The last five years have not been good for anyone that believes literature should be free from censorship. The most extreme recent example of a novelist punished for writing a book came last year when Salman Rushdie was attacked in the upstate New York town of Chautauqua by a young man. Rushdie was badly injured but survived the attack.
And he has been surviving ever since the death sentence (or fatwa) was imposed on his life by the gruesome theocracy of Iran in February 1989 for writing his allegedly blasphemous novel: The Satanic Verses.
