April Program by Hedda Smithson
Sacramento Branch of AAUW Presents
“The Rights Stuff” Episode Eight
Banned Books and the Right to Read Anything!
Lights, Camera, Action!!
Coming Attraction! Save the date! Saturday, April 20, 2024
North Ridge Country Club, 7600 Madison Ave, Fair Oaks
A joint meeting and luncheon with *CHAR
Some history from Hedda’s memory bank: In September or October of 1956, or maybe it was 1957, the big deal between classes and/or lunch was passing around Val Jean S’s well-worn copy of Grace Metalious’ “Peyton Place”. Several pages were marked: passages that blew our little minds. My friend Sonja and I remember! In a recent conversation she called it a “dirty” book. And Canada did ban it from 1956 to 1958!! So that was Hedda’s first experience with Banned Books –“Peyton Place” was banned? It did become the basis for a TV series that ran from 1964 to 1969.
Fast forward to now. When a book is banned, can a publisher acquire the rights to the content? Yes! Parisian Obelisk Press published Henry Miller’s sexually frank novel “Tropic of Cancer” and Olympia Press published William Burroughs’s “Naked Lunch”. Does making a book forbidden make it more desirable? Could this be a marketing ploy? Here is a quiz for you to help you think about the April meeting. Answers appear elsewhere in this newsletter issue:
- Which book is banned by fourteen countries?
- “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” by D H Lawrence (1928)
- “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)
- “Satanic Verses” by Salman Rushdie (1988)
- Which country has the largest number of banned books?
a) Australia
b) China
c) Indonesia
d) Singapore
e) US
3. What reasons for banning are given?
a) Sexually explicit
b) Blasphemy against Islam
c) Positive depiction of Jews
d) All of the above
4. Which country banned all works from Johannes Kepler, Voltaire and Federico Garcia Lorca?
a) Germany
b) Italy
c) Spain
*CHAR – Citrus Heights American River Branch of AAUW