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"There are worse crimes than burning books," wrote the poet Joseph Alexandrovitch Brodsky. "One of them is not reading them". In honor of Banned Books Week, an annual event co-sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA), The Y Files is profiling three works of science and science fiction that have aroused the ire of censors past and present. Yesterday, we examined the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Gallilei. Today, we begin with a book that still stokes the flames of America's "culture wars". We end with the tale of a monster.
On The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)
Published in 1859, Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species is a seminal study in evolutionary biology and one of the most important (and controversial) scientific works ever written. An English naturalist, Darwin argued that species evolve from common ancestors through a process called natural section. Darwin also described processes such as variation, the struggle for existence, and survival of the fittest. Ironically, the word "evolution" never appeared in the first edition of On the Origin of Species, a book whose title was later changed to, simply, The Origin of Species.
Once educated as an Anglican clergyman, Darwin later referred to himself as "the Devil's Chaplain". Although Origin avoided any discussion about the lineage of homo sapiens, critics claimed that his work contradicted the Biblical story of creation in the Book of Genesis. First, Darwin's book was banned from the library at Trinity College, where the naturalist had been a student. Later, during the twentieth century, the battle crossed the Atlantic and centered upon John Scopes, a high school teacher in Tennessee who had violated the Butler Act, a state law that prohibited teaching "any theory that denies the story of the Divine Creation of Man as taught in the Bible".
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley)
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus was written in 1816 by 19-year old Mary Shelley, daughter of British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and husband of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Frankenstein, as Mary Shelley's book is more commonly known, was published anonymously in 1818, but re-published under the author's name in 1831. Arguably the first science fiction novel, Frankenstein is the fictional story of a humanoid "fiend" or "demon" created by Victor Frankenstein, an alchemy-enamored chemist. His monstrous creation, stitched together from human corpses, kills several of Frankenstein's family members and friends before being marooned in the Arctic.
In the 1955, the New York Times reported that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein had been banned in South Africa as "indecent, objectionable, or obscene." The apartheid regime also banned Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, a story not about a human being – but about a horse.
Editor's Note: Click here for Part 1 of this two-part series.
Resources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Species
http://www.freedomtoread.ca/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/bannings_and_burnings.pdf
http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/scopes/darwin.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Frankenstein
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/banned-books.html
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Re: Celebrate Banned Books Week (Part 2)
