Author Salman Rushdie harshly criticized Puffin Books, the publisher of Roald Dahl, for making hundreds of changes to some of the works of his classic children books to make them more inclusive.
Taking to Twitter over the weekend, Rushdie said that "Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed."
"Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship," wrote Rushdie, whose novel "The Satanic Verses" led Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to declare a fatwa in 1989 urging all Muslims to kill him.
Critics of Dahl, who was a vocal antisemite until his death in 1990, have said that some of his works are bigoted, according to the Washington Examiner.
Others against the decision by Puffin Books also publicly addressed the issue.
Actor Brian Cox, who currently stars in HBO's "Succession" and has worked with the Royal Shakespeare Company, compared the revisions to McCarthyism.
"I really do believe [these books are] of their time and they should be left alone," Cox told The Times of London in a radio interview. "Roald Dahl was a great satirist, apart from anything else. It's disgraceful. It's this kind of form of McCarthyism, this woke culture, which is absolutely wanting to reinterpret everything and redesign and say, 'Oh, that didn't exist. Well, it did exist. We have to acknowledge our history."
Suzanne Nossel, the CEO of PEN America, a nonprofit that defends free expression in literature and other art, added her organization's grave concerns over the decision by Puffin Books, explaining in a tweet that "if we start down the path of trying to correct for perceived slights instead of allowing readers to receive and react to books as written, we risk distorting the work of great authors and clouding the essential lens that literature offers on society."
Another critic of the move, Laura Hackett, a lifelong Dahl fan who serves as deputy literary editor for London's Sunday Times newspaper, said she is going to take matters into her own hands.
"The editors at Puffin should be ashamed of the botched surgery they've carried out on some of the finest children's literature in Britain," Hackett wrote, the Washington Examiner reported. "As for me, I'll be carefully stowing away my old, original copies of Dahl's stories, so that one day my children can enjoy them in their full, nasty, colorful glory."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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