MY PARENTS LET ME READ WHATEVER I WANTED. THIS included weird and scary comic books, which in the 1950s were seen as subversive and disgusting and ruinous to children. In 1954, when I was reading Tales From the Crypt, Senator Estes Kefauver convened a special committee to investigate their dangers. Star witness Dr. Fredric Wertheim, a prominent psychiatrist, held comic books responsible for juvenile delinquency, a huge concern at the time. He declared that in comparison, when it came to brainwashing children, “Hitler was a beginner.” (Wertheim was a political progressive, by the way, as was Kefauver.)
Later, though, when I graduated to grown-up books, there was one author my father banned: Guy de Maupassant. I don’t know whether he was my dad’s idea of a too-sexy writer—French, you know—but…
