Kurt Vonnegut was no stranger to book bans.

'Our goal isn't to ban as many books as we can,' one district official said.

In 1973, the acclaimed American author — a native of Indiana — learned that his 1969 novel Slaughterhouse-Five had been removed from the curriculum at Drake High School in Drake, N.D., and that all 32 copies from an English class had been burned in the school furnace.

The teacher who had assigned the book and the students who had wanted to read it protested, but the local school board chair, Charles McCarthy, overruled them. He objected to the book’s “obscene language.”

Vonnegut, then 51 years old and widely praised as one of the country’s literary lights, objected in characteristically direct terms. In a letter to the school board chair, he wrote, “If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are.”

No books in Knox County Schools are being loaded into any furnaces. But a half-century after the ban in Drake, Slaughterhouse-Five is being removed this month from KCS libraries across the district.

It is one of 48 books that district staff have pulled from shelves to comply with a new state law, which forbids any school library materials from depicting or describing nudity, sexual conduct or excess violence.

Keith Wilson, Knox County’s assistant superintendent for academics, said the district is doing its best to adhere to the new guidelines and still provide abundant reading options for students.

“Our goal isn't to ban as many books as we can just because it's a black and white interpretation of the law,” Wilson said. “There’s still some gray in there that you have to deal with. I think we’ll get better at that over time.”

The law doesn’t offer guidance on how strictly to interpret phrases like “sexual conduct,” leaving it up to individual school systems. That is creating divergent results. Wilson County Schools, east of Nashville, removed nearly 400 titles from its libraries — while Metro Nashville Public Schools officials have so far said only that they’re reviewing their procedures.

“In reviewing the new law, we do not see a need to significantly change the operation of our libraries,” MNPS spokesperson Sean Braisted told The Tennessean.

First Amendment advocacy groups say the Tennessee law is part of a wave of book-banning efforts across the country driven by conservative activist groups like Moms for Liberty. 

PEN America, which advocates for writers’ freedom of expression, said the law made the lists of removed books inevitable.

“This law was designed to catalyze book banning; we should not be surprised now that we are seeing the mass removal of books in response to this censorial legislation,” said Kasey Meehan, PEN America’s Freedom to Read program director, in a statement. She added, “When libraries are emptied of books, students are deprived of a robust education that supports their intellectual development into the future. This legislation and the subsequent response from school districts imposes a stark restriction on the freedom to read.”

Julia Whitehead is the founder and CEO of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum & Library in the author’s hometown of Indianapolis. In an interview with Compass, she said banning Vonnegut’s books was a betrayal of the American freedoms he fought to preserve.

“It’s a terribly violent thing to ban books,” said Whitehead, who is also the author of Breaking Down Vonnegut. “Military veterans like myself and Kurt Vonnegut fought and fight to this day to protect our constitutional rights. Slaughterhouse-Five is not excessive in sex or violence.”

Learning the Law

The law took effect in July, and the Knox County school board revised its library materials policy accordingly. Wilson said training for school librarians in the new guidelines started as soon as they reported for the start of the school year.

“They have to be the ones long-term that understand this process and understand what the new standard for the library collection is, as established by the law,” he said. 

The standards will apply to any new materials considered for purchase. The harder part is dealing with thousands of titles already on the shelves. After being trained, librarians were tasked with reviewing their school collections and flagging any books that potentially violated the law.

It doesn’t matter if the violating material is on only one page of a given book. The law replaced prior guidance, based on longstanding U.S. Supreme Court precedent, that the total merit of a work had to be taken into account. Instead, a single picture or paragraph is now enough to warrant removal.

Librarians submitted books for review to a deciding panel made up of Wilson; Sarah Searles, the district’s supervisor of academic resources and libraries; and Erin Phillips, executive director for learning and literacy.

Wilson said the committee received 121 titles for review. You can see the full list here, including the reason cited for each one. Besides the 48 designated for removal, 69 were approved to remain on the shelves, and four were held for further review.

Illustrations account for the objections to most of the five titles removed from elementary libraries. They include In the Night Kitchen by the lauded author, illustrator and National Medal of Arts winner Maurice Sendak, which has a few cartoonish images of its young protagonist with no pants on; Draw Me a Star by Eric Carle, the writer and illustrator of The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which has an impressionistic image of a naked man and woman, including a nub that is evidently a penis; and There’s Going to Be a Baby by John Burningham and Helen Oxenbury, which tells a sweet story of a young boy preparing to become a big brother that features one image of him taking a bath. 

Eight books are being removed at the middle school level, including You: The Owner’s Manual for Teens, a health book by Drs. Michael F. Roizen and Mehmet C. Oz. (Oz has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to head the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.)

Besides Slaughterhouse-Five, which was flagged for descriptions of nudity, the 33 titles removed from high schools include The Bluest Eye by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, which has some descriptions of sexual abuse; Wicked by Gregory Maguire, the source material for the current smash-hit movie musical, which includes scenes of sexual activity; and Afghan-American author Khaled Hosseini’s acclaimed novel The Kite Runner, for scenes of “sadomasochistic abuse.”

Wilson said the plan is for a quarterly cycle of review, with more titles identified on an ongoing basis. 

District officials didn’t have an exact number of actual volumes being pulled from the shelves, since some of the titles are in multiple schools. But it will be a tiny fraction of the approximately 800,000 books and materials available in KCS libraries.

As for what happens to the books once they’re removed, Wilson said that for now they are being designated as “inactive” and stored on site at their respective schools. 

Trusting the Process

School board Chair Betsy Henderson, who heads up the five-member Republican majority on the school board, said in text messages that she respected the work of district staff to comply with the law. 

“Knox County went through a deliberate process to ensure materials are appropriate for students,” she said. “While I support this effort, we must continue to remain vigilant and have regular reviews to ensure the right decisions are being made. To be clear, sexually explicit material funded by taxpayers has no place in our schools and I will always stand up for protecting our kids.”

Asked if the removal of literary classics troubled her, Henderson said, “This list was developed by teachers, parents, and district leaders. I trust that process.”

One thing the process didn’t include, Wilson said, were any pre-selected lists from outside groups, whether that was Wilson County Schools or Moms for Liberty.

“Obviously I think a lot of our librarians are aware of (lists), whether it be websites that offer feedback or reviews, or a Moms for Liberty list or something like that,” he said. “We just did not necessarily use a list like that to be a driver or a resource.”

Of 51 titles in KCS collections flagged as “explicit” by the Knox County chapter of Moms for Liberty — using lists compiled by national conservative groups — eight have been marked for removal in the district’s list to date.

One odd feature of the process is that unlike prior systems for book removal, which had to be driven by a complaint from parents, students or staff, the law requires librarians to do the censorship themselves. Wilson acknowledged it was difficult for some staff members, who see their mission as providing access to information rather than inhibiting it.

“Most of them at least understand and know that this is a law that we are tasked with responding to,” he said. “And I think what they are hopefully seeing through that is we've tried to be very thoughtful about our interpretation.”

In Indianapolis, Whitehead said Vonnegut — who died in 2007 — would not have been surprised by the continuing controversy over access to books and literature.

“Even though he was curmudgeonly, I think his ever-present sense of hope would prevail in each one of these situations,” she said. “Because he knew there were organizations that would fight for our First Amendment rights. The majority of the country supports these rights.”

In his letter to the Drake school board chair, Vonnegut appealed to patriotic ideals. 

“Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them,” he wrote. “If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.”

CORRECTION 12/26/24: Story has been revised to give Erin Phillips' correct job title.