Banning Books in America: Not a How-to

(Hardback)

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This is a book about banned books in the U.S. about reading them, teaching them, and assigning them under the shadow of political pressure not to.

Banning Books in America includes reflections by novelists on banning and being banned, arguments about the histories and politics of book banning, readings of banned books in national and international contexts, and responses to new legislation by anti-censorship advocates, teachers, and librarians.

Together, these writers and educators provide a view from the trenches of the wars on reading and on educational freedom on the freedom to learn and teach without constraint and, if not a blueprint, at least some ideas not just about what it means to ban books but also about how to fight back against the forces that would ban them.

Author Bio

Samuel Cohen is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri, USA, where he teaches a course on banned books. He is the author of After the End of History: American Fiction in the 1990s (Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2010) and co-editor of The Legacy of David Foster Wallace (2012) and The Clash Takes on the World (Bloomsbury, 2017). He is series editor of The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture.