The Three Attacks on Intellectual Freedom

Updated at 9:21 p.m. ET on August 7, 2023

In June 1953, at the height of the McCarthy era, while congressional investigators and private groups were hunting down “subversive” or merely “objectionable” books and authors in the name of national security, the American Library Association and the Association Book Publishers Council issued a manifesto called “The Freedom to Read.” The document defended free expression and denounced censorship and conformity in language whose clarity and force are startling today. It argued for “the widest diversity of views and expressions” and against purging work based on “the personal history or political affiliations of the author.” It urged publishers and librarians to resist government and private suppression, and to “give full meaning to the freedom to read by providing books that enrich the quality and diversity of thought.” The manifesto took on not just official censorship, but the broader atmosphere of coercion and groupthink. It concluded: “We do not state these propositions in the comfortable belief that what people read is unimportant. We believe rather that what people read is deeply important; that ideas can be dangerous; but that the suppression of ideas is fatal to a democratic society. Freedom itself is a dangerous way of life, but it is ours.”

“The Freedom to Read” was covered in papers and on TV news. President Dwight Eisenhower, who that same month had urged the graduating class of Dartmouth College not to “join the book burners,”’ sent a letter of praise to the manifesto’s authors. In one of the darkest periods of American history, the manifesto gave librarians and publishers the courage of their principles. One librarian later wrote, “There developed a fighting profession, made up of dedicated people who were sure of their direction.”

This past June, the library and publishers’ associations reissued “The Freedom to Read” on its 70th anniversary. Scores of publishers, libraries, literary groups, civil-liberty organizations, and authors signed on to endorse its principles. And yet many of those institutional signatories—including the “Big Five” publishing conglomerates—often violate its propositions, perhaps not even aware that they’re doing so. Few of them, if any, could produce as unapologetic a defense of intellectual freedom as the one made at a time when inquisitors were destroying careers and lives. It’s worth asking why the American literary world in 2023 is less able to uphold the principles of “The Freedom to Read” than its authors in 1953.

The attack on intellectual freedom today is coming from several directions. First—and likely the main concern of the signatories—is an official campaign by governors, state legislatures, local governments, and school boards to weed out books and ideas they don’t like. Most of the targets are politically on the left; most present facts or express views about race, gender, and sexuality that the censors consider dangerous, divisive, obscene, or simply wrong. The effort began in Texas as early as 2020, before public hysteria and political opportunism spread the campaign to Florida and other states, and to every level of education, removing from library shelves and class reading lists several thousand books by writers such as Toni Morrison and Malala Yousafzai.

Given that states and school districts have a responsibility to set public-school curricula, not all of this can be called government censorship. But laws and policies to prevent students from encountering controversial, unpopular, even offensive writers and ideas amount to a powerfully repressive campaign of book banning, some of it probably unconstitutional. The campaign stems from an American tradition of small-minded panic at rapid change and unorthodox thinking. You can draw a line from Tennessee’s 1925 Scopes trial to Florida’s 2022 Stop WOKE Act. This threat to intellectual freedom is the easiest one for the progressive and enlightened people who predominate in the book world to oppose. No one at Penguin Random House or the National Book Foundation hesitates to stand up for Gender Queer and The Handmaid’s Tale.

“There is more than one way to burn a book,” Ray Bradbury once said. “And the world is full of people running about with lit matches.” The second threat to intellectual freedom comes from a different source—from inside the house. This threat is the subject of a new report that PEN America has just published, “Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm.” (Because I have written about censorship and language in the past, PEN asked me to read and respond to an earlier draft and gave me an advance copy of the final version.) The report is focused on the recent pattern of publishers and authors canceling their own books, sometimes after publication, under pressure organized online or by members, often younger ones, of their own staffs. PEN has tracked 31 cases of what might be called literary infanticide since 2016; half occurred in just the past two years. “None of these books were withdrawn based on any allegation of factual disinformation, nor glorification of violence, nor plagiarism,” the report notes. “Their content or author was simply deemed offensive.”

