Censorship or Not
by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Then Mr. Fitzgerald:
“The clean-book bill1 will be one of the most immoral measures ever adopted. It will throw American art back into the junk-heap where it rested comfortably between the Civil War and the World War. The really immoral books like Simon Called Peter and Mumbo Jumbo2 won’t be touched; they’ll attack Hergesheimer, Drieser, Anderson and Cabell, whom they detest because they can’t understand. George Moore,3 Hardy and Anatole France who are unintelligible to children and idiots will be supprest at once for debauching the morals of village clergymen.”
Notes
Statements by various people about the campaign against unclean books by Justice Ford of the Supreme Court of New York State.
1. Bill sponsored in the New York State legislature; it was intended to prohibit the sale of immoral books.
2. 1923 novel by Henry Clews, Jr. (1876-1937).
3. Anglo-Irish writer (1852-1933) who was best known for his novel Esther Waters (1894).
Published in The Literary Digest magazine (23 June 1923).
Not illustrated.