Musica Universalis · Philosophy · The Dream & The Fight
The Dream
& the Fight
Steinbeck · Angelou · Morrison · Atticus Finch
What was Steinbeck's dream, and how did he kill it? Why was Of Mice and Men banned, and by whom, and for what reason, and what does that tell us about America? What was Maya Angelou singing about? What was Toni Morrison fighting for? What is the injustice at the center of the American dream, and what was Atticus Finch's defense, of a man, of a principle, of a country that had not yet become what it promised to be?
Musica Universalis · Category: Philosophy · The Literature of Justice
Section I · John Steinbeck · 1902–1968
What was Steinbeck's dream,
and how did he kill it?
Steinbeck's dream was the oldest American dream and the most frequently betrayed: that the land belongs to the people who work it. That dignity is the birthright of the laboring body. That friendship, real, specific, inconvenient friendship between two people with nothing except each other, is the irreducible unit of human meaning. He spent his life writing about what happens to that dream when economics, power, and human weakness crush it. He spent his life being punished for it.
He was born in Salinas, California, in 1902. He worked as a laborer alongside Mexican and Filipino farmworkers in the fields of the Salinas Valley. He watched what the Great Depression did to those workers, the foreclosures, the migrations, the labor camps, the brutal mathematics of having nothing. He wrote it down. He wrote it down so truthfully and so beautifully that it became dangerous.
"Guys like us, that work on ranches, are the loneliest guys in the world. They got no family. They don't belong no place. They come to a ranch an' work up a stake and then they go inta town and blow their stake, and the first thing you know they're poundin' their tail on some other ranch. They ain't got nothing to look ahead to."
George Milton to Lennie Small · Of Mice and Men · 1937 · The dream stated before it is broken
Of Mice and Men (1937) is a novella about two migrant farm laborers, George, small and quick-minded, and Lennie, large and intellectually disabled and gentle-natured, who share a dream of owning a small piece of land. "Livin' off the fatta the lan'." A few rabbits. Some alfalfa. The ability to say: this is mine. I worked for this. No one can take it from me. This is the American dream in its smallest, most vulnerable, most human form. Not a mansion. Not power. Just a few acres and the right to stay.
Steinbeck kills the dream in the last pages of the book, not cruelly, not gratuitously, but with the precision of someone who has watched it die many times in real life. Lennie accidentally kills Curley's wife. George knows what will happen when the men find them. He chooses to kill Lennie himself, to protect him from a worse death at the hands of the mob. He shoots his best friend in the back of the head while telling him about the farm, the rabbits, the alfalfa, the life they were going to have. The dream is not deferred. It is administered as a mercy killing.
"The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley / An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain / For promis'd joy."
Robert Burns · "To a Mouse" · 1785 · The source of Steinbeck's title · The original statement of the problem
Why did Steinbeck kill the dream instead of saving it? Because that is what he witnessed. Because the novella is not a fable, it is a documentary. Because in 1937 America, migrant workers did not get their small farms. They got labor camps, starvation wages, and if they organized: beatings, murders, deportations. The Grapes of Wrath (1939), about the Joad family's forced migration from Oklahoma to California, was so accurate that it was called communist propaganda by the Associated Farmers of California, burned in Bakersfield, banned in several states, and investigated by the FBI. Steinbeck was put under surveillance. His hometown, Salinas, did not forgive him for decades.
Why Was Of Mice and Men Banned?
It is one of the most frequently challenged books in American schools, appearing on the American Library Association's top-10 most banned/challenged list in almost every decade since 1980. The specific charges leveled against it:
Language
Profanity and racial slurs
The book uses language that was common among 1930s California farmworkers, including the n-word. Steinbeck was documenting the speech of real people in real situations, including the casual racism that dehumanized the Black character Crooks and confined him to a separate bunkroom. Banning the book because it contains the word is banning the documentary evidence of what the word did and does. Crooks is not degraded by Steinbeck. He is degraded by the system Steinbeck is indicting.
Frequently Cited
Violence
The killing of Lennie
George shoots Lennie. This is cited as gratuitous violence. In context: it is one of the most morally complex acts of mercy in American literature. George does not kill from anger or cruelty, he kills to prevent a worse death. The scene asks: what do we owe each other? What does loyalty cost? What does love cost? This is the violence that needs to be taught.
