I came across this list of banned books at Simply Bluestocking (via Andi). There’s practically nothing I love more than a list of banned books, bwahahahaha!
I’ve highlighted the ones I’ve read and as an added bonus I italicized the ones I was required to read in school. Hurray for the Ann Arbor Public Schools for promoting intellectual freedom! ;)
- The Bible
- Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
- The Koran
- Arabian Nights
- Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
- Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
- Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
- Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
- Essays by Michel de Montaigne
- Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
- Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
- Animal Farm by George Orwell
- Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
- Candide by Voltaire
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Analects by Confucius
- Dubliners by James Joyce
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
- Red and the Black by Stendhal
- Capital by Karl Marx
- Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- Jungle by Upton Sinclair
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
- Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Diary by Samuel Pepys
- Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
- Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
- Color Purple by Alice Walker
- Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
- Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison
- Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
- Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
- Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
- Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
- The Talmud
- Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
- Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
- Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
- American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
- Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
- A Separate Peace by John Knowles
- Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
- Red Pony by John Steinbeck
- Popol Vuh
- Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
- Satyricon by Petronius
- James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
- Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
- Black Boy by Richard Wright
- Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
- Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
- Metaphysics by Aristotle
- Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
- Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
- Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
- Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
- Sanctuary by William Faulkner
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
- Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
- Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
- Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
- Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
- Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
- Émile by Jean Jacques Rousseau
- Nana by Émile Zola
- Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
- Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
- Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
- Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
- Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Banned Books Week isn’t until the end of September, but we might as well get started filling in the gaps right now, eh?
13 Comments
Great list. I haven’t read some you have, and have read some you haven’t – mainly Solzenitsyn, who I had to read for school and loved… One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch which changed my life.
To tell the truth I’m sort of embarrassed about the gaps in my reading. There are a bunch on the list that I ought to read not because they’re banned but just because they’re classics. Maybe I’ll start with A Day in the Life…
I am truly surprised at some of the books on the list! Did I always think that Little House on the Prairie was such an innocent book… ;-)
This reminds me of a policy in our school district that requires a note from mom or dad if we show a PG-13 video. If an English teacher wants to show Romeo & Juliet, a permission slip is needed.
I can’t believe some of the books on the list!
Myrthe, I’ve never understood the twisted minds of those who would ban books. Truly bizarre.
Fred, I asked my husband if we had a similar policy. He laughed and said, well, yes, in theory…
sadly, though I have only seen it on one banned book list, even a book teaching peaceful Buddhism is banned. I simply don’t get it.
It is an awful crime to commit the banning of a book, because it is denying people the possibility of continuing their education. It seems to me to be despicable that all of these books, probably never even read by the people seeking to ban them, are merely being banned out of fear. Animal Farm, the Book of Buddism (I do not no the exact title so with the lack of proper name I place this), the Qua’ran, The Communist Manifesto, Capital, and so many others. Partly the reason so many people fear Communism is because the media portrays it badly, and because the only Communism they hear of is China and North Korea, however if people could actually read some ideals in these banned books perhaps that fear would be asuaged. Continue spreading the knowledge and encouraging people to read these books, I know I want to start ticking off titles on my list at once.
This is unacceptable. Half of these books are apart of history, and are extremely important. Not to mention they are people’s favorite books. I think banning books is a very, extremely stupid idea and a waste of time!
I think that book banning is completely stupid! if they were banned why are we still reading them?? The few who understand how important books are to society are quite lucky and those who do not understand just how truly important they are, I feel quite alot of sympathy for. I myself love books and it hurts my heart to see people treat them like trash.
This is fantastic! I’ve had to read quite a few of those in school as well. It really suprises me to see that some of these are banned. I think I’ll start reading all of the things on this list that I haven’t read yet.
I understand why books by John Steinbeck are banned(weird,earlier today I had to write an essay weather or not Of Mice and Men should be banned) Personally, I don’t like any of John Steinbeck’s books. I had to read Of Mice and Men in school early this year,and I hated it. His books are rather offensive and the language he uses is terrible.He put the Lord’s name in vain.Yes,I agree banning books is bad,but some just have to be banned.I really don’t see why The Diary of Anne Frank has been banned,I mean,really,it’s a diary,Anne Frank can’t help what happened and what she wrote in her diary
Caitlyn, what gives you the right to decide what I should or should not read? You don’t like John Steinbeck? Fine. Don’t read John Steinbeck. But don’t you dare tell me that I can’t read John Steinbeck!
Stranger in a strange land is a good book… why is little house on the prarie on there??? Of mice and men is a really good book!!! =P nice list though.
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