1927 April 30

Authors Organize Group to Fight “Irresponsible Censorship”

 

A group of more than forty noted authors organized the Committee for the Suppression of Irresponsible Censorship to fight the censorship of literary works around the country. Members included the poet Edgar Lee Masters, journalist William Allen White, historian Hendrick Van Loon, novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart, among others. They cited a censorship “wave of hysteria sweeping over the country.”

The major force for censorship of books and plays at the time was the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded and led by Anthony Comstock, author of the infamous Comstock Act.  In the 1920s,the Society was led by John Sumner, who aggressively continued Comstock’s crusade against “smut.”

One of the great landmarks in the fight against censorship involved the court decision ending a U.S. Customs ban on James Joyce’s acclaimed novel Ulysses. See December 6, 1933.

Learn more about the history of censorship: Paul Boyer, Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (1968)

Banned Books Week presents, Authors Speak Out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKE7k5Qjobw

Learn more about the history of censorship: Paul Boyer, Purity in Print: The Vice-Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (1968)

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