"The Awakening" and American Libraries: An Update

[...]those fictions which appeared to overstep the boundaries of propriety rarely appeared in mass-market periodicals or were brought out by major, mainstream book publishers, except under special circumstances. [...]all of this information serves to challenge the argument put forward by both Toth and Koloski that in February 1900 the Herbert S. Stone publishing company of Chicago cancelled its contract with Chopin to publish A Vocation and a Voice because its proprietor feared that the challenging topics of these stories, as well as the controversy surrounding The Awakening in the press and among librarians, would greatly inhibit sales of the collection. [...]Simonds statement that certain patrons objected to The Awakening "when it was first published," then complained to the librarian, eventually leading to its removal, suggests that it took over three years for head librarian Kephart to succumb to the patrons' pressure to remove the book. According to the Evanston library's annual reports, Northwestern University "professors and students" frequently used the library's resources ( Twenty-Seventh Annual Report 16), and the "university set" made up a major portion of the library's patronage. [...]it is evident the patrons of the library in this suburban Illinois city were more divided in their opinion about The Awakening and other books on the list than it might at first appear.