It is time to push back against spineless mental midgets without a moral compass who are banning books considered literary classics.
What It Means to Be a Writer: John Steinbeck’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech About Slicing Through Humanity’s Confusion. 1962.
When John Steinbeck (February 27, 1902–December 20, 1968) took the podium at the Swedish Academy to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature “for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humor and keen social perception.” Two decades after he contemplated the contradictions of human nature and our grounds for lucid hope, the sixty-year-old Steinbeck proceeded to deliver a stunning, sobering, yet resolutely optimistic acceptance speech, later included in Nobel Writers on Writing (public library) — the collection that gave us Bertrand Russell on the four desires driving all human behavior, Pearl S. Buck on the nature of creativity, and Gabriel García Márquez’s vision of a world in which “no one will be able to decide for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be possible.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was another American poet and educator whose works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He was the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy and was one of the fireside poets from New England. Born: February 27, 1807, Portland, ME Died: March 24, 1882, Cambridge, MA Longfellow was also a giant of American Literature who shared February 27th birthdays with Steinbeck.
Steinbeck's Nobel acceptance speech is one of the best. “A writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.” he expressed his concern stating: "We have usurped many of the powers we once ascribed to God; Fearful and unprepared, we have assumed lordship over the life or death of the whole world—of all living things. The danger and the glory and the choice rest finally in man. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SKEODtaQUU
Ladies and gentlemen, allow no one to dictate what you can and can not read, write because they will want to also control our inner thoughts and points of view. Nobel laureates in Literature - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dRzlSrwVRU