Like Billy Pilgrim, the unstuck-in-time protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade, it can sometimes feel like we're all witnessing the same censorship fights again and again.
Since it was published in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five has been a repeated target for book burners—sometimes quite literally. In 1973, 32 copies of the book were thrown into the furnace at a high school in Drake, North Dakota, on orders from the local school board after parents complained about the book's sex and profanity. Sensibilities about those things have come a long way in the past few decades, but Vonnegut's novel is still a target. In 2011, a school board in Missouri barred the book from the curriculum and ordered it confined to a special section of the school's library.
