8 Spring Street - Marion, MA 02738
508-748-1252
8 Spring Street - Marion, MA 02738
508-748-1252
Join librarians from the Elizabeth Taber Library for the first meeting of our Banned Books Club! Learn about the campaigns to challege, ban, and even burn Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five. So it goes!
Since its first publishing in 1967, Slaughterhouse-Five has been and continues to be banned from classrooms and libraries the world over. The most commonly cited reason for the challenges is “obscene content". Bruce Severy, a twenty-six-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota, in 1973, decided to use the novel as a teaching aid in his classroom. The head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, had other ideas. McCarthy demanded that all thirty-two copies be burned in the school’s furnace. Many of the students protested the decision; some even refused to hand their books back. Their admirable stance was ignored. On November 16, 1973, an angry and disappointed Vonnegut wrote to McCarthy to make his feelings known. Click to view Vonnegut's letter.
Click here for a list of vocabulary and definitions broken down by chapter