California High School
Reshelves Sophie’s Choice
The novel Sophie’s Choice returned to the library shelves of the La Mirada (Calif.) High School January 10, four months after a parent wrote to complain that the book contained profanity and descriptions of sexuality. Several weeks earlier, the ACLU of Southern California had threatened a First Amendment lawsuit if the book was not reshelved promptly.
Despite the timing, Norwalk–La Mirada Unified School District Superintendent Ginger Shattuck said in the January 12 Los Angeles Times, “We are definitely not into censorship.” She explained that high-school principal Andrew Huynh was reviewing the school’s only copy of the book because of the complaint. “I just don’t buy that story,” reacted Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney for the ACLU of Southern California, adding, “I’m glad it could be resolved so quickly.”
Author William Styron won the National Book Award in 1979 for Sophie’s Choice, which recounts the horrors of a Holocaust survivor’s life in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp and her ill-fated postwar love affair. “It has a great deal of literary merit, and historical and cultural value,” La Mirada High School senior Kat Kosmala told the Times.
Posted January 21, 2002.
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