Banned Books Week Begins – Last Week of September
Banned Books Week was launched on this day in response to an upsurge in the number of attempts to censor books in schools, bookstores, and libraries.
It is an annual awareness campaign that draws attention to banned and challenged books and is celebrated during the last week of September. Banned Books Week is jointly sponsored by the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom and Amnesty International USA.
One of the most famous book censorship cases in American history involved the ban on James Joyce’s famous novel Ulysses by the U.S. Customs. The book was finally declared not obscene and allowed in the U.S. on December 6, 1933 (see also August 7, 1934, for the appellate court decision).
Go to the Banned Book Week web site: http://www.bannedbooksweek.org/
Banned Book Week; authors speak out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKE7k5Qjobw
Learn more about censorship in America: Marjorie Heins, Sex, Sin, and Blasphemy: A Guide to America’s Censorship Wars (1993)
Read about libraries and the censorship wars: Valerie Nye and Kathy Barko, True Stories of Censorship Battles in America’s Libraries (2012)
Read about the history of book censorship: Paul Boyer, Purity in Print: The Vice Society Movement and Book Censorship in America (1968)