Frequently Cited
Theology
"Taking the Lord's name in vain" and irreligion
Cited in multiple school districts across the American South, 1980s–2020s. The complaint: characters swear and do not reference God. The farmworkers in the novel have no access to the consolations of religion that are preached to them by those who hold power over their lives. Their language reflects their material conditions. This, too, is the point.
Frequently Cited
Politics
"Anti-business," "communist," "undermines respect for authority"
The original 1930s ban. The Associated Farmers of California, a front organization for large agricultural interests, organized book burnings and lobbying campaigns. Steinbeck documented real labor conditions and real exploitation. Calling the documentation "communist" was the strategy for dismissing it without engaging its content. The strategy has not changed. The targets have.
1930s–Present
Disability
"Offensive portrayal of intellectual disability"
A more recent critique, and the only one with any genuine complexity. Some disability advocates argue Lennie's characterization reduces a person with an intellectual disability to a narrative device. The counter-argument: Lennie is the most tender character in the book. He is portrayed as gentle, loving, full of desire for beauty, worthy of dignity and grief. His death is the most tragic moment in the novel precisely because the reader has been made to love him. Steinbeck gave Lennie humanity in a society that denied it to him.
More Recent
"The whole idea scares me, being needed and being loved. How do you manage to survive that?"
John Steinbeck · letter to his editor Pascal Covici · On the reception of Of Mice and Men
Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962. The Swedish Academy called him a writer who "with realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do sympathetic humour and keen social perception, has interpreted the whole breadth of the human experience." The New York Times, upon his winning the Nobel, ran a piece arguing he didn't deserve it, that his best work was behind him, that he was past his peak, that the award was a mistake. He read the piece. He knew they were right that his later work was weaker. He spent his last years believing he had failed. He died in 1968 with the FBI file, the burned books, the Nobel Prize, and the question of whether he had written anything as true as Of Mice and Men ever again. He had. He just didn't know it.
Section II · Maya Angelou · 1928–2014
What was Maya Angelou
singing about?
Maya Angelou sang about the fact of survival. Not survival as triumph, survival as a moral act, an act of refusal, an act of love directed at the self when no one else was offering it. She sang about what it means to be a Black woman in America: the specific, doubled invisibility of race and gender, the violence done to the body and the spirit, and the insistence, against all of it, on flourishing anyway.
She was born in 1928, sent to live with her grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas at three years old after her parents' marriage dissolved. At eight, she was raped by her mother's boyfriend, Freeman. She reported it. He was convicted. He was killed, apparently by her uncles, shortly after his release, within days of the verdict. Angelou, eight years old, concluded that her speaking had caused his death. She stopped speaking for almost five years. She believed her voice was dangerous. This is the origin of everything she later wrote.
What broke her silence: a woman named Bertha Flowers, an educated Black woman in Stamps who decided that Angelou's mind was worth cultivating. Who gave her books. Who read poetry aloud to her. Who told her that words only have power when they are spoken, that language needs the human voice. Angelou began to speak again. She began to write. She spent the next 70 years making up for the silence, and making the silence itself mean something.
Still I Rise · 1978
From "And Still I Rise" (poetry collection) · The most recited poem in the English language after Kipling's "If"
The poem addresses those who have tried to crush, humiliate, and erase her, who have written her history in the dirt, who have profited from her ancestors' labor, who have tried to break her with "bitterness" and "lies." It refuses to be broken. Each stanza escalates. The final stanzas become a declaration of Black womanhood rising from the specific history of slavery and degradation: "Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave / I am the dream and the hope of the slave." The poem is not about individual resilience. It is about collective survival. The "I" who rises carries every generation before her. The rising is not personal, it is historical.
Phenomenal Woman · 1978
From the same collection · The counter-statement to every definition of beauty that excluded her
Men and women who consider themselves more conventionally beautiful cannot understand why she is desired, admired, noticed. She explains: it is in the span of her hips, the curl of her lips, the fire in her eyes, the joy of her walk, the arch of her back. The poem catalogs physical traits associated with Black women's bodies that had been historically mocked, fetishized, or erased from the definition of "beautiful." Angelou reclaims each one. "I'm a woman / Phenomenally. / Phenomenal woman / That's me." The poem does not ask permission. It does not negotiate. It states a fact and dares the world to disagree.
"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you."
