Charlotte’s Web is a beloved children’s story about a little girl, Fern, who lives on a farm and falls in love with a runt pig. The runt grows up to be a gentle and bashful pig named Wilbur. The pig is befriended by a spider named Charlotte, who has a way with words and is determined to save Wilbur from slaughter.
It seems amazing that in the 21st century, Charlotte’s Web would be a target for censorship. But in 2006, some parents in a Kansas school district decided that talking animals were blasphemous and unnatural, and that passages about the spider dying were “inappropriate subject matter for a children’s book.” The book was banned in the school system.
Like to read? Here are just a “few” other books of the many that were once banned through the efforts the self-absorbed, the self-righteous and the misguided:
- The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
- The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
- To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
- The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
- Beloved, by Toni Morrison
- The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
- 1984, by George Orwell
- Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
- Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
- Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
- Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
- Animal Farm, by George Orwell
- The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
- As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
- A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
- Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
- Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
- Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
- Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
- Native Son, by Richard Wright
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey
- Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
- For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
- The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
- Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
- All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
- The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
- A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
- The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
- In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
- The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
- Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron
- Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
- Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
- A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
- Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
- Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence
- The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
- Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
Additional information:
- Banned Books Week – Celebrating the Freedom to Read: Sept. 27- Oct. 3, 2015
- Charlotte’s Web at Wikipedia
- E. B. White at Wikipedia