Judy raised her eyebrows and blinked a few times while he continued.
“I have looked through several of these, Ms. Blume. One of them talks about masturbation, another one talks about a little boy who is window-peeping on his neighbor, a little girl, another one talks about somebody throwing up.”
She tilted her head to interrupt him. “Throwing up is sex?”
“Well, it has to do with bodily functions,” Buchanan said. “What is all this doing in a book for ten-year-olds?”
“There is no preoccupation with sex,” Blume countered quickly. “Did you read the whole book or did you just read pages that were paper clipped?”
The question didn’t ruffle Buchanan. The tenor of the conversation heightened as he started reading passages aloud to Blume from her own novels. “Why can’t… you write an interesting, exciting book for ten-year-olds without getting into a discussion of masturbation?” he asked.
Judy threw him a skeptical look, her mouth tightening. “First of all, Deenie is not about masturbation, it’s about a girl with scoliosis,” she corrected.
Buchanan was literally shaking her book at her. Judy looked like she was going to pop. “Are you hung up on masturbation?” she asked him, an uncomfortable laugh catching in her throat.
“You are! You’re hung up about this stuff,” Buchanan insisted.
“One scene in one book,” Blume said, barely letting him finish.
Blume came off as tough. She held her own—more than that, she got in a good shot against Buchanan in his camel suit jacket and brown-striped tie, giving a face and a voice to the yearslong right-wing onslaught. But inside her, it was a different story. Inside, she was dissolving, her eyes revealing just a glint from that hidden puddle.
Judy was suffering. She felt “isolated and alone.” The years of being scrutinized, of being called a bad influence and a pornographer, had chipped away at her. And it wasn’t just sexual themes that her critics had issues with. “I had letters from angry parents accusing me of ruining Christmas forever because of a chapter in Superfudge, called ‘Santa Who?,’ ” she wrote in her essay for American Libraries, referring to a sequence where Peter and Fudge acknowledge that Santa isn’t real. (This is still a thing! Librarian Lauren Harrison said when elementary schoolers check Superfudge out of the library, she taps out a quick email to the parents warning them that “there’s a whole chapter that blows up Santa Claus.”)
Other moms and dads tossed off angry notes to Judy about her language. “Some sent lists showing me how easily I could have substituted one word for another. Meanie for bitch, darn for damn, nasty for ass… Perhaps most shocking of all was a letter from a nine-year-old addressed to Jewdy Blume telling me I had no right to write about Jewish angels in Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself.”
Blume couldn’t help but take the criticisms personally, even though she knew other authors—from Norma Klein to canonical writers, including John Steinbeck and Anne Frank—were being targeted, too.
Unlike Blume, Klein mostly found the whole thing amusing. In the summer of 1982, Publishers Weekly came out with a list of the most banned writers in America, which included Solzhenitsyn, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and D. H. Lawrence. “Judy Blume and I were the only women writers on the list, as well as the only authors of books for children,” Klein wrote in an essay for the American Library Association called “On Being a Banned Writer.” “My first thought was: I’ll never be in such good company again,” she joked, before calling it “Perhaps the proudest moment of my literary career.”
As her daughter Jennifer Fleissner confirmed, Klein was “happy to be a quiet pioneer.” It helped that she, like Judy, received letter after gushing letter in the mail, “mostly from girls who were just so thankful for the books and felt… it was this window into another world and another way of thinking that was very important to them,” Fleissner said. Also like Judy, Klein hadn’t set out to be a renegade. But Norma wasn’t afraid to step into that role. “Once she realized that people did see the books as blazing this trail, then I think that was a mantle that she was willing to take on,” Fleissner said.
Klein’s most challenged book was It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me, according to a count put together by Arizona State University professor Ken Donelson and published by the University of North Carolina Press in 1990. Donelson tallied up protests against books as reported by the Office for Intellectual Freedom between 1952 and 1989. His list included a number of familiar, widely celebrated titles along with the supplied justifications for their removal from public spaces. Judith Guest’s Ordinary People was described by a woman in West Virginia as “absolutely filthy, dirty, vulgar.” In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a school board member said of Vonnegut’s “book of dirty language” Slaughterhouse-Five: “I’ve been told the author is a great writer. He may have boo-booed on this one.” (The earnestness of this phrasing—ha!)