Maya Angelou · I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings · 1969 · The opening logic of the memoir
Why I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings Was Banned
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is Maya Angelou's autobiography of her childhood through age seventeen. It is one of the most challenged books in American schools. The reasons:
Rape
Depicts the sexual assault of a child
The book describes Angelou's rape at age eight in specific emotional terms. Schools that ban it argue this is inappropriate for young readers. The counter-argument, made by every teacher who has taught it: for students who have experienced sexual violence, and that is a significant percentage of any classroom, seeing their experience reflected, named, survived, and transcended is not inappropriate. It is the only literature that might save them. The book was not written for comfort. It was written for survival.
Primary Reason
Race
"Anti-white sentiment" and racial content
The book depicts the experience of growing up Black in the Jim Crow South. It depicts racism accurately. White characters who behave in racist ways are not portrayed sympathetically. This has been coded as "anti-white." A book depicting racial injustice from the perspective of someone who experienced it is not anti-white. It is anti-racism. The conflation of the two is itself a form of the injustice Angelou is describing.
Frequently Cited
Content
"Inappropriate sexual content," teen pregnancy, homosexuality
The final chapter depicts Angelou, at 16, intentionally having sex with a neighborhood boy because she wants to understand her own sexuality, and becoming pregnant. The pregnancy is described without shame. Some school districts in the American South and Midwest have cited this, and brief references to homosexuality, as grounds for removal. A 16-year-old's autonomous decision about her own body is, apparently, more disturbing to certain school boards than the rape she experienced at eight.
Frequently Cited
The title comes from Paul Laurence Dunbar's 1899 poem "Sympathy," which ends: "I know why the caged bird sings, ah me, / When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,, / When he beats his bars and he would be free; / It is not a carol of joy or glee, / But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core." The caged bird sings not from happiness but from desperate necessity. The song is the proof of life. Angelou titled her memoir after this image because she understood herself to be the bird. The memoir is the song. The song is the reason she survived.
Section III · Toni Morrison · 1931–2019
What was Toni Morrison
fighting for?
Toni Morrison was fighting for the right of Black life and Black interiority to exist at the center of literature, not as background, not as moral lesson for white readers, not as supporting cast in someone else's story of America. She was fighting for the radical act of writing about Black people as if white people were not in the room.
She worked as an editor at Random House for nearly twenty years, where she edited and championed Black writers including Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Gayl Jones, and Muhammad Ali. She understood the publishing industry from the inside: who got published, who got reviewed, who got taught in schools, whose lives were considered universal. She wrote her own novels as a corrective to that architecture of exclusion, not a polite corrective, but a structural one.
Beloved (1987) is based on the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who in 1856 escaped from a Kentucky plantation and crossed the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati, and who, when recaptured by slave hunters, attempted to kill her children rather than see them returned to slavery. She succeeded in killing one daughter. Morrison took this documented historical event and made it a ghost story, a love story, a psychological excavation of what slavery actually does to the human self. The ghost of the murdered daughter, named Beloved, comes back as a young woman and slowly consumes the family. She is not metaphor. She is memory itself, made flesh, insisting on being witnessed.
"Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined."
Toni Morrison · Beloved · 1987
"If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else."
Toni Morrison · Interview with O Magazine · 2003
Morrison was fighting against the dominant narrative of American history that treated slavery as: distant, past, over, unfortunate but resolved, something that happened to people who are gone. Beloved insists that it is not over. That the trauma is not resolved. That the people who lived through it were fully human, more than fully human, because they had to be, and that the suppression of their stories is the continuation of the original crime. "This is not a story to pass on," Morrison writes at the end of Beloved, three times. But the triple repetition does not mean forget it. In African American vernacular, "pass on" can mean both "to skip over" and "to die." The sentence means: this is a story you cannot avoid, and you will not survive it unchanged.
She was also fighting the literary establishment's assumptions about what "universal" means. In a famous 1992 essay, "Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination," she argued that American literature, Poe, Hemingway, Cather, Twain, was saturated with the Black presence it claimed to ignore. The "Africanist persona" in American fiction, the figure of darkness, wildness, danger, freedom, was always there, shaping the white protagonist's journey, defined by and defining the white center. She named it. Naming it was the fight.
