10 Banned Books That May Surprise You
Sensible or outrageous? You decide
In recent years, the news has been awash in stories of books being challenged, censored, or outright banned in school and public libraries. Of course, book challenges have gone on for hundreds of years. Some make a kind of sense; others are simply outrageous.
Here are ten banned books or authors that may surprise you.
American Heritage Dictionary
We tend to think of a dictionary as something like the Constitution–a disembodied set of laws rather than a living document. Yet dictionaries are written by people who have ideas, and sometimes those ideas cause trouble.
Created in 1969 by magazine publisher James Parton, the American Heritage Dictionary immediately ran into critics who disliked its “objectionable language.” It was removed from school libraries in Eldon, Missouri. A few years later, it disappeared from shelves in Folsom, California and later from Churchill County, Nevada, though it was eventually reinstated there.
Its most prominent banning occurred in Anchorage, Alaska, where the ultra-conservative People for Better Education assembled a list of scurrilous entries, such as “bed” meaning “to have sexual intercourse with” or “ball” being used for “testicle.” The…
