The Censorship of Realist and Naturalist Novels, Then and Now

Abstract

This chapter focuses on several realist and naturalist works that have been subject to censorship by librarians, editors, publishers, or the legal system. It examines censorship allegations made by authors and later by critics and biographers about Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Hamlin Garland’s The Rose of Dutcher’s Cooley (1895), Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1901) and An American Tragedy (1925), and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1906). Finally, it connects the historical context of the censorship issue to the recent debates on college campuses about speech codes and to contemporary book censorship and free-speech cases in the public schools.