seasons (King) 18 DiRienzo, John 48 disabilities. See Deenie drugs 10, 39, 100 Dudley, Beverly 54 Duncan, Lois 75–76. See also Killing Mr. Griffin Duncan, Teresa 35

e

Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, The (Mackler) author of 120 censorship of 10 challenges and censorship of 117–120 date rape and 9 overview of 117 Ecker, Charles I. 118–120 Eckert, Carter 90 Edgar Awards 87 Edith Jackson (Guy) 22 Edwards Awards. See Margaret A. Edwards Award Eikleberry, Jay and Mary 78–79 Elgin, Ilinois 60–61 End of Alice, The (Homes) 98 Eskimos. See Julie of the Wolves executions. See My Brother Sam Is Dead

f

Fairfield, California 96–97 Fairley, Gary 45 falcons 36 Farm Security Administration 20 Farris, Elaine 86 Feldman, Jackie 83 First Amendment Banned Books Week and 131 challenges, censorship and 11

Deenie and 45–47 Iceman and 113 Foreman, Jack 112 Forever . . . (Blume) author of 25–26 challenges and censorship of 58–62 overview of 57–58 responsibility and 8 forgiveness 100 freedom of speech. See First Amendment Freedom to Read Foundation 132 Friedman, Karen 73

g

Gainey, Dennis 23 Gardner, Crystal 118–119 gays. See homosexuality Gees, Amanda 91 Geismar, Maxwell 16 George, Jean Craighead 34, 36–37. See also Julie of the Wolves ghetto life 40 “Goin’ Fishin’” (Crutcher) 100 Grand Rapids, Michigan 102–103 Great Gilly Hopkins, The (Paterson) author of 81–82 challenges and censorship of 77–78 Cheshire, Connecticut, and 79–81 overview of 77 racism and 9 Salina, Kansas, and 78–79 Great Santini, The (Conroy, Pat) 18 Greenville, South Carolina 74 guilt 100 Guy, Rosa 22 Gwinnett County, Georgia 45–47

h

Hans Christian Andersen Medals for Writing 82 Hardy, Julie 35 Harner, Bill 74

136 Coming-of-age Fiction Harrigan, Elizabeth 65–66 Harris, Michael 55 Harry Potter series, book challenges and 11 Hartford-Alley, June 112–113 Hartman, Diane 79–80 Harvey, Anna 119 hatred, understanding of as theme 9 Heaton, Doug 61 Heier, Maureen 114 Hendrix, Marilyn 74 Herlong, William 74 Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich, A (Childress) author of 41–42 challenges and censorship of 40–41 overview of 39 peer pressure and 10 Heumphreus, Susan 97 Highfill, Jimmy 46 Hill, Bobby 40 historical context 51–56, 90 hockey. See Iceman home schooling 60–62 Homes, A.M. 8, 97–98. See also Jack homosexuality Athletic Shorts and 99, 100–102 book challenges and 8, 12 Jack and 95–98 Hooks, Kevin 42 Hufsey, L. Dean 62

i

I am the Cheese (Cormier) 110 I Know What You Did Last Summer (Duncan) 75 Iceman (Lynch) author of 115 challenges and censorship of 111–114 death and 8–9 overview of 111 violence and 10 “In the Time I Get” (Crutcher) 100–101

Inexcusable (Lynch) 115 Intellectual Freedom Action Network 131 Intellectual Freedom Awards 104

j

Jack (Homes) author of 97–98 challenges and censorship of 96–97 homosexuality and 8 overview of 95–96 Japan. See So Far from the Bamboo Grove Jaung, Henry 90–91 Johnson, Alberta 17 Johnson, Benjie. See Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich, A Jolly, Roger 97 Jorn, Jana 108 Julie of the Wolves (George) author of 36–37 challenges and censorship of 34–36 overview of 33–34 rape and 9 Jung, Sheila 91

k

Keen, Virginia 66–67 Ketay, Marilyn 24 kidnapping. See Killing Mr. Griffin Killing Mr. Griffin (Duncan) author of 75–76 challenges and censorship of 72–74 overview of 71–72 peer pressure and 9 King, Stephen 18 Klause, Annette Curtis 74 Klein, Norma 47 Knapp, Donald 40 Knapp, Rebecca Williams 54 I Know What You Did Last Summer (Duncan) 75

