Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Whitman: legendary authors of banned classics

A promise is a promise is a promise, and we’re a blog of our word. We pledged to feature banned and challenged books this month, in celebration of free speech and next week’s Banned Books Week, and we’re enjoying doing just that.

We also hope you’ve enjoyed Cuppa Joad so far this September. Read our past challenged-books posts, and discover three books below by American literary legends that share surprising histories in censorship:

• The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck: Generally cited for “vulgar language,” this American classic (which inspired the name of our blog) has been burned, banned, and challenged since its publication. The first incident was a burning by the St. Louis public library, and more recently it was challenged as questionable material in California as a reading resource for an eleventh-grade literature class.
• As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner: This classic Southern novel was banned by a school district in Kentucky in 1986 for “offensive and obscene passages referring to abortion” and on the grounds that it “uses God’s name in vain.” No members of the school board had read the novel.
• Leaves of Grass, by Walt Whitman: It wasn’t exactly last week, but did you know that in 1881 the Boston District Attorney demanded expurgation of this American classic and threatened criminal prosecution unless this demand was met? According to the prosecutor, the volume of poetry was in need of a few “fig leaves.”