EPL Picks - Freedom to Read - Challenged Books 60s, 70s & 80s
Annotation:1988: The Race Relations Committee of the Toronto Board of Education recommended that the book be withdrawn from curriculum use in all Toronto high schools. Cause of objection: The novel was seen to contain racial slurs. Update: The board rejected the committee’s recommendation but circulated to all its schools the reasons for the parents’ objections that had led to the committee’s study of the book and asked its Committee on Bias in the Curriculum to suggest ways the book could be taught with sensitivity.
Place a Hold
Annotation:1988–89: One of three books challenged by one person in a high school library in Estevan (SK). Update: The board followed regular procedures for dealing with challenged materials, and the book remains in the library. Background: The book, credited with being the first young-adult novel to be written in Canada, has been at the heart of many controversies in schools and communities across Canada. A public reading of Hold Fast was held at the Canadian Children’s Book Centre in Toronto to mark Freedom to Read Week 1995.
Annotation:1984: Doyle’s publisher received a letter from the principal of a rural Ontario school stating that copies of the book were being returned because they promoted negative views and did not contain the values of “positive citizenship.”
Annotation:1982: Toronto parents petitioned, without success, to remove the book from the high school curriculum. This book has been the target of challenges in school districts across the country. Cause of objection: Parents objected to the “language and philosophy of the book.”
Annotation:This book has been attacked in various jurisdictions. In 1982, the Etobicoke (ON) Board of Education was asked to ban it from the high school curriculum. The motion was defeated. In 1990, a complaint from a student and her father led the Essex County (ON) Board of Education to establish a written policy to deal with such objections. The book was not withdrawn.
Annotation:From 1976 to 1994, the book was challenged repeatedly and removed from senior high school reading lists across Canada. In at least two provinces it does not appear on the curriculum. Cause of objection: Language and sexual content.
Annotation:1970: In Cranbrook (BC), the school board banned this science fiction novel from the Grade 9 curriculum and school libraries. The story is about a mentally retarded adult who becomes a genius after having a brain operation. Cause of objection: A parent complained that the book was “filthy and immoral.” Update: The president of the B.C. Teachers’ Federation criticized the book’s removal. The board reconsidered its decision and returned the novel to the school library; however, trustees did not lift the ban on the book in the curriculum.
Annotation:This novel has been consistently challenged in Canadian schools for at least 15 years. Cause of objection: “Foul language.”
Annotation:1964: In Abbotsford (BC), the British Columbia Association for the Advancement of Coloured People petitioned for the removal of this book from school libraries. The book is a collection of folk tales told by an African-American in the Old South. Cause of objection: The BCAACP said the book was “offensive to Negroes.” Update: The request was denied.
Annotation:Frequently banned due to its descriptions of orgies and licentiousness. The story is about four rich male libertines who decide to pursue their lusts to the extreme regardless of commonly accepted morality. It was written while Sade was imprisoned in the Bastille, reputedly in less than a month.
Annotation:A Farewell to Arms might strike you as fairly innocuous but was banned in some states in America for its detailed sexual content and was also prohibited in Italy, allegedly for its unflattering portrayal of the retreat from Caporetto during the Second World War, in which its narrator is fighting.
Annotation:Temporarily banned in several countries including France, Britain and South Africa for its depiction of unlikely narrator Humbert Humbert's passion for "nymphet" Lolita, a thirteen-year-old girl, and their ensuing sexual relationship.
Annotation:Fahrenheit 451, which is ironically a tale about banning books, was banned in several American states and schools around the world. The plot centres around fireman, Guy Montag, whose job is to burn books and the title refers to the temperature at which paper combusts. The work was published in 1953 during McCarthyism and was widely seen to be about censorship although Bradbury has refuted this.
Annotation:Was not published in its original form in America in 1959 and courts in Boston banned it for obscenity in 1962. The decision was reversed in 1966 and the disjointed series of vignettes about drug addict William Lee has long since been seen as Burroughs' seminal work.
Annotation:Banned temporarily in the US, UK and Australia for violating obscenity laws. The tale is about an isolated upper class Bohemian, Connie Chatterley, whose unsatisfactory marriage to a paralysed war veteran, Clifford Chatterley, leads her to engage in sex with other men, including vividly written liaisons with Oliver Mellors, a young gamekeeper on her husband's estate. The ban was lifted in the America and Britain in 1959 and 1960 respectively.
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Description
A selection of books that were challenged or banned in Canada and around the world in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Each challenge sought to limit public access to the books in schools, libraries, or bookstores.
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