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On Being a Banned Writer

Perhaps the proudest moment of my literary career was during the summer of 1982 when I read in Publisher's Weekly that I was one of the most banned writers in America. Judy Blume and I were the only women writers on the list, as well as the only authors of books for children. We also comprised almost half of the five living writers, the other three being Alexander Solzenitsyn, Richard Brautigan, and Kurt Vonnegut. The remaining four writers were D.H. Lawrence, Daniel Defoe, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. My first thought was: I'll never be in such good company again. My second was to envision a talk show, somewhere in outer space, with all ten of us, each privately wondering what the connecting link was binding us together. I would venture to say that Judy Blume and I were on the list primarily for two reasons: we write for children and adolescents and our books are popular with them. Books for children are judged differently from books for adults in ways that are not always helpful to their true audience. Unlike adult books, which are reviewed by adults, children's books are not reviewed by children. They often contain elements of life that children find true, real, and involving, but which adults find disturbing. Thus, there has often been a large body of children's literature deemed proper and fit by librarians and reviewers but almost never read by children. On the other side of the spectrum are writers like myself who incur the wrath of the children's book establishment, but have ardent readers among the kids themselves. There are truths about life which children accept, because they are living them, but from which adults flinch or hide their eyes. Recently the head of a library in the Midwest wrote me asking if I'd mind if one of my books was not removed from the shelves but put on a special list of "objectionable books" which would be tacked in a prominent spot near the checkout counter. I replied that since, to my mind, there is no book in the library which is not objectionable to someone, I felt unworthy of being thus singled out. I myself find half the books I read (and I read almost constantly) objectionable in one way or another: poorly written, sexist, idiotic. The only kind of censorship which makes sense to me is the kind all of us practice Â— putting down a book without finishing it because it seems boring or not worth the time. One might add to that, if one believes in censoring the reading matter of one's children, as I do not, preventing or attempting