Sublime

Unlike Blume, Klein mostly found the whole thing amusing. In the summer of 1982, Publishers Weekly came out with a list of the most banned writers in America, which included Solzhenitsyn, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, and D. H. Lawrence. “Judy Blume and I were the only women writers on the list, as well as the only authors of books for childr

Jackson told School Library Journal in 2001. “It was the voice, the absence of adult regret, instruction or nostalgia,” Jackson said, that always convinced him that Blume’s books were a little bit magical. “She turns them over to the kids, to the characters,” he continued.

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, w

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 Mun