Here is one example you definitely will not hear about during ALA’s Banned Books Week (starting September 24th) and you will never hear the author’s book read out loud in libraries:
“He is the most widely read English-language author in history, read by about 10,000 times more people than Chaucer himself, yet more than likely you won’t recognize his name: William Tyndale.
William Tyndale was a theologian and scholar born in North Nibley, England in 1494 and he died at Vilvoorden, Belgium in 1536. (The first date is only an approximation, no one is actually certain of the year he was born). Tyndale was strangled to death and burned at the stake for being the first person to publish the New Testament in Early Modern English. (Other scholars had translated the Bible into English before him, such as John Wycliffe, but Tyndale was the first to take advantage of Gutenberg’s new printing press and widely disseminate his translation.) At the time that Tyndale published his New Testament translation, it was a crime punishable by death, according to the Roman Catholic Church, and eventually he was hunted down and killed for fulfilling his goal of putting the Word of God into the hands of the common people...Tyndale endorsed the movement to reform the Roman Catholic Church and in his translation he included notes and comments that supported his Reformation views. Hence, when he finished his work it was immediately banned by the authorities…”
For more, read Foxe’s Book of Martyrs chapter on William Tyndale
Interesting that ALA says “intellectual freedom” is the basis for Banned Books Week and defines it as “…the freedom to access information and express ideas, even if the information and ideas might be considered unorthodox or unpopular…“
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