Banned Books & Authors, First Amendment Educational Posters

Book Burning
“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.”
Ray Bradbury, author of Fahrenheit 451
b. 8-22-1920; Waukegan, Illinois

I remember seeing the movie Fahrenheit 451 in college, when we emerged from the theatre, the bookstore across the street had a line of people waiting to get in.

Isabel Allende
b. 8-2-1942

The House of the Spirits

“I was born in the back room of a shadowy house, and grew up amidst ancient furniture, books in Latin, and human mummies, but none of those things made me melancholy, because I came into the world with a breath of the jungle in my memory.”

• more Isabel Allende poster
• Hispanic & Latinos posters
• Latino Writers

Maya Angelou
b. 4-4-1928; St. Louis, MO

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is an autobiographical novel dealing with incest.

• more Maya Angelou posters
• Poetry Forms posters
• American Authors of the 20th Century

The Decameron by Boccaccio
is a collection of 100 novellas (deca=10) written in 14th Century Italy. It is an allegorical work and valued as an important historical document of life in the fourteenth century.

Decameron was banned for decades under the Comstock Law of 1873 (Federal Anti-Obscenity Act) banning the mailing of "lewd," "indecent," "filthy," or "obscene" materials.

• more Giovanni Boccaccio print
• Black Dealth poster
• health posters

Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Despite having endured six centuries of literary scrutiny Geoffrey Chaucer's bawdy Canterbury Tales were removed from a high school advanced literature course in 1995 after parents deemed some of the tales 'inappropriate'. BTW - did you know the name Chaucer is French and means 'shoe'? An amusing detail for a man who wrote about pilgrimages.

• more Chaucer in British Authors posters
• more William Blake posters

Aldous Huxley
b. 7-26-1894; England
d. 11-22-1963

Accused of being anti-family and anti-Christian, Brave New World is a work of fiction that anticipates developments in reproductive technology, biological engineering, and sleep-learning in the distant future. Brave New World predicts a nightmare world (dystopian v utopian) where everyone is "happy". The title comes from Shakespeare's The Tempest, Act V, Scene I.

• Aldous Huxley portrait

Toni Morrison
b. 2-18-1931; Lorain, OH

The Bluest Eye
Beloved
Song of Solomon

• more Toni Morrison posters
• more Outstanding Contemporary African Americans posters

Katherine Paterson
b. 10-31-1932; China

The Bridge to Terabithia is about two friends who create an imaginary world in the woods. The book was accused of satanic material; the author, Katherine Paterson, is the daughter of Christian missionaries and wife of a Presbyterian Minister.

Sylvia Plath
b. 10-27-1932; Massachusetts
d. 2-11-1963; suicide, England

The Bell Jar is an autobiographical work tracing poet Sylvia Plath's nervous breakdown. It was challenged on the grounds that it condoned an "objectionable" viewpoint.

by J. D. Salinger
b. 1-1-1919; NYC

The Catcher in the Rye depicts a teenager's nervous breakdown, and as recently as 1983 "the book's contents" were cited as justification to ban the book.

• J. D. Salinger TIME Magazine cover

Maurice Sendak
b. 6-10-1928, Brooklyn, NY

Maurice Sendak is an American author and illustrator whose In the Night Kitchen regularly appears on the ALA's list of challenged and banned books.

The Grapes of Wrath History Through Literature Art Print

John Steinbeck
b. 2-27-1902, California
d. 12-20-1968; CT

Grapes of Wrath, cited for "vulgar language," was burned by the St. Louis public library. Steinbeck's classic Of Mice and Men has been described as a "filthy book" by Tennessee officials, and banned from a public school in Ohio in 1980.

• History Through Literature posters
• John Steinbeck at Amazon.com
• 1962 Nobel Prize for Literature

Mark Twain
b. 11-30-1835; Missouri
d. 4-21-1910; Connecticut

“Always do right- this will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

• more Mark Twain posters
• American Authors of the 19th Century posters

Voltaire
b. 11-21-1694; France
d. 5-30-1778

Candide is a 'picaresque' novel declared obscene by U.S. Customs in 1929 and seized in 1930. Because Candide was an assigned text at Harvard, and defended by two professors, it was permitted in a different edition. The U.S. Post Office also demanded that a mail order book catalog omit the book in 1944.

• portrait of Voltaire

The Color Purple
Alice Walker
b. 2-9-1944; Georgia

The Color Purple is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by African- American author Alice Walker. The Color Purple was challenged, but retained, in a California school district due to controversial ideas about race, religion, and sexuality.

Richard Wright
b. 9-4-1908, near Natchez, MS
d. 11-28-1960

Richard Wright's Native Son is protest novel and one of the earliest and most successful attempts to explain the racial divide and social conditions imposed on African-Americans by white society in the United States.

• more Voices of Diversity posters
• more Richard Wright posters
• more Black History posters

The Bill of Rights Poster -
First Amendment Poster

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 the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

• Bill of Rights poster series