There had always been efforts to ban books, of course. And in the 1970s, those efforts exploded. In the early part of the decade, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom averaged 100 or so book challenges a year. By decade’s end, there were ten times more. Would-be censors condemned all sorts of literary portraits: unorthodox families, radical politics, race, unflattering portraits of American authority, any mention of Christ, any mention of sex.Article continues after advertisement
Some of the attacks were sobering, as when, on an overcast day in December 1977, the Warsaw, Indiana Senior Citizens Club built a bonfire and chucked in forty copies of the self-help treatise Values Clarification: A Handbook for Practical Strategies for Teachers and Students. Others offered a bit of high camp, like the campaign of Tom Williams, a Baptist minister in Abingdon, Virginia. Characterizing his local library as a “dispenser of hard-core pornography at public expense” for circulating such titles as Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, Harold Robbins’s The Lonely Lady, and Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, Williams accused the head librarian of “feloniously corrupting the minds of children.” The librarian, in turn, accused the preacher of book theft. When Williams tried to get excerpts from these raunchfests published in the local newspaper, the editor-in-chief refused, calling Williams a “nipplehead.”
