Censoring Toni Morrison

For Toni Morrison, it’s time to speak out about staying silent. Burn This Book, a new collection on censorship edited by Morrison, includes essays by John Updike and Salman Rushdie. Morrison hosted an event with the National Coalition Against Censorship on Wednesday night, which brought out the oft-banned writer Judy Blume and comedienne Fran Lebowitz. And censorship is an issue, of course, that hits home for Morrison: just two weeks ago, her own Song of Solomon was banned from a high school class in Michigan for its profanity and sexual content. “We think about novels as merely entertaining,” she told the crowd. “But the good ones are bodies of knowledge.”