A few cases became big news. Hachette canceled Woody Allen’s autobiography after a staff walkout, and Blake Bailey’s biography of Philip Roth was withdrawn after publication by Norton, both following accusations of sexual misconduct by the authors (Allen and Bailey denied the accusations). Publishers have canceled books following an author’s public remarks—for example, those of the cartoonist Scott Adams, the British journalist Julie Burchill, and the right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

In one particularly wild case, an author named Natasha Tynes, on the verge of publishing her first novel, a crime thriller, saw a Black employee of the Washington, D.C., Metro system eating on a train (a violation of the system’s rules). She tweeted a picture of the woman at the transit authority with a complaint, and immediately found herself transformed into a viral racist. Within hours her distributor, Rare Bird Books, had dropped the novel, tweeting that Tynes “did something truly horrible today.” The publisher, California Coldblood, after trying to wash its hands of the book, eventually went ahead with publication “due to contractual obligations,” but the novel was as good as dead. “How can you expect authors to be these perfect creatures who never commit any faults?” Tynes lamented to PEN. Most publishers now include a boilerplate morals clause in book contracts that legitimizes these cancellations—a loophole that contradicts tenets of “The Freedom to Read” that those publishers endorsed.

Many of the cases discussed in the report have nothing to do with an author’s offensive statements or bad behavior. Instead, they involve sins of phrasing, characterization, plot, subject matter, or authorial identity. Last year Picador dropped a schoolteacher’s prizewinning memoir when it was attacked for racially insensitive portrayals. A scholarly study of Black feminist culture was withdrawn by Wipf and Stock after critics pointed out that its author was white. Simon & Schuster preemptively killed a biography for children of Hitler because of Hitler. Four young-adult and children’s novels (which seem particularly vulnerable to attack) were pulled for supposedly offensive stories and descriptions. One of them, A Place for Wolves—a novel about two gay American boys set in Kosovo during its war with Serbia—was canceled by its author, Kosoko Jackson, himself a prosecutor of literary offenses via Twitter, after people on social media accused him of violating his own edict about identity placing strict limits on appropriate subject matter: “Stories about the civil rights movement should be written by black people,” he’d tweeted. “Stories of suffrage should be written by women. Ergo, stories about boys during horrific and life changing times, like the AIDS EPIDEMIC, should be written by gay men. Why is this so hard to get?”

At the heart of these literary autos-da-fé is identity—or, in a phrase the report uses several times, “marginalized identities.” The trip wires that can blow up a writer’s work—charges of “harmful” language, failures of “representation,” “appropriation,” or generally “problematic” content—are all strung along lines of identity. When Jeanine Cummins, a white writer, received a lot of attention (and, reportedly, a seven-figure book deal) in 2020 for American Dirt, a novel about a Mexican mother and child on the run from a drug gang, she was denounced for taking an opportunity that should have gone to a Latina author who would, some critics said, have written a better book. Her publisher, Flatiron/Macmillan, didn’t pull the novel—it was selling far too many copies—but it canceled Cummins’s tour, citing safety concerns, and issued an abject statement of self-criticism. The ordeal of American Dirt showed publishers that crossing lines of identity can be dangerous, prompting one former editor, interviewed anonymously by PEN, to ask: “Are we saying that not anyone can write any story? Do you have to have a certain identity? There’s a lot of fear around that.”

A skeptic might ask why a few dozen awkward decisions and minor controversies out of tens of thousands of books published every year should matter. The answer is that these incidents reveal an atmosphere of conformity and fear that undermines any claim book publishing has to being more than just a business. Most of the canceled books described in the report are victims of a pervasive orthodoxy. At its most rigid, this orthodoxy puts the claims of identity above everything else—literary quality, authorial independence, the freedom to read. Its reach can be seen in how many of the canceled books were already making obvious, if clumsy, efforts to abide by the values of equity and inclusion; and in Natasha Tynes’s attempt to defend herself from online attacks by pleading that she herself is “a minority writer.”

