Stifled Laughter

August 8, 1994
In 1986 school officials in Lake City, a town in north Florida, banned a state-approved high school textbook because it included Aristophanes's sexually frank Lysistrata and Chaucer's bawdy ``The Miller's Tale.'' Johnson, a playwright and graudate student, decided to fight back, and her lively story captures the claustrophobic know-nothing spirit of the book burners. Though the students themselves were critical of the banning and Lake City was ridiculed by editorialists, the directive was upheld by a federal judge in 1988 and by an appeals court the next year. Johnson and her allies, advised by lawyers fearful of the Supreme Court's new conservative majority, did not further pursue the case. However, she joined a successful fight against an attempt to ban Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men in another rural Florida town. Johnson's description of the toll her crusade took on her marriage might have been trimmed, but would-be activists will learn from her story that fights are stressful.

September 1, 1994
During 1986 in the small town of Lake City, Florida, textbooks used in the high school humanities class were confiscated and locked up by order of the school board. Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale" and Aristophanes' Lysistrata, included in the textbook, were found to be offensive due to "sexual explicitness." Johnson, then a Ph.D. student in English literature at Florida State University and a resident of Lake City, vigorously opposed the banning of these works as well as the moral dictatorship of the administrators. She writes of the legal as well as personal trials she endured in her struggle to preserve the right of free speech in her community. Her court battles were unsuccessful, yet the experience of her five-year ordeal is edifying. Recommended for general collections.-Eloise R. Hitchcock, Tennessee Techno- logical Univ. Lib., Cookeville