More than 50 years after a North Dakota school district burned copies of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse-Five,’ the anti-war novel is still being censored

Filed 1h ago · Via The Conversation · The Buffoon Desk

THIS STORY IS SCORED

Dance of the Tuba Plum Fairy

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Rjcastillo · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

In 1973, teacher Bruce Severy assigned Kurt Vonnegut's ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ to his sophomore class in Drake, North Dakota; after a parent complained about profanity, the school board voted unanimously in 1976 to remove the book and burned 32 copies in the school furnace. Vonnegut wrote the board directly, noting his own record as a decorated World War II veteran who had fought nations that burned books, and received no reply.

The novel became the subject of the Supreme Court's 1982 Board of Education v. Pico case, after a Long Island school board pulled it and ten other titles, seven by minority authors, from library shelves. The fractured 5-4 ruling found school boards cannot remove books simply because they object to the ideas in them, though it left districts broad authority to judge educational suitability.

The book remains a target today: in January 2026 the ACLU sued on behalf of Vonnegut's estate after Utah's ‘sensitive materials law’ gave districts a mechanism to ban it from schools.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Burning books in a school furnace is the kind of thing a person assumes belongs to history until the ACLU is filing suit over the same book half a century later. The cast of characters keeps changing, a superintendent named Fuhrman and a board chairman named McCarthy back then, a state law with a soft-sounding name now, but the instinct underneath is the same one it always was. A novel that argues for kindness over cruelty keeps getting treated like the dangerous one, which tells you plenty about what actually makes certain adults nervous.

Source: Read the original at The Conversation → Scored: Dance of the Tuba Plum Fairy · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

Read it scored.

Every story, every clown, every kazoo — in your pocket. Music plays automatically. Regret is optional.

GET IT ON iOS GET IT ON ANDROID

OR FOLLOW THE DESK ON BLUESKY →