In the News

Even today books are banned by certain institutions or in other venues for political, religious, sexual or social reasons. Beginning in 1982, the American Library Association (ALA) has celebrated Banned Book Week annually during the last week of September. The goal of this weeklong event is to keep the concept of literary freedom in the forefront of Americans' minds. Look for our display of books that have been banned throughout the ages, and select your own banned book to read!

Here are just a few of them...

Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence was inspired by the long-standing affair between Lawrence's German wife and an Italian peasant who eventually became her third husband. This fictionalized account is the story of Constance Chatterley, who, while trapped in an unhappy marriage to an aristocratic mine owner whose war wounds have left him paralyzed and impotent becomes involved with a gamekeeper. Many critics consider it Lawrence's best novel.

Candide by Voltaire tells the story of a naive youth who is conscripted, shipwrecked, and tortured by the Inquisition without losing his will to live. Voltaire is a brilliant satirist and one of the most influential figures of the eighteenth century Enlightenment. Highly readable, this is a book you will long remember.

Famed and recently deceased author John Updike was a prolific novelist, poet, and short story writer, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Rabbit, Run, his second novel, is about a high-school basketball star who on an impulse, at the age of twenty six, deserts his wife. Set in a small urban area of southeastern Pennsylvania in 1959, the story portrays the potentially tragic clash between religion and morality.