Honoring Her Legacy, PEN America Will Co-Present the Oct. 11 Eleanor Roosevelt Awards for Bravery in Literature—Celebrating 11 Author-Champions of Intellectual Freedom and the Fight Against Censorship
Through her life, Eleanor Roosevelt championed causes from human rights and social justice to women’s and racial equality. Perhaps less well known among the rights she defended were the freedoms to read, write and speak. She rejected censorship, believing that democracy depends on people having the right and obligation to learn and judge for themselves which ideas make sense to them. As first lady she uniquely stepped up to persuade her husband to lift a postal ban on a bestselling book.
Mrs. Roosevelt was an icon— an activist, humanitarian, our longest serving first lady, and the force behind the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At her core, she loved books, reading, and ideas. Her circle included many writers and she herself wrote 28 books and a popular syndicated newspaper column My Day that ran six days a week for 27 years.
Among her writer friends was Lillian Smith, a white Southern author who spent decades schooling fellow Southerners on the evils of racial segregation and prejudice at a time when such views were unpopular. Smith’s writings and speeches drew the attention of Dr. Martin Luther King, who praised her in his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” as a Southerner who “grasped the meaning of this social revolution and committed themselves to it.”
Smith’s bestselling 1944 novel Strange Fruit—an indictment of racism—became the target of censorship because it included an interracial love affair, then taboo, and one profanity. Boston police labelled the book obscene and banned its sales. As the book climbed to the top of The New York Times bestseller list, Detroit also banned it. The U.S. Postal Service soon blocked the book from being shipped through the mail until Smith’s publisher persuaded Mrs. Roosevelt to urge her husband to lift the ban, which he did.
Mrs. Roosevelt’s legacy against censorship will be highlighted for a second year this fall through the Eleanor Roosevelt Awards for Bravery in Literature, celebrating 11 authors who are champions of intellectual freedom and the fight against censorship. PEN America will join the Eleanor Roosevelt Center in co-presenting the awards Oct. 11 at the Bardavon 1869 Opera House in Poughkeepsie in Dutchess County, N.Y. The ceremony will be the centerpiece of PEN America’s events during Banned Books Week, with its President Jennifer Finney Boylan giving the keynote speech. Among the honorees will be Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist and poet whose most celebrated book, The Handmaid’s Tale, has been widely banned in the United States.
The Roosevelt Center’s recognition of authors whose books have been banned comes amid sweeping censorship in public schools. Since 2021, PEN America has documented nearly 16,000 book bans in U.S. public schools, a level of censorship unseen since the McCarthy era Red Scare of the 1950s (which Mrs. Roosevelt also vehemently criticized).
The Eleanor Roosevelt Center established the award in 2024, according to Samantha Shapley, the center’s managing director.
Shapley said: “Eleanor Roosevelt believed that literacy, libraries, and access to diverse voices are the heart of democracy, and she championed intellectual freedom as a fundamental human right. Today, as book bans threaten those values, the Eleanor Roosevelt Center carries her voice forward by honoring the authors, educators, and advocates who bravely defend the right to read. Each year, we bestow the Bravery in Literature Awards to celebrate remarkable individuals whose works have faced censorship and those who stand on the front lines to protect the freedom to read.”
In her “My Day” newspaper column and her speeches she addressed her belief that censorship is both un-American and un-democratic. She not only believed access to information was an essential element for a thriving democracy but also that all people had the freedom to hold opinions without interference.
In 1949 she wrote a column on the banning of The Nation magazine in New York City public schools, a decision that was ultimately reversed. “I do not feel that banning books, magazines, newspapers, special writers or radio commentators actually trains people in the democratic processes. I feel that if you live in a democracy you have to be able, because of the freedom which is part of the rights of every individual in a democracy, to make your own judgments as an individual. Since all people must have equal freedom we must be trained to decide after hearing the facts where we ourselves stand. Therefore, you need to hear both sides of every question. If you surrender your freedom to an individual or a group in the hope that any decision taken will be for your benefit, then you no longer live in a democratic way.”
A decade later, she wrote in her column: “I don’t think any book should be banned by a censor. We should try to educate the public so that it will not buy books that have no literary value. I think an educated public is quite capable of doing its own censoring.”
This won’t be the first time PEN America’s mission to defend free expression, literary culture and writers worldwide will intersect with the ideas and values that inspired Mrs. Roosevelt and motivated her thinking and actions worldwide.
In 1939, she invited Dorothy Thompson (then president of the American Center of PEN) and Jules Romains (International President of PEN), to visit the White House and meet with President Roosevelt. The meeting followed a PEN World Congress of Writers that met at the World’s Fair in New York City to underscore the importance of support for free expression and dissent just days before the outbreak of World War II. Thompson, a prominent journalist, five years earlier was expelled from Nazi Germany because of her writing. She was the first American correspondent to be ejected by the Nazi regime.
In his opening address at the Congress, PEN International President Romain expressed the urgency of PEN’s concerns on the eve of war, stating famously, “we are no longer able to act as if tyranny did not exist…Therefore, we must act that it shall not exist”.
The White House meeting between the PEN delegation and the Roosevelts underscored the value of literary and intellectual engagement in the political sphere and highlighted the importance of defending freedom of expression amid rising political instability.
“As an advocate for the freedom to read, Eleanor Roosevelt’s legacy reminds us that book banning has no place in our American democracy,” said Kasey Meehan, PEN America’s Freedom to Read program director. “Just like the Pack Horse Librarians of the Great Depression, may we all carry Mrs. Roosevelt’s vision forward to ensure people everywhere have access to library books. We look forward to celebrating the esteemed awardees at the Eleanor Roosevelt Bravery in Literature Awards Oct. 11.”