Index 137

Korea. See So Far from the Bamboo Grove Krug, Judith 12 Krysztof, Lori 107 Kuehlewind, Sharon 79–81

l

“Landmark Challenges” 12 language Alice books and 83 Athletic Shorts and 101–103 censorship and 8, 12 Confessions of an Only Child and 47 Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things and 118 Great Gilly Hopkins, The and 78–80 Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich and 40 Iceman and 112, 114 Jack and 97 Julie of the Wolves and 34 Killing Mr. Griffin and 73 Learning Tree and 17, 19 My Brother Sam is Dead and 53–54 One Fat Summer and 64–65 We All Fall Down and 106, 107 Lanners, Lynne 108 Laugh Lines 12 Leadbelly 20 Learning Tree, The (Parks) author of 19–20 Burnsville, Minnesota, and 18 challenges and censorship of 16–17 Cheyenne, Wyoming, and 17 death and 8 hatred and 9 Mobile County, Alabama, and 18–19 overview of 15–16 Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher 28 lesbians. See homosexuality Levittown, New York 65–67 Levy, Ann 112–113

Lewis, Hazel 102 libraries, book challenges and 12 Life magazine 20 Lipsyte, Robert 68–69. See also One Fat Summer Litchfield, Jim 46 Luhr, Julie 17 Lynch, Chris 8–9, 111–112, 115. See also Iceman

m

Mabley, Moms 42 Mackler, Carolyn 9, 118, 119, 120. See also Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things, The Malcolm, Jim 48 Margaret A. Edwards Awards 10, 68, 76, 104, 110 Marion, Illinois 59 Master Puppeteer, The (Paterson) 82 Masterson, Karen 91 masturbation 8, 44–48, 65, 85 McGrath, Ned 30 McNamara, Jean 60–62 Michaud, Norman 83 Miglione, Tony 21–22 Milpitas, California 73 Mobile County, Alabama 18–19 Moore, Jeff 47 murder 9, 17 My Brother Sam is Dead (Collier and Collier) Antioch, California, and 53–54 authors of 55–56 challenges and censorship of 52–53 death and 9 overview of 51–52 Staunton, Virginia, and 54–55 My Side of the Mountain (George) 37

n

NAACP 17, 102 National Book Awards 34, 52, 78, 82, 115

138 Coming-of-age Fiction National Coalition Against Censorship 26, 129 National Medals of Arts 20 Naylor, Phyllis Reynolds 83, 85, 86–87. See also Alice books Nelson, Judy 53–54 Newberry Honor awards 37, 52, 83 Newberry Medals 34, 87 Newsletter on Intellectual Freedom 13 Night Cry (Naylor) 87 Nikolay, Frank 114 North Korea. See So Far from the Bamboo Grove

o

Oates, Tomas 59 Office for Intellectual Freedom 132 Office of War Information 20 Oliveira, Sue 85 One Fat Summer (Lipsyte) author of 68–69 challenges and censorship of 64–65 Levittown, New York, and 65–67 overview of 63–64 violence and 10 “Other Pin, The” (Crutcher) 99–100 overweight. See weight

p

Palmisano, Gina 62 parents, book challenges and 11 Parker, Don 66 Parks, Gordon 19–20. See also Learning Tree, The Parks, Harriet 29–30 Paterson, David L. 82 Paterson, Katherine 78–79, 80, 81–82. See also Great Gilly Hopkins, The Peck, Robert Newton 30–31. See also Day No Pigs Would Die, A peer pressure Alice books and 83, 85 Killing Mr. Griffin and 73 as theme 9–10

penguins 12 Phillips, Sandy 85 pigs. See Day No Pigs Would Die, A “Pin, The” (Crutcher) 99 Planned Parenthood 8 Pulitzer Prizes 56

