“Censorship reflects a society’s lack of confidence in itself. It is the hallmark of an authoritarian regime…” – [U.S.] Justice Potter Stewart (1966)

From: U.S. Embassy, Nigeria

"A lack of 'literary value' has apparently left Ralph Ellison's landmark 1952 novel, Invisible Man banned from school libraries in Randolph County, N.C., the Asheboro Courier-Tribune reports. […]

     As the school district's policy requires, the complaints [of a Randolph County, N.C. parent of an eleventh grader] lead to votes on the school and district levels. Both held that the book should remain available to students in the library. However, in a 5-2 vote, the school board voted to ban the book, with one board member, Gary Mason, stating, 'I didn’t find any literary value.'
     Mason's blunt assessment however, runs counter to decades of intellectual criticism of the novel, which won the 1953 National Book Award for fiction, beating out Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck's East of Eden.
     In 1995, writing for the New York Times, Roger Rosenblatt praised the novel as a masterpiece.
     'Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953, was instantly recognized as a masterpiece, a novel that captured the grim realities of racial discrimination as no book had,' Rosenblatt wrote. 'Its reputation grew as Ellison retreated into a mythic literary silence that made his one achievement definitive.'"
— Huffington Post
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"[…] All [Randolph County Board of Education] members were given copies to read before the vote. Board Chair McDonald said 'it was a hard read.'
     Mason said, 'I didn’t find any literary value' and objected to the book’s language. 'I’m for not allowing it to be available,' he added.
     A school district official said ahead of the vote that Invisible Man was just one of many options in school libraries, and that no student was forced to read it. She also stressed that the state Department of Public Instruction approved the book for student consumption.
     Invisible Man was one of three books that Randleman High School juniors-to-be in the 2013-14 school year could choose to read for the summer. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin and Passing by Nella Larsen were the students’ other choices. Honors students had to choose two of the three books."
— rt.com
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Here's another post about censorship...

For a list of books banned in the U.S. go here...

Here's a link to what's happening in your area of the U.S.A. during Banned Books Week — September 22 - 28, 2013.

Buy Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and the other books mentioned in these posts here...

Marilyn French: November 21, 1929 – May 2, 2009

"[...] With steely views about the treatment of woman and a gift for expressing them on the printed page, Ms. French transformed herself from an academic who quietly bristled at the expectations of married women in the post-World War II era to a leading, if controversial, opinionmaker on gender issues who decried the patriarchal society she saw around her. 'My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world,' she once declared.   
     Her first and best-known novel, The Women’s Room, released in 1977, traces a submissive housewife’s journey of self-discovery following her divorce in the 1950s, describing the lives of Mira Ward and her friends in graduate school at Harvard as they grow into independent women. The book was partly informed by her own experience of leaving an unhappy marriage and helping her daughter deal with the aftermath of being raped. Women all over the world seized on the book, which sold more than 20 million copies and was translated into 20 languages.
     Gloria Steinem, a close friend, compared the impact of the book on the discussion surrounding women’s rights to the one that Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man had had on racial equality 25 years earlier. 
     'It was about the lives of women who were supposed to live the lives of their husbands, supposed to marry an identity rather than become one themselves, to live secondary lives,' Ms. Steinem said in an interview Sunday. 'It expressed the experience of a huge number of women and let them know that they were not alone and not crazy.'
— A. G. Sultzberger and Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times
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Buy this book here...