“Margo would never voluntarily live with such an angry, critical person. Never. But when it was your own child you had no choice.”

Eventually, by the late 1960s, she’d been rejected by every major publisher, from Harper & Row to Houghton Mifflin to Random House and Pantheon. But she had made progress, too. She sold a short story, called “The Flying Munchgins,” to a children’s magazine, about a little boy named Leonard who discovers a society of mysterious creatures—the

If Judy Blume was the Pied Piper, as the Christian Science Monitor wrote, then the Reagan administration and its champions were trying to barricade the gates to Hamelin. But they didn’t account for the fact that making a big show of locking her out only amplified her music.

Critical Race Theory,

The answer, I’ve come to believe, is sex. Sex is the lifeblood that flows through her pages. Not selling sex for titillation’s sake, the way her critics claimed, but sex as a fundamental part of being human. From Margaret Simon’s obsession with getting her period to Deenie Fenner’s curiosity about masturbation, the children in Blume’s stories all

Lois Lenski,

evanescent

In the fall of 1980, Karen Fleshman was a sixth grader at Mary Blair Elementary School when she heard the news that her favorite author had sparked concern among community members and was at risk of being purged from the school library. Fleshman, then an eleven-year-old “voracious reader” with glasses, braces, and a short feathered blond haircut,

(This is still a thing! Librarian Lauren Harrison said when elementary schoolers check Superfudge out of the library, she taps out a quick email to the parents warning them that “there’s a whole chapter that blows up Santa Claus.”)