Claude Brown, a Black writer who published the autobiographical novel Manchild in the Promised Land about growing up in Harlem, was subjected to a particularly memorable critique. In Old Town, Maine, a member of a school committee objected to the book as well as the elective course it was being taught in, called “The Nature of Prejudice.” The protestor noted that because there were no Black people in Old Town, “prejudice was no problem.”
Topping Donelson’s list was J. D. Salinger, with The Catcher in the Rye challenged seventy-one times. Blume followed with fifty-seven objections against a number of her books: Forever led the pack with eighteen challenges, followed by Deenie; Then Again, Maybe I Won’t; Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Blubber; and It’s Not the End of the World. Steinbeck came in third with forty-seven total complaints, mostly against Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath. “There’s an obvious drop-off after Steinbeck,” Donelson wrote. “Whatever authors we add beyond, the point is clear—Salinger and Blume and Steinbeck lead all the rest by a wide margin.” Donelson also argued that Blume, not Salinger, deserved the top spot “since several of Blume’s books are on the hit parade… while Salinger has only one.” He mused that the book banners were actually undermining their own agendas by keeping Salinger’s book front and center. “How many adolescent readers would read about Holden Caulfield’s life if they weren’t frequently reminded by censors how dreadful and immoral Catcher is?”
Go Ask Alice was the subject of thirty-one incidents—ironic, as the tragic diary was eventually revealed to be a cautionary tale fabricated by a staunchly anti-drug Mormon homemaker named Beatrice Sparks. Norma Klein had been called out fourteen times, mostly for It’s OK if You Don’t Love Me but also for Mom, The Wolf Man, and Me, along with a handful of other titles.
In “On Being a Banned Writer,” Klein took the high ground when it came to anybody’s issues with her own books, but also expressed real concerns about living in a world where demonizing the written word was considered fair game. She called the 1980s-era hankering for book bans “a deadly and frightening thing to observe, especially after the fifties and McCarthyism and the toll such denial of freedom of speech took on an entire generation.” Klein went on: “Having heard about this era from my parents, I am horrified to see my own teenage daughters come of age at a time when the books to which they have access in libraries and schools are being scrutinized in a way we would deplore were it described as taking place in the Soviet Union.”
Far from the Soviet Union was the town of Peoria, Illinois, where in the fall of 1984 the local school district removed three of Blume’s books—Then Again, Maybe I Won’t; Deenie; and Blubber—from the school library’s shelves. Despite the increased frequency of book challenges across the country, this particular one made national headlines, perhaps due to the city’s reputation as a bellwether of Midwestern tastes and tolerances. The New York Times followed the story closely, reporting that the town’s associate superintendent, Dennis Gainey, approved the decision, regardless of his own personal view that Blume’s books were “excellent.”
Gainey told the press that the district had determined the books were not appropriate for readers younger than seventh grade, which put officials in a bind, because the school library was open to students of all grades, from kindergarten to eighth. The offending titles were plucked out for their sexual content—Deenie and Then Again, Maybe I Won’t of course being the infamous masturbation and wet dream books—and for strong language (once again, Blubber’s use of the word “bitch” got Blume in trouble). In the Times, Richard Jackson called the decision “lunatic,” given that the titles were still available at public libraries and bookstores. But Peoria’s officials had carefully considered the issue, they said. When it came to these three novels, Blume’s work just didn’t play there.
Or so the city thought. After news of the bans spread, school board secretary Winifred Henderson started receiving letters and calls in response to the bans. Some of them were supportive—“99 percent” of callers outside of Peoria agreed with the decision to remove the books, Henderson told the Times—while the city’s constituents were more evenly split.
