Kurt Vonnegut’s anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five has long faced challenges from parents and school boards. One of the most extreme cases occurred in November 1976, when the Drake school board in North Dakota voted unanimously to remove the book from school premises and burned 32 copies in the school furnace.

The controversy began with teacher Severy, whose progressive approach was reflected in his curriculum. He insisted that students should learn “how to think, not what to think,” and assigned contemporary fiction to his sophomore literature class, including Slaughterhouse-Five, a strange and unconventional novel published four years earlier.

Severy selected works that he believed could help students understand the problems confronting society. Those choices, however, conflicted with the conservative values of his new community. After a parent complained about profanity in Vonnegut’s novel, the school board acted. Students were instructed to surrender their copies, and school officials searched their lockers if they refused. The district ultimately burned 32 copies in the school furnace.

The incident attracted widespread press attention. Critics of the school board compared the action to Nazi book burnings. The district’s image was further complicated by the names of two officials: Superintendent Fuhrman, a name that evoked Adolf Hitler’s formal title, Führer, and board Chairman McCarthy, which recalled Joseph McCarthy, the disgraced anti-communist senator associated with efforts to purge and censor Americans.

When Vonnegut learned what had happened, he was angry and saddened. In a letter to the Drake school board, he wrote that his books were “not sexy” and did not argue “in favor of wildness of any kind.” Instead, he said, they “beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are.”

Vonnegut also told the board that he was a decorated World War II veteran who had fought against nations that hated books and burned them. He never received a response.

The North Dakota episode was the most severe attempt to censor Slaughterhouse-Five, but it was not the only one. As the novel entered high school and college curricula, parents and school boards argued that it was obscene and immoral. Its irreverent treatment of Christianity was called blasphemous, while its depiction of the U.S. military’s bombing of Dresden, Germany, was condemned as anti-American.

The novel was challenged again in January 2026, when the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of Vonnegut’s estate. The case followed Utah’s “sensitive materials law,” which gave school districts a mechanism to ban the book. The ACLU’s announcement is available here.

The Supreme Court and school-library censorship

Censorship disputes involving Slaughterhouse-Five are legally complicated because they have occurred primarily in high schools rather than colleges. Schools have responsibilities to determine which materials are appropriate for younger students, while students retain First Amendment rights to receive information and ideas.

One major case involving those issues reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1976, several members of the Island Trees School District on Long Island, New York, objected to 11 books in school libraries or assigned curricula after a conservative activist group publicized a list of “inappropriate” titles.

Seven of the books had been written by authors from minority ethnic or religious groups. They included Best Stories of Negro Writers, edited by Langston Hughes, and Alice Childress’ young adult novel A Hero Ain’t Nothing but a Sandwich.

The 11th title was Slaughterhouse-Five. At a press conference, school board member Frank Martin read passages aloud, focusing on a section in which Vonnegut’s character Kilgore Trout reimagines the story of Christ’s crucifixion. Trout argues that the revised story offers a better moral than the original Gospel account because it teaches people to be kind to everyone, rather than only to those who are well connected.

Martin said that even if the rest of the book told the best story in the world, he would not want it in the school library “with this stuff in it.”

Five high school students, led by 17-year-old Steven Pico, filed a lawsuit against the district. They argued that removing the books was unconstitutional and violated their First Amendment right to receive information. The case moved through the lower courts for years before reaching the Supreme Court in 1982.

Board of Education v. Pico produced seven separate opinions, and the justices did not definitively resolve all of the First Amendment questions involved. However, a 5-4 majority ruled for the students on the procedural issue, finding that their case should have received a full trial rather than being dismissed through summary judgment years earlier. The Supreme Court opinion is available here.

As the only Supreme Court case to date involving censorship in school libraries, Pico established general guidelines that continue to be used. The decision recognized that school districts have authority to supervise the education of students in their care and may remove materials that are, in Justice William Brennan’s words, “pervasively vulgar” or educationally unsuitable.

At the same time, school districts may not remove books because they object to the ideas expressed in them. Materials cannot be removed on narrowly partisan or political grounds, and any removal must comply with the “transcendent imperatives of the First Amendment.” This distinction between a district’s authority to curate educational materials and an impermissible effort to suppress ideas remains central to school-library censorship disputes.

Book bans in the United States today

Despite the Supreme Court’s ruling that books cannot be banned on partisan or political grounds, book challenges and bans have increased in the United States since 2020. PEN America, a literary and free-speech advocacy group, documented 2,532 instances of book bans in public schools during the 2021–22 school year. The figure rose to 3,362 in 2022–23 and nearly tripled to 10,046 in 2023–24. Although the numbers have since declined somewhat, they remain high, according to PEN America.

Many current censorship disputes involve the same issues raised against Slaughterhouse-Five more than 50 years ago: profanity, sexual content and violence. John Green’s Looking for Alaska has been the most frequently banned school book since 2021, largely because of a brief and awkward sexual encounter between two characters.

Fiction and memoirs dealing with gender identity and LGBTQ+ issues have also increasingly become targets. Right-wing parental-rights groups such as Moms for Liberty have helped drive some of those challenges. George M. Johnson’s memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue and Maia Kobabe’s autobiographical graphic novel Gender Queer are among the books most frequently banned in schools in recent years.

Books by Black authors also remain prominent in school-censorship disputes, as they were among the majority of titles challenged in the Pico case. Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, has appeared among the 10 most banned books since 2021. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved ranked No. 26. In 2006, however, Beloved was named the best single work of American fiction since 1980 in a poll of writers and literary critics.

Vonnegut defended First Amendment rights throughout his career. In 1976, he told students at Connecticut College that language and literature were “holy” to him. He believed schools should expose children to a wide range of opinions and information so they could become better citizens.

He was not optimistic about the prospects of arguments against book banning. Vonnegut once concluded that opposing censorship was like “attempting to explain America at its bravest and most optimistic to orangutans.”

Susan Farrell is a professor of English at the College of Charleston.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. The original article is available on The Conversation.