Eventually, orthodoxy makes the suppression of books unnecessary because it leads to self-censorship by editors and writers. One canceled author interviewed by PEN said, “It has shut me down, creatively. There is always a censor, perched on my shoulder, telling me I cannot write about this or that topic.” What writer can honestly say it isn’t true of them? Almost none of the editors interviewed for the PEN report were willing to be quoted by name. What are they afraid of, if not the fate of their authors?

Below the waterline lie all the books that aren’t contracted, or even written, because of the examples that become public. In an op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, the best-selling author Richard North Patterson wrote that his latest novel—about an interracial relationship set against battles over voting rights and white racism—was rejected by “roughly 20” New York publishers. “The seemingly dominant sentiment was that only those personally subject to discrimination could be safely allowed to depict it through fictional characters,” Patterson wrote. (Trial was published in June by a conservative Christian firm in Tennessee and currently ranks around No. 37,000 among all books on Amazon. Several books in the PEN report, canceled by major publishers, were grabbed up by small houses with far less reach.)

PEN is a free-speech organization. Having already issued a lengthy report and numerous statements condemning book banning by state and local governments, it seems to have realized that it could not ignore a pattern of suppression closer to home, by organizations that publish PEN members and sponsor its fundraising galas.

In May, PEN landed in the middle of its own free-speech controversy when two Ukrainian soldier-writers announced that they would withdraw from the organization’s World Voices Festival if two Russian writers were also included on another panel. Rather than cancel the Ukrainians, who had already arrived in the United States, and send them back home to the war, PEN asked the Russian writers and their panel’s moderator, Masha Gessen, a PEN board member, to speak under a different banner, that of PEN America. The Russians and Gessen instead decided to cancel their own event, and Gessen resigned from the board in protest for what was seen as PEN caving in to the Ukrainians’ demands. (One of the Russian writers later said that she did not want to participate if the Ukrainians didn’t want her there.) A month later, PEN declared it “regrettable” and “wrongheaded” when the writer Elizabeth Gilbert suspended publication of her next novel because Ukrainian readers were upset that it was set in Soviet Russia. All of this merely shows that it’s easier to hold a principled position on free speech when you’re not the one facing unpleasant consequences.

PEN spent months researching and internally debating the new report, anticipating controversy. An early draft was hampered by reflexive hedges and tactical critiques, and a few of them remain in the published report: Accusations of literary harm “risk playing into the hands of book banners” on the right who use the same rhetoric; the publisher of American Dirt might have avoided trouble if it had marketed the novel with more sensitivity.

The report is an important, even courageous, document in our moment. PEN is offering guidance and backbone for a book trade that appears to have lost its nerve and forgotten its mission in the face of ceaseless outrage. Among its recommendations, the report urges that “publishing houses should rarely, if ever, withdraw books from circulation.” It calls for greater transparency and author involvement in any decisions about cancellations. Goodreads, the online review site, where mobs sometimes beat books to death before they’re even finished, let alone published and read, is asked to “encourage authentic reviews” and prevent “review-bombing.”

These technical fixes would greatly improve policies and procedures in the publishing industry, but they can’t solve the wider problem—a climate of intolerance and cowardice that stifles the book world. In the conclusion to its report, PEN calls for “a broader tonal shift in literary discourse,” which is necessary but probably beyond the power of any report. Essentially, PEN is saying to the remaining gatekeepers, “Remember your purpose,” and to the new gate-crashers, “Don’t use speech to limit speech.” For inspiration it reprints “The Freedom to Read” in full and urges workers in the book world to take it to heart. Ayad Akhtar, the president of PEN America, told me that he hopes publishers will include the 70-year-old manifesto along with DEI training for new hires. PEN wants its report to have an effect similar to that of the earlier document—to make publishing once more “a fighting profession.”

And yet something holds the report back from using the full-throated language of “The Freedom to Read.” I think the difficulty lies in an earlier report that PEN published last year.

