A few weeks back, two parents at a West Virginia high school decided they didn’t want their kids reading Pat Conroy, and got their local school board to prohibit students at Nitro High School from discussing The Prince of Tides and Beach Music in class because the novels were too violent; also, they contain profanity. Conroy stepped into the debate last week with a sharply worded letter to the Charleston Gazette. “In my travels around this country, I have discovered that America hates its teachers, and I could not tell you why,” he wrote. “I have yet to meet an English teacher who assigned a book to damage a kid.”
Still, he finds an upside: “Because you banned my books, every kid in that county will read them, every single one of them. Because book banners are invariably idiots, they don’t know how the world works—but writers and English teachers do.”