The American Library Association maintains a list of the Top 100 Banned Or Challenged Novels Of The 20th Century. Below is a list of those books that have been confirmed as being banned or challenged. The ones in bold are currently on the “Top 10 Challenged Books Of 2009”. The books in blue are books I have read so far.
What banned books have you read?
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- Native Son by Richard Wright
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
- The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
- Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
- Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
- Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
- A Separate Peace by John Knowles
- Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
- The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
- Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike
whyyy the hell is Twilight on one of those lists?
“Reasons: Sexually Explicit, Religious Viewpoint, Unsuited to Age Group ”
It seems like a lot of the banned or challenged items have to do with school libraries and parents not wanting their kids exposed to sexual content, swear words and things that make people think about religion.
Ok, I’ve read 25 of them, picking from both lists. I wouldn’t call the Twlight series sexually explicit though… bloody and violent, yes, but that’s usually ok with the book-banning crowd!
That is why I chose to focus on the above subset, confirmed banned classics. Not everything banned is interesting. In the other lists there seemed to be a lot of items challenged by parents in school libraries versus adults trying to keep books from other adults, like “The Tropic Of Cancer” which was banned in the US for about 30 years after it was published.
Wow, of mice and men. We read that in year 10 in school. That book is tame. Most of those books are available here. My dad has some of those.
Word. Many of these books aren’t dealing with super heavy and deviant sex scenes or penetrating cultural critiques. Some of them only have “bad words” in them and that was enough to get a parents group raised against them.