Happy New Year everyone! I hope you’re all charged up for 2024, because I decided to kick this year off with a bang. Today’s topic is separating authors from their art, and I figured it’s a good one, because this has come up a few times recently, and I’m curious to see what you guys think. I’m also excited because there’s some people who have started to pop in and comment pretty regularly, so I think there’s going to be some great feedback on this topic.

There are numerous cases of authors behaving badly in recent years. The author who first comes to mind for me is JK Rowling. The Harry Potter series was a much loved series for generations of children, and offered a safe space for many LGBTQ children. However, in recent years, her behavior has done harm to that same community, and her books and movies have contained harmful imagery and representation of minority groups. She’s not the only one, just the one that I think most people are aware of.

There’s also cases of authors from the past who were just horrible people. One who pops to mind immediately is Roald Dahl. While his children’s books have been beloved for decades, he was a raging antisemite, blaming the Jews for their own genocide, and outright acknowledging his own antisemitism even in 1990. Those statements and others were harmful enough that his family has made a formal apology for his words. 

So are we capable of separating authors from their art? Do we judge these two different groups of authors differently?

For me personally, it depends on the author’s behavior, the type of apology they make, and their actions going forward for present day authors. In addition, and most importantly, it depends on the reaction of the group being harmed to the apology. If I’m not a member of the group being harmed, it isn’t up to me to accept the apology. JKR is on my no read/no review/no promote list because not only has her behavior been harmful and there has been no apology, she has doubled and tripled down on her behavior. 

Perhaps a better example is Jay Kristoff, a fantasy author who writes YA and adult books. His books are problematic in a variety of ways, including appropriating Māori culture, containing antisemitic tropes and using the name for God that Jewish people use in prayer for a character who leads a cabal of blood drinkers, ableism towards people with albinism, misrepresentation and fetishization towards Asian culture and characters, specifically Japanese characters, poor handling of a scene involving sexual assault in one of his books, and racist behavior towards a Black reader on Twitter (back when it was still called Twitter). When interviewed about his research on Japanese culture for one of his books, he gave an outright racist answer. But when the pandemic led to high levels of anti-Asian hate and people started to call him out on his hateful behaviors and how it carries over into his writing, he finally caved an issued an “apology,” which I linked here. I put the word in quotes, because he managed to write an entire one-page apology without actually apologizing once, and not taking responsibility at all. Instead, he just decides to change the name of a character in his book and throw some money to charities for Asian and Jewish people, and goes on his merry little way. That’s another character who hasn’t changed any behavior at all, in my opinion.

I was always taught that an apology is just words unless you follow it up with meaningful action. If I’ve taken something from you, I can’t just say, “oops, sorry,” and expect to be forgiven unless I also return what I took. So if someone harms a community, or a bunch of communities, I want to see them take the time to learn about the communities they’ve harmed. If it’s a writer, this is especially important, first of all, because they have the potential to reach a wide range of people, and secondly, because if they’re writing about a group, they should know about how they’ve specifically harmed that group so they could avoid doing it again in the future. If a present day author were to issue an apology and commit to learning about a community and working with them to create positive change? That’s something I can get behind. We all make mistakes. It’s how we deal with them that makes the difference.

Authors from the past are a whole different story. Some books just don’t age well, and include elements that were perfectly acceptable in society that just don’t fly today. Agatha Christie was a racist and an antisemite, but her works are still widely read, and have been edited to remove racist and potentially harmful language. However, that can’t be done for some books—The Witches by Roald Dahl, for example. That book has antisemitic tropes threaded throughout the plot that can’t simply be edited out without removing the majority of the story; the witches are based on caricatures of Jews and the long-lasting blood libel that has been used as a justification for antisemitism for centuries. But something like To Kill a Mockingbird or The Adventures of Huck Finn are books with problematic content that doesn’t come across quite the same, despite including depictions of slavery, racism, and use of a racial slur. Maybe because they aren’t used maliciously (I can’t speak for the Harper Lee book, which I never read), but in Mark Twain’s work, they felt more like speaking about history in accurate terms, rather than with harmful intent, although calling Jim by the n-word before his name always felt uncomfortable to me, regardless. 

Maybe I can’t make up my mind, or maybe I just picked some bad examples, but I’m open to hearing opinions.

What do you guys think? Can you separate authors from their art? Do you treat them differently if they’re contemporary or historical authors?