Beloved
Graphic violence, sexual content, disturbing imagery, banned from AP Literature curricula
In 2021, a group of parents in Spotsylvania County, Virginia demanded that the book be removed from school libraries, and that staff who resisted removal be fired. One parent called for books to be burned. Beloved depicts: infanticide, sexual violence, the psychological devastation of slavery. These things happened. They happened to real people. The demand to remove the book from schools is the demand to not know what happened. That is the continuation of the crime Morrison was writing against.
Most Recently 2021
The Bluest Eye
Morrison's first novel, #1 most banned book in the US, 2013
About an 11-year-old Black girl named Pecola Breedlove who prays for blue eyes, believing that whiteness is the standard of beauty and worth, and who is raped by her father. The ALA listed it as the most challenged book in America in 2013. The cited reasons: sexual content, content "challenging" to students, depicting rape. Morrison's response: "The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being." She wrote the book to make the distraction impossible to maintain. The banning is the proof that it worked.
#1 Most Banned 2013
"If you can only be tall because someone else is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is white people have a very, very serious problem."
Toni Morrison · Interview with Charlie Rose · 1993
Section IV · Harper Lee · To Kill a Mockingbird · 1960
What was Atticus Finch's
defense?
To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is narrated by Scout Finch, a young girl in Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930s. Her father, Atticus Finch, is a lawyer appointed to defend Tom Robinson, a Black man falsely accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. Atticus knows Tom is innocent. He knows that proving innocence will not save Tom in 1930s Alabama. He makes the defense anyway. The question the novel asks is: why? What is the moral logic of defending someone you know you cannot save?
Atticus
"To begin with, this case should never have come to trial. This case is as simple as black and white. The state has not produced one iota of medical evidence that the crime Tom Robinson is charged with ever took place."
Atticus
"But there is one way in this country in which all men are created equal, there is one human institution that makes a pauper the equal of a Rockefeller, the stupid man the equal of an Einstein, and the ignorant man the equal of any college president. That institution, gentlemen, is a court."
Atticus
"I'm no idealist to believe firmly in the integrity of our courts and the jury system, that is no ideal to me, it is a living, working reality. Gentlemen, a court is no better than each man of you sitting before me on this jury. A court is only as sound as its jurors, and a juror is only as sound as the man."
Atticus
"In the name of God, do your duty. In the name of God, believe Tom Robinson."
Scout (narrator)
The jury convicts Tom Robinson. He is sentenced to death. He is later shot seventeen times attempting to escape prison. Tom Robinson's arm was crippled, he could not have committed the crime as described. Everyone in the courtroom who thought about it knew this. The jury deliberated for several hours, which in 1930s Alabama was considered an unusually long time, a sign that Atticus had reached something in them. Not enough. Not nearly enough.
Atticus's defense is not a defense of Tom Robinson alone. It is a defense of the principle that a court of law should operate on evidence, not on the social arrangements of power. He is defending the idea that truth and procedure matter even when they will not prevail. He is defending his children, who are watching, against the lesson that the world is simply arranged for the powerful and nothing can be done. He is defending whatever is left of himself to believe in.
But the novel has a complication that became more visible over time: Atticus Finch is a white savior. The story of Tom Robinson's destruction is told through the eyes of a white child, mediated by a white father's moral development, and resolved (or not resolved) in terms of what it means for the white family's future. Tom Robinson himself is a thin figure, we know he is innocent, we know he is good, and then he is dead. His wife, Helen, his children, they appear briefly and are not heard from again. The most important Black character in the novel is defined almost entirely by what is done to him.
"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
Atticus Finch · To Kill a Mockingbird · Chapter 3 · Harper Lee · 1960
Harper Lee published Go Set a Watchman in 2015, a novel written before Mockingbird, suppressed for decades, published when Lee was elderly and, some believed, not fully able to consent to its publication. In Watchman, an adult Scout returns to Maycomb and discovers that her father has attended a Ku Klux Klan meeting, opposes integration, and holds the view that Black Americans are not yet ready for full equality. The Atticus of Watchman is not a hero. He is a Southern moderate of the 1950s, which means he thought the pace of change was more important than the content of justice. Many readers were devastated. Others argued that this was always the more honest portrait: a good man by the standards of his time and place, which were not good enough.
1977–Now
To Kill a Mockingbird, among the most banned books in American schools
Reasons: racial slurs (it contains the n-word, used by racists, which is the point), "subject matter inappropriate for middle school," "promotes white saviorism" (the more sophisticated recent critique). In 2017, the Biloxi, Mississippi school district removed it from 8th grade reading lists, stating that the language "makes people uncomfortable." A book about racial injustice makes people uncomfortable. That is not a flaw. That is the function.
