Yesterday, I happened to read something Norman Vincent Peale wrote in 1957 for Look magazine, regarding school boards banning books like Huckleberry Finn “because of inappropriate language and ideas” (yes, as far back as 1957).
He referred to “the peculiar notion that all ideas in fiction must be good,” and predicted that in the future “supernervous boards might drop Merchant of Venice or the Bible because some characters are depicted unsympathetically or in a way that some people might find disturbing [we’ve already gone there, of course]. If children’s minds are to be shielded from conflict and social change, it might be better to keep them away from reading entirely.”