But at the end of November, the school board also received one extremely notable dissension from a number of high-profile signers. The letter came on behalf of the Authors League and made the case that pulling books from school libraries teaches kids “the wrong lesson, one of intolerance, distrust and contempt” for the First Amendment, which protects “not only the freedoms to write, publish and read but also the freedom to decide what to read.” The eight names on the note were impressive, all belonging to influential children’s book authors: Madeleine L’Engle; Natalie Babbitt, who wrote Tuck Everlasting; Caldecott Medal–winning picture book writer Uri Shulevitz; and cartoonist William Steig, among others.
By early December, the school board had agreed to reconsider the issue. On Monday, December 3, the board convened and voted 5-2 in favor of reinstating Blume’s novels. However, it was a qualified victory, with the library setting up a new system where these books would only be available to older readers, and to younger ones with parental consent. One local mother, who’d spoken out against the bans, told reporters she was satisfied with this outcome. “This is what I first suggested as a compromise,” she said. “I feel that the action they took will address the rights of children and all parents.”
The rhetoric of parental rights animated both sides of the conversation, with would-be book banners arguing that they had license to control what their kids were reading at school. That’s what happened in Gwinnett County, Georgia, in August 1985, when a local mom named Teresa Wilson asked to see the new book that her nine-year-old daughter, Naco, had borrowed from the school library. That October, she told the Chicago Tribune that she flipped Deenie open and immediately, she was disgusted. “The first page I opened to talked about masturbation,” she explained to a reporter. “That’s when I got involved.”
Wilson described herself as a homemaker who had “never been involved in anything like this before.” Nonetheless, she sprung to action, contacting Naco’s school, the county school board, and—in a way that closely mirrored the fictional events described in Maudie and Me and the Dirty Book—founded a group called Concerned Citizens of Gwinnett. As is often the case when even just one parent challenges a book, local officials hurried to remove Deenie from the shelves. But that wasn’t the end of the story. Another committee, called the Free Speech Movement of Gwinnett, came together to fight the decision. It was led by George Wilson (no relation to Teresa).
Gwinnett County is just outside Atlanta, and at the time it was home to twenty-three thousand elementary school students—all potential readers of novels by Judy Blume. George Wilson told the Tribune that both he and his ten-year-old daughter Katherine had read Deenie and he had no problem with it: “No one is obligated to read this book, but I want my child to have the option to go into the school library and pick out any book she wants, without someone else’s parent dictating what she can read.” He felt so strongly about the issue that he got the Georgia chapter of the ACLU involved. It went ahead and filed an appeal to the state school board.
But that didn’t scare Teresa Wilson, who had also enlisted help from the Freedom Foundation—a conservative think tank—and the Moral Majority. Beyond that, she had connected with a Texas couple named Mel and Norma Gabler, whose organization Educational Research Analysts was devoted to ridding public schools of textbooks that conflicted with their fundamentalist Christian values. Wilson told the Tribune that with challenging Deenie, she was just getting started. “I’m hearing about all kinds of other books in our schools that I’d object to,” she said, including those that “sympathize with communism, encourage premarital sex or experimenting with drugs, take pro-abortion positions and stress evolution without teaching creationism, too.”
George Wilson said that this was exactly why he rallied a team to fight on behalf of Deenie. His opponent’s point of view put her “in the same boat with fascism,” he argued. “If you give them Czechoslovakia, they’ll come back for Poland later.”
The ACLU agreed. In December 1985, the Chicago Tribune published a follow-up that included results from a national survey showing an uptick in book challenges across the South, as well as data from affected librarians suggesting that more often than not, these challenges resulted in the books being removed altogether. A spokesperson for the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom added that while book banning efforts in the South tended to be more organized, the problem was bad in the Northeast, too. By then, the Gwinnett school board had agreed to restore Deenie to elementary school libraries, but only if it lived on a restricted shelf that students would have to avoid unless they had written permission from their parents. The ACLU didn’t like that so-called resolution, either.
