The Banned Book That Every Child Should Read

The Crazy Story Behind the Crusade to Outlaw Shel Silverstein’s ‘A Light in the Attic’

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America is having another of its periodic crazes around banned books. These aren’t new, of course. As early as the 1600s, the colonists banned John Eliot’s The Christian Commonwealth and William Pynchon’s The Meritorious Price of Our Redemption. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was notoriously banned in the Confederacy, and of course, James Joyce’s Ulysses, which turned 100 this week, was banned for more than a decade before the Supreme Court outlawed the practice in 1933.

This go-round, the targets have been Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel of the Holocaust, Maus, which was banned by a school district in Tennessee, promptly turning the book into a bestseller. And schools across Texas, who have been subject to pressure from parents to outlaw such works of fiction as Jack of Hearts (and Other Parts), The Handsome Girl and Her Beautiful Boy, All Boys Aren’t Blue, and Lawn Boy, which NBC News characterized as coming-of-age stories that prominently feature LGBTQ characters. All in, the American Library Association lists nearly 200 books that have been “frequently challenged,” including A Wrinkle in Time and His Dark Materials.

All of these acts are un-American, anti-education, and an almost laughable assault on freedom and common sense.

Still, if you squint, twist your head, and put on the hat of a hyper-sensitive parent, you can usually understand the perverse logic behind most of the books people choose to ban. Harry Potter is a sorcerer!

But all the squinting in the world can’t explain one of the most bizarre book-banning stories of all time. This book, I would suggest, is the one banned book that every child should read.

Shel Silverstein’s A Light in the Attic.

Wait, what? Somebody tried to ban a book of harmless and clever children’s poems? You betcha, Dumbledore.

The year was 1993. The Fruitland Park Elementary School in Lake County, Florida, banned Shel Silverstein’s book of 131 illustrated poems. The complaint: The work promoted disobedience, violence, suicide, Satan, and cannibalism. You read that right: Shel Silverstein wants your child to eat babies.

One of the poems critics found most offensive was “How Not to Dry the Dishes.”

If you have to dry the dishes

(Such an awful, boring chore)

If you have to dry the dishes

(‘Stead of going to the store)

If you have to dry the dishes

And you drop one on the floor —

Maybe they won’t let you

Dry the dishes anymore.

Beware, parents, read Shel Silverstein to your babies and they'll grow up to break your unused wedding china!

Another poem deemed dangerous: “Little Abigail and the Beautiful Pony.”

There was a girl named Abigail

Who was taking a drive

Through the country

With her parents

When she spied a beautiful sad-eyed

Grey and white pony.

And next to it was a sign

That said,

FOR SALE—CHEAP.

Abigail asks to buy the pony. Her parents decline. Abigail throws a tantrum. Sound familiar? Well, Silverstein is here with a warning.

And Abigail began to cry and said,

“If I don’t get that pony I’ll die.”

And her parents said, “You won’t die.

No child ever died yet from not getting a pony.”

And Abigail felt so bad

That when she got home she went to bed,

And she couldn’t eat,

And she couldn’t sleep,

And her heart was broken,

And she DID die—

All because of a pony

That her parents wouldn’t buy.

Take that parents! Deny your children what they want and THEY WILL DIE. (NB: If you have an Abigail in your home, read my piece on how to prevent your child from becoming a 'present monster.')

Still, the most offensive poem of all, apparently, was “Kidnapped." It begins:

This morning I got kidnapped

By three masked men.

They stopped me on the sidewalk,

And offered me some candy.

And when I wouldn't take it

They grabbed me by the collar,

And pinned my arms behind me,

And shoved me in the backseat

Of this big black limousine and

Tied my hands behind my back

With sharp and rusty wire.

It ends with the girl, shotgun pointed at her, tied up on a stool.

That's why I'm ………………………………………………………..

OK, maybe that poem is kind of scary—IF YOU DON'T LOOK AT THE SILLY ILLUSTRATION.

For his part, Silverstein was nonchalant about the brouhaha. In her biography, A Boy Named Shel, author Lisa Rogak quotes the poet as saying, “I think if you’re a creative person, you should just go about your business, do your work, and not care about how it’s received. Not that I don’t care about success, I do, but only because it lets me do what I want. I was always prepared for success, but that means that I have to be prepared for failure too.”

And sure enough, an advisory committee of parents and teachers eventually overturned the ban.

But ironically, in their zeal, the banners missed the most subversive Silverstein poem of all, “Sick,” from Where the Sidewalk Ends, in which little Peggy Ann McKay announces, “I cannot go to school today.”

She has the measles and the mumps, she says, a gash, a rash and purple bumps. Her mouth is wet, her throat is dry, she’s going blind in her right eye. Her leg is cut, her eye is blue, she has the instamatic flu. Her neck is stiff, her voice is weak, she hardly whispers when she speaks. She’s got these and twice as many ailments.

My elbow's bent, my spine ain't straight,

My temperature is one-o-eight.

My brain is shrunk, I cannot hear,

There is a hole inside my ear.

I have a hangnail, and my heart is—what?

What's that? What's that you say?

You say today is...Saturday?

G'bye, I'm going out to play!"

Look at this behavior: Lying! Faking! Using deception to skip school! Surely any reasonable parent would want this poem banned from their child’s impressionable eyes. Let's do it, America. Let's cancel Peggy Ann McKay, the girl who wants to cancel school.

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Or these books: Life Is in the Transitions, The Secrets of Happy Families, and Council of Dads.

Or, you can contact me directly.

You can find the poems quoted here, and many other Silverstein works, at the wonderful website of the Academy of American Poets, which welcomes your support.