Alice Walker Banned / Edition 1

by Alice Walker

Overview

Featuring a reprint of Alice Walker's short stories "Roselily" and "Am I Blue?", this little gift book carries a serious message about censorship. Holt's Introduction decribes past forms of literary censorship in the United States and places the contemporary banning of books within that history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	2901879960472
Publisher:	Aunt Lute Books
Publication date:	06/01/1996
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	106
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 1.50(h) x 9.50(d)

About the Author

Alice Walker, winner of the 1983 Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award for The Color Purple, has earned international recognition. She is the author of several novels, includeing Possessing the Secret of Joy, Temple of My Familiar, Meridian, The Color Purple, and The Third Life of Grange Copeland. The recipient of many awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Rosenthal award for fiction fromm the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

Hometown:

Mendocino, California

Date of Birth:

February 9, 1944

Place of Birth:

Eatonton, Georgia

Education:

B.A., Sarah Lawrence College, 1965; attended Spelman College, 1961-63

Editorial Reviews

In response to outrage from Christian conservatives, the California State Board of Education (BOE) removed in 1994 two short stories by Alice Walker from its California Learning Assessment System (CLAS) exam, which was adopted to allow children of all backgrounds a "level playing field." One of the stories, "Roselily," an interior monolog of a poor, Mississippi girl (an unwed mother) as she is being married and taken away to Chicago like chattel, was deemed "anti-religious." The other story, "Am I Blue?," is an allegory of slavery told by a narrator observing the treatment of a horse; the story's ending holds emotional associations of eating animal products with cruelty and was thus marked "anti-meat-eating." Here, in time for Banned Books Week, the two stories are reprinted in full, along with an excerpt from Walker's other much-censored book, The Color Purple. With an introduction by Patricia Holt delineating the controversy and appendixes of newspaper articles, letters, and minutes of the BOE meeting, this book will allow a cooler, more informed discussion of an important debate.Amy Boaz, "Library Journal"

Library Journal

Walker has paid dearly for her creativity and forthrightness about her belief in personal freedom on all fronts, from sexuality to spirituality. In her poignant memoir, "The Same River Twice" , Walker tracks the course of many of the controversies that have surrounded her work, especially "The Color Purple". Now this striking volume offers a detailed account of the effort to censor two of her most engrossing stories, "Roselily" and "Am I Blue." In her appropriately ironic and critical introduction, Patricia Holt of the "San Francisco Chronicle Book Review" traces the comic yet tragic series of events that led to these stories being removed from a 1994 statewide examination by the California Board of Education, one for being "anti-religious," the other because it was "anti-meat-eating." Holt's fine essay and the stories themselves are followed by appendixes containing news clippings covering the various debates aroused by Walker's prizewinning fiction, making this an invaluable contribution to the literature of censorship.

Donna Seaman