Slaughterhouse-Five: KURTVONNEGUT.

• Author: Boehm, Eric
• Position: Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade

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.

The American Library Association says Slaughterhouse-Five was one of the most frequently challenged books of the 20th century.

It is also one of the most important books of that century for its unflinching portrayal of the brutality of war, its unconventional and deliberately meta structure, and its fatalist perspective that nonetheless eschews nihilism. Inspired by Vonnegut's experience as a prisoner of war during the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Slaughterhouse-Five explores the absurdity of mass-scale murder. It asks, but leaves mostly unanswered, the questions about free will and responsibility that recur...