“…Miller’s book is rich with colorful anecdotes.”—Journal of
American History
“This is a superb example of breathtaking research, presented in a
style that will appeal to a broad audience…Rather than delivering a
detailed history of the Watch and Ward, he offers up a series of
vignettes that are historically accurate yet thoroughly
entertaining in their telling. This is social history at its
finest, and Miller should be applauded for resurrecting the history
of this influential group tha
內容簡介：
“I want to be intelligent, even if I do live in Boston.”—an
anonymous Bostonian, 1929
In this spectacular romp through the Puritan City, Neil Miller
relates the scintillating story of how a powerful band of Brahmin
moral crusaders helped make Boston the most straitlaced city in
America, forever linked with the infamous catchphrase “Banned in
Boston.”
Bankrolled by society’s upper crust, the New England Watch and Ward
Society acted as a quasi-vigilante police force and notorious
literary censor for over eighty years. Often going over the heads
of local authorities, it orchestrated the mass censorship of books
and plays, raided gambling dens and brothels, and utilized spies to
entrap prostitutes and their patrons.
Miller deftly traces the growth of the Watch and Ward, from its
formation in 1878 to its waning days in the 1950s. During its
heyday, the society and its imitators banished modern classics by
Hemingway, Faulkner, and Sinclair Lewis and went to war with
publishing and literary giants such as Alfred A. Knopf and The
Atlantic Monthly. To the chagrin of the Watch and Ward, some
writers rode the national wave of publicity that accompanied the
banning of their books. Upton Sinclair declared staunchly, “I would
rather be banned in Boston than read anywhere else because when you
are banned in Boston, you are read everywhere else.” Others faced
extinction or tried to barter their way onto bookshelves, like Walt
Whitman, who hesitantly removed lines from Leaves of Grass under
the watchful eye of the Watch and Ward. As the Great Depression
unfolded, the society shifted its focus from bookstores to
burlesque, successfully shuttering the Old Howard, the city’s
legendary theater that attracted patrons from T. S. Eliot to John
F. Kennedy.
Banned in Boston is a lively history and, despite Boston’s
“liberal” reputation today, a cautionary tale of the dangers caused
by moral crusaders of all stripes.
關於作者：
Neil Miller teaches journalism at Tufts University and is the
award-winning author of five nonfiction books. His most recent
work, Kartchner Caverns, won the 2009 Arizona Book Award.
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