A notorious novel that’s been banned for adults and children in some parts of the world for years has been removed from the Cobb County School District.
Superintendent Chris Ragsdale said Thursday that the district’s continuing review of books deemed inappropriate for minors has culled “American Psycho,” written by Bret Easton Ellis and published in 1991.
At a Cobb Board of Education work session, Ragsdale did not elaborate on the reason, nor did he say which schools carried the book.
The Cobb school district has removed more than two dozen books over the last two school years for what Ragsdale has said contain sexually explicit, lewd, graphic or otherwise inappropriate content for minors.
Some citizens have objected to what they have called “bans,” and filed a civil rights complaint, saying many of the books have minority and LGBTQ themes.
After last November’s elections Ragsdale, asked his critics “to take a break.”
“American Psycho” has been the subject of bans and removals for much of its history, even before its publication.
Protagonist Patrick Bateman, a successful New York investment banker in the 1980s, also is a serial killer, and the novel is replete with graphic descriptions of murderous violence, sex and sadistic behavior.
Feminist groups organized boycotts due to the book’s depictions of violence against women, and Ellis received death threats.
“American Psycho” was made into a film in 2000 starring Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe and Reese Witherspoon.
At the book’s 25th anniversary, Ellis told Rolling Stone that he wanted his novel to be a scathing, satirical condemnation of the excesses of Wall Street and American finance at the time:
“I created this guy who becomes this emblem for yuppie despair in the Reagan Eighties—a very specific time and place—and yet he’s really infused with my own pain and what I was going through as a guy in his 20s, trying to fit into a society that he doesn’t necessarily want to fit into but doesn’t really know what the other options are.”
He said the book also “was really about the dandification of the American male. It was really about what is going on with men now, in terms of surface narcissism” and that themes revolving around male culture “seemed to me much more interesting than whether he is or is not a serial killer, because that really is a small section of the book.”
The American Library Association placed “American Psycho” on its most banned book list for the 1990s. In some parts of Australia, the book was banned altogether, or sold to adults only with wrapping paper on the cover.
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