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Thu 9 Sep, 2004 03:44 pm
Hey everybody im 16 and I'm having to do a "Banned Book" project and i can not for the life of me find why "The Green Mile" was banned...please help me
From what I know, many of King's books have been banned from various Southern state high school libraries because of language and sexual content.
Green Mile seemed pretty innocuous so far as both language and sexual content, at least by the standards of the past thirty years or so.
Could it have been the idea that a convicted killer was somehow made analogous to Jesus? It would have to relate to the perspective of the group involved in banning it, I suppose.
Where was this banned, by the way?
I found this forum by looking up banned books for a forum buddy and I have not found anywhere , and I have checked Google very well but there is no where that I can find where this book was banned. I live in Tennessee and it can be the worst. If ya have any proof or a link please let me know..Thank you
I can't recall how specific the book is about the molestation and murder of the little girls. That might have been enough to get it banned.
Maybe. That part really seemed in just to set up the prison situation, though.
That's interesting, Deborah. Tennessee does sound like a tough one, but in New Mexico, they actually had a bookburning in Alamagordo. Try to believe this - it was Harry Potter book!
roger wrote:Maybe. That part really seemed in just to set up the prison situation, though.
That's interesting, Deborah. Tennessee does sound like a tough one, but in New Mexico, they actually had a bookburning in Alamagordo. Try to believe this - it was Harry Potter book!
Oh I can belive it. I am not a church going as a matter of fact I am agnostic, and not to down any religious in hear but this is what is getting these books banned. The extreme religious. I live in the firey bible belt. I am original from Dallas Teaxs. I love it here but I tell you what its hard sometimes.
Whatever happened to the 1st Amendment? Book burning is, usually, a private matter. Some kooks get together and, self-righteously, throw a few volumes on the bonfire. But banning a book, I thought, was illegal. They used to do it with impunity back in the day and my hometown of Boston, MA was notorious. 'Banned in Boston' at one time was something to brag about on a book's dust-jacket. Since all the US Supreme Court rulings of the 1940s and 1950s, though, I thought this practice had been mostly abandoned, except for some school districts which can't actually ban a book but can tell their students that they are forbidden to read this book. Which, of couurse, just increases the book's sales on, say, Amazon.com.
Merry Andrew wrote:Whatever happened to the 1st Amendment? Book burning is, usually, a private matter. Some kooks get together and, self-righteously, throw a few volumes on the bonfire. But banning a book, I thought, was illegal. They used to do it with impunity back in the day and my hometown of Boston, MA was notorious. 'Banned in Boston' at one time was something to brag about on a book's dust-jacket. Since all the US Supreme Court rulings of the 1940s and 1950s, though, I thought this practice had been mostly abandoned, except for some school districts which can't actually ban a book but can tell their students that they are forbidden to read this book. Which, of couurse, just increases the book's sales on, say, Amazon.com.
There are very few books that have actually been truely banned in a 1st Amendment sense in the US in the last 200 years. Most books that make "banned" lists are those that were identified by schools as unsuitable for their students to report on (usually because of questionable age-appropriate sexual content) or those that the US Postal Service has refused to allow to be mailed through the US Mail becaus eof explicit content. (The 1st Amendment says uou have a right to print and read books. It doesn't say anything about the government having to transport the books to/for you.)
I don't know, fishin'. I seem to recall that Ulysses was not allowed to be brought into the USA until the Supreme Court intervened and ruled that James Joyce's classic was not obscene. For many years you couldn't buy Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer or Tropic of Capricorn anywhere in the USA. This is anecdotal, but I have heard of instances where people who had bought these books, especially the Miller works, in Europe had them confiscated by US Customs when re-entering this country. Now, you might say that this isn't 'banning' because there was no specific legislation to cover it, but it seems to me that once a practice becomes government policy (and the PO, at the time, was strictly an arm of the Federal government), it has the same effect as a duly promulgated law.
I didn't say there weren't any Andrew. I said "There are very few books that have actually been truely banned in a 1st Amendment sense...". The "Online Book Pages" banned book list has a grand total of 11 books that were truely banned in the US and goes back as far as the founding of this country. (None of them remain banned). "The File Room" lists a grand total of 388 books banned or censored anywhere in North America but their lists includes things that have nothing to do with the government at well (like Disney's refusal to distribute Moore's "Fahrenheit 911")
i think the part of the book that merited its banning was when prisoner wild bill grabbed, then molested percy whetmore. it freaked him out so much that he pissed his pants... only from the macabre mind of SK!
There's also the part where John Coffey is taken to the warden's wife to cure her of her cancer, and in her delirium invites Coffey and his friends to have anal sex with her.
King started out as a writer of pornographic stories, and he never really got over it. It's all over his many novels.
I knew that his earliest stories were sold to men's magazines, but I didn't think they were pornographic stories. His work doesn't strike me as any more risce than most other horror or mystery writers who are active today
I don't know of any 'pornographic' story that King has ever published. There are some erotic elements in many of his tales, but they are far from being pornographic. In fact, perversely and paradoxically, some of his most lyrical writing is in the erotic passages.
I recall reading an interview of his in which he was describing his early career, struggling to live and all, and to be able to "buy meat to have with his Cheerios" he considered writing pornographic stories for some publisher, but soon realized, "what am I doing?" and abandoned the enterprise.
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