The
Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank
The
Diary of a Young Girl (also
known as The Diary of Anne Frank) is a book
of the writings from the Dutch language diary kept
by Anne Frank while she was in hiding for two years with her family during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. The family was apprehended in 1944 and Anne Frank
ultimately died of typhus in
the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Back
in 1947, when Anne’s father Otto Frank published her diary, he was advised by
his publisher that some of Anne’s writings about her sexuality would be
offensive to certain readers, and several diary entries, constituting about 30
percent of the book, were cut. Sixty-six years later, parents are complaining about
the “pornographic” entries in the restored edition, since being frank (pun
somewhat intended) about one’s vagina is
clearly incredibly porn-y.
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The novel tells of a young man
named Dorian Gray, the subject of a painting by artist Basil Hallward. Basil is
impressed by Dorian's beauty and becomes infatuated with him, believing his
beauty is responsible for a new mode in his art. This book is the only published novel
by Oscar Wilde, appearing as the lead story in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine on 20 June 1890, printed as the July
1890 issue of this magazine.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Oscar Wilde’s famous novel was
much more homoerotic in its original form than in the version that finally made
it to print in 1891. Apparently, Wilde’s editor J.M. Stoddart acknowledged that the
text contained “a number of things which an innocent woman would make an
exception to,” and to that end made significant cuts of “objectionable”
material (read: more obvious exploration of both Basil’s and Dorian’s
sexuality), assuring Craige Lippincott that he would polish it until it was
“acceptable to the most fastidious taste” before it was published in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890. Even with
these cuts, the public outrage was so intense that it was revised even more
drastically before it could be published in book form the next year. In 2011,
an uncensored version was published by Harvard University Press.
From Here to Eternity, James Jones
From Here to Eternity is the debut novel of American author James Jones, published by Scribner's in
1951. It is loosely based on Jones' experiences in the pre-World War II Hawaiian Division's 27th Infantry and the unit in which he served,
Company E ("The Boxing Company"). Fellow company member Hal Gould said that while the novel was based on
the company, including some depictions of actual persons, the characters are
fictional and both the harsh conditions and described events are inventions.
From Here to Eternity won the National Book Award and was named one of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century by the Modern
Library Board.
When
James Jones submitted his classic novel From Here to Eternity to his editor at Scribner, it contained “explicit
mentions of gay sex and a number of four-letter words” that didn’t make it to
the final product. When changes were proposed, Jones objected, writing that
“the things we change in this book for propriety’s sake will in five years, or
ten years, come in someone else’s book anyway.” But ultimately he gave in, and
the edited version was published in 1951. Sixty years later, Jones’s daughter
decided to republish the book in a completely restored, digital edition.
In The First Circle, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
In the First Circle (Russian: В круге первом, V
kruge pervom) is a novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn released in 1968. A fuller version of
the book was published in English in 2009.
The novel depicts the
lives of the occupants of a sharashka (a R&D bureau made of gulag inmates) located in the Moscow suburbs. This novel is highly
autobiographical. Many of the prisoners (zeks)
are technicians or academics who have been arrested under Article 58 of the RSFSR Penal Code in Joseph Stalin's purges following
the Second World
War. Unlike inhabitants of other gulag labor camps,
the sharashka zeks were adequately fed and enjoy good working conditions;
however if they found disfavor with the authorities, they could be instantly
shipped to Siberia.
Before
Solzhenitsyn’s classic was published in 1968, the author cut nine chapters
(including a scene in which the main character warns the US embassy of a Soviet
plan to steal nuclear secrets) in order to pass through censors in his native
USSR, and even truncated the title to The First Circle. An English
translation of the full version was published by Harper Perennial in 2009.
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury.
The novel presents a future American society where books are outlawed and firemen burn any house that contains them.
This novel has been
the subject of various interpretations, primarily focusing on the historical
role of book burning in suppressing dissenting
ideas. In a 1956 radio interview, Bradbury stated that he wrote Fahrenheit 451 because of his concerns at the time
(during the about censorship
and the threat of book burning in the United States. In later years, he stated
his motivation for writing the book in more general terms.
Oh, irony. Bradbury’s
famous novel, a strong argument against censorship, was itself expurgated and
sold by its publisher in that diminished form for a full 13 years before the
author found out about it. About 15 years after its original publication in
1953, Ballantine Books began marketing a special edition to high schools, with
more than 75 passages “cleaned up” for teenage consumption — swear words erased
and certain passages rewritten. The censored version ran for 10 printings
before Bradbury found out about it in 1979. He demanded that the publisher
withdraw all the modified books and continue to sell only the original, and
they gracefully (and probably sheepishly) agreed.
Demons, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Demons (Russian: Бесы, transliteration: Bésy, "demons") is an 1872 novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky is an extremely political book. Demons is a testimonial of life in Imperial
Russia in the late
19th century.
As the revolutionary democrats begin to rise in Russia, different
ideologies begin to collide. Dostoyevsky casts a critical eye on both the left-wingidealists,
portraying their ideas and ideological foundation as demonic, and the conservative establishment's ineptitude in dealing
with those ideas and their social consequences.
When Dostoyevsky
submitted his political novel in 1872, the government censored an entire
chapter, “At Tikhon’s,” which features Stavrogin’s confession that he molested
a teenage girl, who then killed herself. It is now included in most modern
editions, but also often published separately.
The
Woman At 1000°, Hallgrímur Helga
This
novel’s not a classic (yet), but it is a contemporary example of major
expurgation to fit a foreign market. Apparently, the German
version of Icelandic author Hallgrímur Helga is a full 30 chapters shorter than
the original — with the affected chapters being mainly related to Hitler and
the Holocaust. “It is not just a gentle redrafting – it is a rewrite of
everything that has to do with Adolf Hitler, SS and war. We are not talking
about removing one word here and one sentence there, but completely systematic
political censorship,” said scholar Erik Skyum-Nielsen. The German publisher
said they merely wanted to make it shorter.
"Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads."
-George Bernard Shaw-
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