Books: Banned Books

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In the U. S. when books are banned it is usually by action of municipal authorities, as Boston's mayor once stopped the sale of Dreiser's American Tragedy, or as the mayor of Omaha, Neb. more recently clamped down on Mari Sandoz' Slogum House. In England books that come under official displeasure are usually withdrawn by the publishers; in European dictatorships their circulation is forbidden by the state. Recent book bans:

¶When 400 New York State women's clubs donated one book apiece to the library of Westfield Farms, reformatory for women, a Patchogue club balked at giving Ernest Hemingway's To Have and Have Not, could see no "rehabilitative value" in it.

¶In London, publishers withdrew the autobiography of a prostitute, To Beg I Am Ashamed, after newspaper columnists, before the book's publication, called it disgraceful, sordid, "the vilest book that has ever left a modern printing press." Smarting, the publishers accused columnists of "a gross breach of privilege" in denouncing a book before it appeared, of exaggerating its sensationalism. Critics, agreeing with the publishers, graded the book honest but dreary.

¶In Vienna, Nazis began to purge the 400-year-old Austrian National Library, one of the world's best (1,200,000 volumes), announced that all non-Aryan books would be burned. In Williamstown, Mass., a group of Williams College students, including a grandson of Woodrow Wilson and the editor of the college paper, promptly cabled an offer to buy all the banned books to prevent their being burned. Brooklyn's Borough President Raymond Ingersoll cabled that Brooklyn's public library would be glad to have them, offered to pay transportation costs.