[Prestidigitweeze]

I'd assumed this had to have been posted here before, but since it hasn't, here is Kurt Vonnegut's letter to Charles McCarthy, head of the school board of Drake High School, North Dakota.

But first, a bit of backstory.

November 9, 1973: After high school English teacher, Bruce Severy, decided to have his students read Slaughterhouse Five, McCarthy caught wind and ordered that all thirty-two copies from the class be burned in the school furnace to remove the stench of Vonnegut's "obscene language." Other books followed: Sixty copies of Deliverance, by James Dickey, and the anthology, Short Story Masterpieces, which included fiction by Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck.

Despite McCarthy's originally receiving the "only [non-author's] copy" of the letter, it was eventually published in Vonnegut's collection, Palm Sunday, in 1981.

Forty years after the event, Slaughterhouse Five is still challenged routinely in American public high schools. Mobile Read members have read about this as recently as a few months ago (in the News section of this forum), when the book was removed once again from high school libraries at an intolerant activist's request.

Letter deleted due to copyright issues; I'll add an excerpt if people care.