The Artist in the Amphitheatre

Abstract

The persecution of the creative writer is an old and time-honored tradition. Homer's epic poem The Odyssey was too much in favor of freedom for the tastes of the first century Roman Emperor Caligula, who attempted to suppress the work. Shakespeare has been under attack since the seventeenth century for his political and moral standpoints. Shelley and Byron caused public outrage because of their immorality. James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence were banned as obscene before they were hailed as literary giants. From 1933 to 1945 Germany enjoyed an orgy of anti-intellectualism with public burnings of books deemed to be un-German; these included works by Maxim Gorky, Upton Sinclair, Thomas Mann and Ernest Hemingway. It would be comforting to believe that our enlightened age protects the creative writer from such outrages. The body of international human rights law, which originated partly as a response to the excesses of Nazi Germany, is clearly on the side of the writer. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted almost unanimously by the United Nations in 1948, guarantees unequivocally the right to freedom of expression quoted above.