Yes, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West Is Banned!

Gregory Maguire took one of American fiction’s most iconic villains and asked a simple question: what if she wasn’t? Wicked follows Elphaba, the green-skinned girl who grows up to become the Wicked Witch of the West, from her birth in Oz through her radical student days and her eventual collision with a corrupt government. Maguire’s Oz isn’t the technicolor dreamscape of the movie. It’s a police state run by a fraudulent Wizard, and Elphaba is its most dangerous dissident. The novel is dense, literary, and deeply political, exploring how societies create their monsters.

With 17 challenges across Florida, Texas, and Tennessee, Wicked has been pulled from school shelves for sexual content, violence, and occult themes. The sexual content objections center on Maguire’s frank treatment of Elphaba’s adult relationships. The occult complaints are almost funny considering the source material is literally about witches. What challengers miss is that Maguire wrote a 400-page meditation on the nature of evil, moral courage, and how propaganda turns heroes into villains. The musical made it palatable for Broadway. The book remains sharp enough to cut.