New exhibition highlights 100 years of defending freedom of speech 

Story at a glance

• PEN America, a nonprofit organization that works to promote freedom of speech and expression, turns 100 this year.  

• Since its creation, the organization has stood at the intersection of literature and human rights.  

• The new exhibit will be on display at the New York Historical Society starting July 22.

PEN America, one of the nation’s leading freedom of speech organizations, is turning 100 this year.  

In honor of the milestone anniversary, the nonprofit is launching a new exhibit at the New York Historical Society called PEN America at 100: A Century of Defending the Written Word.  

The exhibit, which officially opens to the public on July 22, will feature 60 objects chronologically tracing the expansion of human rights in the country and changing literary concerns, according to a statement.  

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During a time of rising book bans in the United States, the exhibit seems necessary to show the long history of censorship and camaraderie in the literary world.  

“PEN America at 100 opens a remarkable window into PEN America’s century-long effort to unite writers in defense of the freedoms that underwrite a flourishing society and culture,” said PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel.  

“PEN America has a long legacy of mobilizing literary luminaries to contest the forces of censorship, silencing, and the stifling of thought. This show helps bring to light the dilemmas and tensions that have marked that effort, including battles over whose voices are heard and who determines what is written and read. It is a story of productive struggle that sheds essential light on pressing present day battles against new threats to expressive rights.” 

Some pieces on exhibit include a photograph of American playwright Arthur Miller and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda outside of a Greenwich Village bookstore before a PEN International Congress and a 1957 note from “On the Road” author Jack Kerouac in which he explains that as someone “still living on a ‘beat’ basis” he had to defer paying his PEN America membership dues until he received his royalties.