Banned Books Week

Sixty years after its originally publication, Ray Bradbury's internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn't live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

Intellectual freedom is a core value of librarianship, but fighting to keep controversial materials on the shelves can sometimes feel like a lonely battle. And not all censorship controversies involve the public objecting to a book in the collection--libraries are venues for displays and meetings, and sometimes library staff themselves are tempted to preemptively censor a work. Those facing censorship challenges can find support and inspiration in this book, which compiles dozens of stories from library front lines.

In 1950, after three decades of exemplary service, Brown was summarily dismissed from her job as librarian at the Bartlesville, Oklahoma, Public Library. Though the ostensible reason was circulating subversive materials, Robbins (Library and Information studies, U. of Wisconsin-Madison) says it was because she advocated racial equality and had helped form a group affiliated with the Congress of Racial Equality. She emphasizes the matrix of personal, community, state, and national forces that can still lead to censorship, intolerance, and suppression.