Maureen Corrigan

About the presenter:

For more than twenty years, Maureen Corrigan has been the book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air. She is also a columnist for the Washington Post as well as the Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University, where her courses are very popular and her lectures have been described as “brilliant,” “hilarious,” “passionate,” and “eloquent.” She is the author of Leave me Alone, I’m Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books and So We Read On: How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why it Endures, which was named one of the ten best books of 2014 by Library Journal. Corrigan knows a lot about books considered too dangerous to read and is the author and presenter of “Banned Books; Burned Books: Forbidden Literary Works”—a unique program on the subject of book bannings and burnings in America and Great Britain.

Her expertise ranges from the first book in pre-Colonial America (New English Canaan, 1637), whose author, Thomas Morton, angered the Puritans by celebrating the superiority of the Native Peoples, to the issues of our own day, including Critical Race Theory and books banned because of the actions or controversial opinions of their authors. She also explores the hard-fought legal trials that affirmed our freedom to read D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, as well as the stealthier acts of censorship practiced, for example, on fanfiction sites.

Maureen Corrigan will speak about Banned Books.

Sponsored by the Fred K. Darragh Jr. Foundation and Little Rock Public Radio.