Who Controls What Books You Can Read?

Welcome to Reason's summer banned books issue

- By Katherine Mangu-Ward

SOMEONE GAVE MARGARET Atwood a flamethrower.

The gray-haired author has become a patron saint for a certain kind of dystopian apocalypticism. No protest is complete these days without at least a few women in the red robes and white bonnets of The Handmaid's Tale, her clouded portrait of an authoritarian society built around controlling conscience and fertility. The Handmaid's Tale has been banned many times sometimes by whole countries, such as Portugal and Spain in the days of Salazar and the Francoists, Atwood notes, sometimes by school boards, sometimes by libraries.

All of which made her the perfect subject for a stunt to raise money for PEN America, a nonprofit that fights literary censorship: She took a blowtorch to a custom-made fireproof edition of her most famous work, which would later be put up for auction by Sotheby's.

Book burnings have long been popular with those who would seize and hold power, from the Catholic Church (page 26) to Josef Stalin (page 37). Kings, fascists, and communists alike have warmed their hands over literary bonfires. But rarely in 2022 America do book bans take the incendiary form of our Ray Bradbury-fueled (page 34) fever dreams.

Yet controversy over book bans has flared up nonetheless, with local and state elections won or lost over which books will be stocked in libraries or taught in schools (page 22)—a newly invigorated front in a long-running culture war.

THE AMERICAN LIBRARY Association (ALA), another anti-censorship organization, keeps lists of what it calls challenged books-books that a person or group has tried to remove from or restrict access to in schools or libraries. A banned book is one where that removal is successful.