The Gwinnett case dragged on—as we know from recent national elections, Georgia is deeply divided when it comes to politics and its citizens are passionate. In 2006, an evangelical Christian mother of three landed Gwinnett back in the news when she demanded that the school system remove the Harry Potter books from libraries on account of their “evil themes, witchcraft, demonic activity, murder, evil blood sacrifice, spells and teaching children all of this.” The Gwinnett Daily Post covered the situation, noting that “book appeals have been fairly rare in the Gwinnett school system.” The article noted that before the Potter furor, the last challenge had been back in 1997, when some parents fought to remove two books: Ghost Camp by middle grade horror writer R.L. Stine, and Judy Blume’s It’s Not the End of the World.
The school board examined these titles and voted to keep them on the shelves. And even the Deenie episode proved that book challenges had a tendency to backfire. In September 1985, a month after Teresa Wilson first set her sights on Deenie, the Associated Press reported that Gwinnett’s bookstores were experiencing an unprecedented run on the novel.
“That’s what happens when they start banning books,” Bobbie Setzer, a local bookstore manager, told the AP. “Everyone wants to read them.”
It was at least a partial victory for Blume—and by then, she commanded a cavalry. She donated money to the National Coalition Against Censorship in the early 1980s and by spring of 1983, she had joined their advisory council. In June 1984, she received a letter from a board member requesting a more substantial donation and offering a face-to-face meeting with Leanne Katz, NCAC’s executive director. Judy wrote back, saying yes, she would very much like to sit down with Katz as soon as she was back in New York.
“My life changed when I learned about the National Coalition Against Censorship… and met Leanne Katz, the tiny dynamo who was its first and longtime director,” Blume wrote in 1999, just two years after Katz died of cancer at the age of sixty-five. “Leanne’s intelligence, her wit, her strong commitment to the First Amendment and helping those who were out on a limb trying to defend it, made her my hero.”
NCAC had started as an offshoot of the ACLU, where Katz was working at the time, but quickly became its own entity. The Coalition—made up of dozens of nonprofit groups, ranging from Planned Parenthood to PEN America to the National Council of Jewish Women to the United Methodist Church—was created specifically to fight against bans. Katz herself believed wholeheartedly in the primacy of the First Amendment, the worthiness of art, and the rights of citizens to access information, even about subjects that were controversial or complicated. She was also a staunch feminist. “The intense battles around the control of sexuality have always been fought on the terrain of women’s bodies,” she wrote in the New York Law School Review in 1993. “Women have long been barred from access to knowledge and information on sexuality, including reproduction, and have been excluded even from viewing or creating representations of their own bodies.”
Women were barred from access to knowledge. Think about that. Katz did; she saw book challenges as just another way for the Right to control female bodies and minds. At this point, Katz and Blume were completely aligned. Connecting with Katz opened a valve for Judy, releasing years of pent-up pressure. She could finally exhale. “I used to feel so alone when I heard my books were being challenged and even banned,” Blume wrote in “Is Puberty a Dirty Word?” “I had nowhere to turn… Today, when I get a message from my publisher that a distressed teacher or librarian or parent or group of students is trying to defend one of my books, I put them in touch with Leanne Katz at the NCAC and from that moment we all work together, not just to keep my books available, but to assure readers of all ages that they will continue to have the freedom to choose.”
In the same essay, Judy once again talked about the letters she received from children and adults whose exposure to her books turned out to be life-changing for them. She quoted a forty-one-year-old fan. “My periods began just before my twelfth birthday,” the woman wrote, “and for six months I suffered untold agonies that I was dying. I hid the evidence for fear it was something bad I had done.” The woman went on to say that she’d been raised in a home where even if Judy’s books had been available at the time, she probably wouldn’t have been allowed to have them. “I have two daughters, ages eight and eleven, and I promised myself that I won’t make the mistakes my own mother made with me. But because of my sheltered upbringing, I still don’t know what is normal and what is not,” she confessed.
