Mark Twain to his editor on the Concord Public Library banningThe Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885:
“Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as ‘trash and only suitable for the slums.’ This will sell us another twenty-five thousand copies for sure!”
And to a librarian on the Brooklyn Public Library’s ban on the same book in 1905:
“I am greatly troubled by what you say. I wrote ‘Tom Sawyer’ & ‘Huck Finn’ for adults exclusively, & it always distressed me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean. I know this by my own experience, & to this day I cherish an unappeased bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 years old. None can do that and ever draw a clean sweet breath again on this side of the grave.”
A student's response to a question posed by her teacher in Allendale, Michigan
"Teenager or not, people do not like to be told what to they can and cannot do. This is how I feel when it comes to banned books. I myself have read many banned books, like The Hunger Games and most recently, Speak. I don't really know much background information on either of the books, just that Suzanne Collins wrote the Hunger Games from her experiences of being a child with a parent in the war, moving around a lot, and that the author of Speak wrote it to basically go against what everyone was telling her should could and couldn't write about. She wanted the truth to be told and was sick of people censoring stories because they don't see it acceptable to the presented audience. I think that censoring books is not a good idea at all. I see how the idea in a whole could sound good, parents wanting to protect their children from bad thoughts and ideas, but really they are not protecting them at all. They are blinding them from the truth, the real world. Children/teenagers cannot grow up thinking that rape, abuse of drugs, and other things that get books banned never happen, because the truth is it happens everyday. If they grow up thinking it won't happen to them, they are just more vulnerable to a situation if presented with one. School is all about preparing us for the real world, so not allowing us to read certain books is just keeping us from what the world will be like when we get to college or other situations. The United States Constitution promises us equal rights, so how are we being provided equal rights when some schools allow certain books and others don't? The children are not even getting a say in whether they can read the books or not which is not equal at all, because the books they read are they items that teach them and prepare them for the real world! So, all in all, the censorship and banning of books is not right and even violates the United States Constitution." ~ Shelby Bond, Allendale High School