8 Beloved Books That Were Once Banned (and Why)

Lee’s novel about race and justice in the Depression-era South has been challenged almost since it was published in 1960, and it still lands on the American Library Association’s most-challenged lists. The usual objections: racial slurs, its frank treatment of rape, and language that some parents and school boards call offensive.

The irony is hard to miss. A book that asks readers to sit with the ugliness of prejudice keeps getting pulled from shelves for depicting that ugliness too plainly. Some schools have moved it to optional reading; others have removed it outright.

Twain’s 1884 novel got into trouble almost immediately, though the reasons have shifted over time. The library in Concord, Massachusetts, banned it in 1885 for being coarse and irreverent — one committee member called it “trash.” A century later the objections centered on its heavy use of a racial slur, which has kept it on challenged-book lists to this day.

It’s a book people argue about precisely because it’s a landmark. Twain wrote it as a searing look at slavery and hypocrisy, and readers have been wrestling with its language ever since.

Steinbeck’s 1939 novel about a family of “Okies” driven west by the Dust Bowl was banned and even burned in some California towns — including Kern County, where much of the story is set. Local officials and farm interests objected to its unflattering portrait of landowners and its depiction of the poor, along with what critics called vulgar language.

The book struck a nerve because it was too close to home. It won the Pulitzer Prize, helped earn Steinbeck the Nobel, and was being pulled from shelves at the same time it was becoming an American classic.

Joyce’s masterpiece has one of the most famous censorship stories in literature. In the United States it was effectively banned for more than a decade as obscene, largely over its sexual frankness. Copies were seized and burned by customs officials.

The ban ended in 1933, when Judge John Woolsey ruled in United States v. One Book Called Ulysses that the novel was a serious work of art, not pornography. That decision became a landmark for free expression, and the book has been in print in America ever since.

Orwell’s dystopia about total surveillance has been challenged from opposite ends of the political spectrum — which may be the most Orwellian detail of all. In the United States it has drawn objections for its sexual content and for being, depending on who you asked, either pro-communist or anti-government.

A book about the state controlling what people are allowed to think has, fittingly, spent decades being challenged by people who wanted to control what others could read. It remains a fixture on lists of frequently contested classics.

Few books have been challenged as often as Salinger’s 1951 novel. For decades it was a lightning rod in American schools, targeted for profanity, sexual references, and what critics saw as a disrespectful attitude toward adults and authority. It has appeared repeatedly on the American Library Association’s lists of most-challenged books.

What makes it stranger is that the same qualities that got it banned — Holden’s raw, unfiltered voice — are exactly why generations of teenagers have loved it. It has sold tens of millions of copies while spending years on someone’s blacklist.

Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war novel, built around the firebombing of Dresden, has been challenged for profanity, sexual content, and irreverence toward religion. In one notorious case, a school board in Drake, North Dakota, ordered copies burned in the school furnace in 1973.

The book also reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In Island Trees School District v. Pico (1982), a case sparked partly by its removal, the Court ruled that school boards can’t yank books from libraries simply because they dislike the ideas inside.

For years the Harry Potter series topped the American Library Association’s most-challenged list. The objections almost always came down to the same thing: the books’ wizardry and magic, which some religious groups and parents argued promoted witchcraft or the occult to children.

It’s a remarkable case of a phenomenon and a controversy growing side by side. As the series sold hundreds of millions of copies and got kids reading in numbers publishers dream about, it was simultaneously being pulled from school libraries across the country.