Continuously Challenged
Section V · The Pattern
The fight for a dream
and the injustices in the dream
What connects Steinbeck, Angelou, Morrison, and Lee, what connects Of Mice and Men, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Beloved, and To Kill a Mockingbird, is that they are all trying to tell the truth about what the American dream costs, and who pays the cost. They were all banned for telling that truth.
Steinbeck's Claim
The dream belongs to those who work the land
But economic systems are designed to ensure that working the land does not translate into owning it. The dream is extended just far enough to keep people working toward it. It is withdrawn the moment they arrive. George and Lennie's farm is not available to people like George and Lennie. It never was. The cruelty is not accidental.
Angelou's Claim
The dream is not available to people who look like me
The American dream is explicitly structured around whiteness and maleness. Angelou's survival and flourishing is an act of outright defiance against the dream's exclusions, not an illustration of its operation. "Still I Rise" is not an endorsement of American opportunity. It is a statement of survival in spite of American systems designed to prevent it.
Morrison's Claim
The dream was built on a crime that has not been acknowledged
The wealth, the land, the institutions of American democracy were built on slavery. Beloved insists that the crime cannot be gotten over, gone around, or passed on, it must be witnessed. The ghost will not leave until the family stops trying not to know what it knows. This is the political argument Morrison makes through the supernatural: you cannot build on what you refuse to acknowledge.
Harper Lee's Claim
The institutions meant to protect the dream are failing it
Atticus believes in the courts. The courts convict Tom Robinson. The system that is supposed to correct for prejudice is made of the same people whose prejudice it is supposed to correct. The idealist's dilemma: do you keep defending the institution because it is the only one you have, or do you admit that the institution is the problem? Go Set a Watchman suggests that Lee thought Atticus had made the wrong choice, and that she had let readers off the hook in Mockingbird by not saying so.
"The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame."
Oscar Wilde · The Picture of Dorian Gray · 1890 · The mechanism of every literary banning
The Pythagorean Comma of the ⚐ CF Q: The American Dream promises a closed circle: work hard, succeed. The data shows the circle doesn't close for most people. Is the dream the equal-tempered version of social mobility, closing on paper but arriving nowhere? American Dream
The American dream promises: work hard, play fair, and the system will reward you. The Pythagorean comma of the dream is the gap between what it promises and what it delivers, the 1.36% that the system skims off the top of every transaction, every generation, for those who are not white, not male, not propertied. The comma accumulates. After enough cycles, George and Lennie have no farm. Pecola Breedlove prays for blue eyes. Tom Robinson is shot seventeen times. Sethe kills her daughter to keep her free. The literature that gets banned is the literature that names the comma. The books that make people uncomfortable are the books that are doing their job. The cage, the mice, the beloved ghost, the mockingbird: all of them are trying to tell you where the gap is. You get to decide whether you want to know.
Primary texts: John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men (1937); The Grapes of Wrath (1939) · Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969); And Still I Rise (1978) · Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987); The Bluest Eye (1970); Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992) · Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960); Go Set a Watchman (2015) · Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Sympathy" (1899) · Robert Burns, "To a Mouse" (1785) · Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) ·
On banning: American Library Association, Frequently Challenged Books reports (1990–2024) · Judith Krug, "Books Challenged or Banned" annual reports · James LaRue, The New Inquisition: Understanding and Responding to Challenges in Your Library (2007) · Joan Delfattore, What Johnny Shouldn't Read: Textbook Censorship in America (1992) ·
On Steinbeck: Jackson Benson, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer (1984) · Jay Parini, John Steinbeck: A Biography (1995) · FBI file: FOIA release, John Steinbeck surveillance records, 1942–1968 ·
On Angelou: Maya Angelou, Letter to My Daughter (2008); Mom & Me & Mom (2013) · Lyman Hagen, Heart of a Woman, Mind of a Writer (1997) ·
On Morrison: Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019) · Hilton Als, "Ghosts in the House," The New Yorker (2003) · Claudia Brodsky Lacour, "Beloved and the New Critics" (1993) ·
On Lee: Charles J. Shields, Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (2006) · The controversy over Go Set a Watchman: Michiko Kakutani, New York Times review (July 2015)