The novel, long used in classrooms as a parable about American racism, has faced various controversies over the decades.

Lee’s 1960 novel about a white lawyer defending a Black man falsely accused of rape in a segregated Alabama town won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into an Oscar-winning film.

Please consider buying them for the students in your life, and for yourselves. That approach has made them some of the most frequently challenged, or outright banned, books in America’s schools it also makes them perfect examples of what literature is supposed to do. The following 14 books employ difficult, sometimes upsetting imagery to tell complicated stories. Maus is not the first, or the last, casualty of an ideology that, in the name of protecting children, leaves them ignorant of the world as it often is. As I wrote in December, getting rid of books that spotlight bigotry is the goal.īooks have been the targets of bans in America for more than a century.

And Maus’s removal isn’t a side effect of an otherwise neutral attempt to keep classrooms wholesome. Hiding these images from children purposefully ignores the mechanized gruesomeness of the Holocaust. Some nudity shows Jews-depicted in the book as mice (their German oppressors are drawn as cats)-stripped naked before their murder. Maus details the cruelties that Spiegelman’s father witnessed during World War II, including in Auschwitz, as well as the pair’s complicated relationship after the war. No one has yet figured out how to depict the Holocaust without ugliness, for the very obvious reason that it was one of the greatest crimes in human history. Officials said that they didn’t object to teaching about genocide, but that the book’s profanity, nudity, violence, and depiction of suicide made it “too adult-oriented for use in our schools.” The school board of McMinn County, Tennessee, just banned Maus, Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize–winning graphic memoir about the Holocaust. Then an Oklahoma state senator filed a bill to ban books that address “sexual perversion,” among other things, from school libraries. Texas State Representative Matt Krause recently put more than 800 books on a watch list, many of them dealing with race and LGBTQ issues. ET on February 3, 2022.īook banning is back.

To kill a mockingbird books