Author Dillard Joins Fray Over Censored Test

Amid a growing dispute over censorship, Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Annie Dillard on Thursday ridiculed state education officials for pulling a sample of her work from a statewide English test.

The State Board of Education last December deleted an excerpt from Dillard’s “An American Childhood” from the test being given this month to 10th-graders in public schools. Kathryn Dronenburg, a board member from El Cajon, said the passage was removed from the test because of “violence” in the description of a snowball fight.

“We Eastern kids threw snowballs,” Dillard said in a prepared statement issued on the eve of today’s board hearing to review the controversy over the deletion of Dillard’s story and two works by fellow Pulitzer Prize-winner Alice Walker.

“We even threw snowballs at moving cars. It wasn’t very smart of us, but it was great fun. It’s comical that the censoring conservatives in California find the notion of throwing snowballs corrupting,” she said in the statement released by her New York publicist.

Dillard’s “American Childhood” is the story of her girlhood and adolescence. She won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction for “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” a story about her life in the Roanoke Valley of Virginia.

The censorship flap stems from two separate incidents.

Last October, a Riverside newspaper printed a passage from Walker’s “Roselily” along with questions about it from last year’s test. State Department of Education officials said they deleted the excerpt because it had been the subject of protests from Christian fundamentalists and because the confidentiality of the test had been compromised.

In a separate action, the Board of Education last December approved the 1994 test, known as the California Learning Assessment System. But the board, on the recommendation of Dronenburg and board President Marion McDowell, vetoed the Dillard excerpt and another Walker story, entitled “Am I Blue?”