Why Are Fallen Angels Banned

The debate over the banning and challenging of books- a process in which a person or group attempts to limit or block access to certain books- has long rocked the country. These books are generally banned or challenged for including content parents find objectionable for the children to be influenced by. The most common causes for banning books in the United States include “children questioning authority, profanity,” and “characters speaking in non-standard English,” among other reasons (Winkler 49). The novel Fallen Angels by Walter Dean Myers has been banned and challenged throughout the country, including a ban in Arlington, Texas on charges that its profanity and violence were supposedly “too intense for Junior High readers” (“Censorship

While the violent scenes were often overwhelming, it was not gratuitous or glorified- it was brief and generally spread over the length of the novel for impact. More challenges, however, are more concerned with the profanity in the novel, which is undoubtedly strong, but is nothing teens would not hear in the halls of a school. Besides, Fallen Angels is more meaningful and “deeper than its necessarily coarse language and imagery,” and banning it for those reasons ignores the purpose of the book (Murray 167-172). Myers set out to “dispel the [notions] of war,” including common views that it is “romantic or simplistically heroic,” and the depictions of violence and analysis of how that violence negatively affects the mentality of those involved serves a strong dissuasion from supporting war (Whelan). Thus, this book should be available to high school readers, as it teaches bluntly an important aspect of social awareness and has the potential to make the future generation more wary of supporting wars. Either way, books are an important means of teaching children about their world and the issues it faces in a controlled environment and promote free expression and imagination, and thus banning books is robbing people of important resources for processing their