ABFFE Selects The Ten-Cent Plague as Book of the Month

The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) has chosen David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America (FSG) as its Book of the Month for March. Hajdu is the author of the bestselling Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn and Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina.

Hajdu's latest title examines how fears about the impact of comic books on children crushed the comic book as a creative force in the 1950s.

"Hajdu's book is a sobering reminder of what happens to artistic freedom when society turns to censorship to protect its children," said ABFFE President Chris Finan in a statement. "His new book is an important contribution to the current debate over efforts to censor the Internet, video games, and other media that appeal to the young."

In an interview featured on the ABFFE website, www.abffe.org, Hadju explains that he chose "to write about the hysteria over comics in the early postwar years in part because it's a largely forgotten chapter of American cultural history. The story of how the lurid comics of that period challenged the aesthetic and social conventions of the time -- and, as a consequence, incited the ire of protectors of the status quo -- had not been fully told." (Read the complete interview.)

ABFFE launched its Book of the Month feature last July to help publicize important books about free speech. Last month's title was Dissent: Voices of Conscience by Colonel (Ret.) Ann Wright and Susan Dixon (Koa Books).