Here's the list of Banned and Challenged Classics and I'm pleased to say I've read several of them.
Here's why these fine books got picked on. Some were sexually explicit, others satanic, and some like Gone With the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird were for uses of a word common to the day they were written or era in which they were set.
Sigh.
Writers deal in real life, even when we're making things up. In fact, especially when we're making things up. If we all set our books in Happy Fuzzy Bunny Universe where everyone loved everyone else, but at a respectable distance, then there would be no point to writing or any other kind of artistic expression. And if Happy Fuzzy Bunny Universe reflected real life, then we wouldn't have much to express anyway.
I live in a free country and can write what I want and read what I want and say what I want and so can everyone else here.
This includes the right to complain and to try to get books banned. Fortunately, it also means we have the right to fight back. Repugnant as it is I'd rather hold my nose and let the right to attempt to ban a book stand because if we start dictating what we can't do, then we will soon start dictating what we can do.
In honor of the banned classics:
" 'Ah's sceered of cows, Miss Scarlett. Ah ain't nebber had nuthin' ter do wid cows. Ah ain' no yard nigger. Ah's a house nigger.' '
-Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind (Avon, 1973)
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I've managed a bit of writing though nothing that will get my WIP, The Legend of Shallal, banned. Dammit.
Here's a taste:
"She bent down and met the wide eyes of a six-legged rodent. One of its tiny claws clutched the bottom of her robe."
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