In “Reading Between the Lines: Race, Equity, and Book Publishing,” PEN examined in detail how the American book business has always been and, despite recent improvements, remains a clubby world of the white, well connected, and well-off. It presented a damning picture, backed by data, of “the white lens through which writers, editors, and publishers curate America’s literature.” It called for publishers to hire and promote more staff of color, publish more books by writers of color, pay them higher advances, and sell their books more intelligently and vigorously.

The two reports are related, but the relation is fraught. The first showed the need for an intensified campaign of diversity, equity, and inclusion across the industry. The second argues for greater freedom to defy the literary strictures of diversity, equity, and inclusion. Is there a contradiction between the two?

PEN doesn’t think so. The new report states: “It is imperative that the literary field chart a course that advances diversity and equity without making these values a cudgel against specific books or writers deemed to fall short in these areas.” In the words of Suzanne Nossel, PEN’s chief executive officer, “You can dismantle the barriers to publication for some without erecting them anew for others.” But this might be wishful thinking, and not only because of practical limits on how many books can feasibly be published. In a different world, it would be entirely possible to expand opportunity without creating a censorious atmosphere. In our world, where DEI has hardened into an ideological litmus test, the effort to place social justice at the center of publishing almost inevitably leads to controversies over “representation” and “harm” that result in banned books. The first report presented DEI in publishing as an urgent moral cause. The second report takes issue with “employees’ increasing expectation that publishers assume moral positions in their curation of catalogs and author lists.” But those employees no doubt believe that they are carrying out the vision of the first report.

Social justice and intellectual freedom are not inherently opposed—often, each requires the other—but they are not the same thing, either. “The Freedom to Read” makes this clear: “It would conflict with the public interest for [publishers and librarians] to establish their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated.” That statement was written at a time when the cause of intellectual freedom was non- or even anti-ideological. Its authors advocated no other goal than the widest and highest-quality expression of views. But in PEN’s new report you can feel a struggle to reconcile the thinking of its earlier one, in which every calculation comes down to identity, with the discriminating judgment and openness to new and disturbing ideas that are essential to producing literature. As one editor told me, “There’s no equity in talent.”

Last year, a federal judge blocked a bid by Penguin Random House, the largest publisher in America, to buy Simon & Schuster, the third largest (a takeover would have practically made the conglomerate a sovereign country). This year, book sales are down across the industry, bringing waves of layoffs; last month, senior editors at Penguin Random House were given the option of a buyout under the shadow of termination, and some of the most illustrious gatekeepers in publishing headed for the door. These events bring me to the third and most serious attack on the written word.

This one is more insidious and pervasive and therefore harder to see clearly, let alone oppose, than book bans and cancellations. It’s the air every writer and reader breathes: the consolidation of publishing into a near-monopoly business; the correspondent shrinking of heterodoxy and risk taking; the fragile economic situation of employees; the withering away of bookstores and book reviews; the growing illiteracy of the public; the decline of English instruction in schools, regardless of political pressures; the data crunching that turns ideas into machine-made products and media into highly sensitive barometers of popularity (with artificial intelligence coming soon to replace the last traces of human originality). All of these trends amount to an assault on the free intellect perpetrated not by Moms for Liberty or YA Twitter, but by Mark Zuckerberg, Warner Bros. Discovery, and Amazon. In a sense, this third attack underlies the other two, because strong emotions and extreme language are programmed into the brains of book banners of every type by algorithms that profit a handful of technology and media giants.

Literature and journalism have never been remunerative fields. But compared with three decades ago, the chances of a serious, sustained career today are far slimmer. I can’t help thinking that these circumstances have something to do with the willingness of publishers to be frightened by a few hundred tweets. Perhaps years of consolidation and precarity have so weakened their conviction in the mission of book publishing that a little outrage online and in house is sufficient to erase it. If the editor’s function is to match the identity of writer and subject matter, then gather data to measure the success of the product, perhaps gatekeepers have finally outlived their usefulness.

This article previously misstated Suzanne Nossel's title at PEN America.