Banned Books Week ~ begins today

Last Monday, a school board in North Carolina banned the novel Invisible Man from its reading list.  Although one board member said at the meeting, "I didn’t find any literary value ... I’m for not allowing it to be available," Ralph Ellison won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1953 for this book.  In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Invisible Man nineteenth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Invisible Man ~ by Ralph Ellison, 1952 As a first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.  The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood," and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.

They banned the book just in time for Banned Books Week, which begins today.  If you have a review of a banned book you'd be willing to share here, let me know.  Leave a comment, or email me (Bonnie) at emerging DOT paradigm AT yahoo DOT com