r

race and racism Athletic Shorts and 100, 102–103 Great Gilly Hopkins, The and 77 Learning Tree and 16 So Far from the Bamboo Grove and 90–91 understanding of as theme 9 Randall, Frederick 91 Random House, Learning Tree and 19 rape date 9, 115, 117 Day No Pigs Would Die, A and 28 Julie of the Wolves and 33, 34, 35–36 So Far from the Bamboo Grove and 89–91 as theme 9 respect, censorship and 10 responsibility 8, 76 Revolutionary War 9, 51–52 Riley, Joe and Candy 85 Riley, Pat 60 Robinson, Cynthia 11 Robinson, D.H. 19 Rocah, David 119 Rogers, Fred 31 Rohde, Stephen 103 Roll, William George 76 Rosato, Lynn 83 Ross, John 35 Rowell, Sam 59 Running Loose (Crutcher) 107

s

Salina, Kansas 78–79 Salinger, J.D. 96

Index 139

Samson, Susan 23 Sant, Chad 102 Savage, Booker 15–16 schools, book challenges and 11–12 scoliosis. See Deenie Sepian, Jan 79 sex. See also Rape Alice books and 83, 85 Earth, My Butt, and Other Big Round Things and 118 Forever . . . and 57–62 Learning Tree and 17 masturbation and 8, 44–48, 65, 85 One Fat Summer and 65 responsibility and 8 Then Again, Maybe I Won’t and 21–22, 23–24 We All Fall Down and 106, 107 Shaft 20 Sheats, Sam 16 Shelbyville, Kentucky 85 Sherborn, Massachusetts 90–92 Shiloh (Naylor) 87 Simon, Howard 30 Sirois, Herman 65–67 Smith, Doreen 65, 67 So Far from the Bamboo Grove (Watkins) 9 author of 93 challenges and censorship of 89–92 overview of 89 Soup novels 31 South Korea. See So Far from the Bamboo Grove speech, freedom of. See First Amendment Spindale, North Carolina 97 Spring Hill, Florida 47–48 Squatrito, Dominic 113 Staunton, Virginia 54–55 Stephens, Ann 55 Students Advocating Freedom in Education (SAFE) 46 suicide 8, 17, 57

Svoboda, Gregg 79 swearing. See language

t

Tallman, Joyce 107, 109 Tango Makes Three, And 12 Taylor, Lee 19 “Telephone Man” (Crutcher) 9, 100, 101 Tett, Cindy 103 Then Again, Maybe I Won’t (Blume) author of 25–26 challenges and censorship of 22, 24–25 Covington, Louisiana, and 22–23 overview of 21–22 Peoria, Illinois, and 23–24 sex and 8 Thompson, Dwight 73–74 “In the Time I Get” (Crutcher) 100–101 Tofte, Terry 18 Trammell, Jerri 47 Tyson, Cicely 41

u

Ulaszek, Lisel 62

v

Van Auken, Barbara 24 violence Day No Pigs Would Die, A and 28, 29 Iceman and 112 Julie of the Wolves and 34 Killing Mr. Griffin and 71–72, 73, 74 Learning Tree and 17 My Brother Sam is Dead and 53–54 One Fat Summer and 65 So Far from the Bamboo Grove and 89–91 as theme 9, 10 We All Fall Down and 105–106

140 Coming-of-age Fiction Vorderbrueggen, Nellie and Bernie 35 voyeurism 8, 21–22

w

Walker, Scott 91 Wallace, Sandy 17 Ward, Cheryl 112–113 Washington, George 40 Watkins, Yolo Kawashima 92, 93. See also So Far from the Bamboo Grove Watts, Louise 85 We All Fall Down (Cormier) author of 109–110 challenges and censorship of 106–109 overview of 105–106 violence and 9 web sites 129 Webb City, Missouri 83–84

Wehmeyer, Connie 108 weight 10, 63–64 werewolves 74 Westerhausen, Don 18 White, Jim 107–109 Who Killed My Daughter (Duncan) 75–76 Williams, Glenn 17 Wilson, Liz 78–79 Wilson, Theresa 45–47 Windsor Locks, Connecticut 112–113 Winfield, Paul 41 Winger, Newt 15–16 wolves. See Julie of the Wolves Wood, Bob 46 Wood, Bonnie Bess 23 World War II 89 wrestling 99–100

y

Yoon, Sam 91

Coming-of-Age Fiction (Our Freedom to Read)

Science Fiction and Fantasy (Our Freedom to Read)

Classic Books (Our Freedom to Read)

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