More Information about Banned Books
Origins of "Banned in Boston"
“During the 1920s the phrase banned in Boston became famous because the long-established Watch and Ward Society of the so-called Hub of the Universe was forever getting the city censor to ban books from sale. Many publishers actively sought to have their books banned in Boston because they knew the label would increase their sales in the rest of the country…”
Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, 2d ed, 1988.
Banned in Boston : the Watch and Ward Society's crusade against books, burlesque, and the social evil by Location: HV6795.B7 M55 2010ISBN: 9780807051139Publication Date: 2010
Banned in Boston Primary Sources
- Pernicious books : address byLocation: Z658.U5 P47 1923Publication Date: 1923address by Professor Bliss Perry of Harvard University to be delivered at the Annual Public Meeting of The New England Watch and Ward Society at the Old South Church, Copley Square, Boston, Mass., April 22, 1923, pp. 8-9: “A sub-division of this sex-obsessed fiction, drama, and verse, turns to pathology, to Freudian psychology, to pseudo-science. Psycho-analysis was one thing in the hands of Dr. James Putnam. It becomes a very different thing in the hands of lady-novelists. A novelist is free to choose any material, of course, provided she can achieve something true and beautiful, but I am not convinced that the ductless glands provide a promising field for artistic effort…”
The Censorship in Boston by Publication Date: 192922 pp. with an appendix of a “list of books…suppressed during the current [1927-1929] Boston frenzy of censorship:”
Read Boston's Banned Books
The Sun Also Rises by ISBN: 0743297334Originally published in 1926, The Sun Also Rises is Ernest Hemingway's first novel and a classic example of his spare but powerful writing.
Oil! by ISBN: 9780143112266The classic novel that inspired the Academy award-winning film, There Will Be Blood.
Dark Laughter by ISBN: 9788832203950Dark Laughter is a 1925 novel by the American author Sherwood Anderson. It dealt with the new sexual freedom of the 1920s, a theme also explored in his 1923 novel Many Marriages and later works. The influence of James Joyce's Ulysses, which Anderson had read before writing the 1925 novel, is expressed in Dark Laughter.
The Wayward Man by ISBN: 9780957233614"Robert Dunwoody has inherited his father's love of the sea and restless spirit while his mother dreams that he will play a part in their family business. Robert rebels against the world of small shopkeepers to follow the harsh, dangerous life of a sailor. After years away, travelling across the oceans and as a hobo in the United States, Robert returns to Belfast and is trapped into marriage and a shop of his own. Can he free himself to return to the world beyond Belfast's streets and return to the joys of an independent life?"
The world of William Clissold: a novel at a new angle by ISBN: 9780571247837Though this novel was first published in 1926, with a preface strenuously denying that it was anything but a work of fiction, William Clissold is nevertheless a character whose thought and background is so thoroughly documented in the work that the reader cannot help identifying him to some extent with Wells himself (so much so that Wells’s agent feared a libel case on its original publication). (from Faber)
