Happy Banned Books Week, everyone! As I’m sure we’re all down with freedom of speech around here, take some time this week to explore some of the great works of literature that have, at one point or another, been banned, burned, or otherwise attacked. Google Book Search has set up a page allowing you to explore banned books, and the Minneapolis Public Library has made it easy to quickly find copies of previously banned books in the system. The American Library Association has a great set of resources (and t-shirts!) celebrating the capacity of the printed page to evade suppression (and challenging society’s attempts to “breach man’s mind.”)
Given the recent renewal of interest in native son F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, it’s interesting to note that novel’s own history as a banned title. I’ve been searching the web looking for more information, but apart from a PBS Online NewsHour quip that the book was banned for ‘promoting’ Long Island and a 1987(!) challenge of the book’s sexual references by a Baptist College, I can’t find much. What’s your favorite banned book?
28 Reader Comments
1:03 pm
The House at Pooh Corner by AA Milne.
(trying to start the thread off in a light-hearted nonpolitical manner)
1:14 pm
Well, aslong as they don’t ban my favorite book.
Teenage Anal Slave.
1:15 pm
Oh, sure, the spamfilter let that through.
1:30 pm
Yeah! *heh heh heh* I guess the filter doesn’t know what “pooh” (sic) is?
2:13 pm
“The Anarchist Cookbook”
2:17 pm
Without a doubt, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. An amazing story of a man having lots of sex to avoid getting down to work on his first novel! The moral: If you’re going to procrastinate, do it with salacious style!
3:00 pm
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest was the first book I had to read in High School that I actually liked. It’s still one of my favorites.
3:16 pm
i know a lot of you here hate sports and think they’re useless…but my love of sports led to my love of reading. i mean, i devoured every sports book imaginable when i was a kid. “catcher in the rye” was my first non-sports book that i truly loved. and i only read it cuz my mom told me it was about baseball.
3:19 pm
For me, it’s On the Road. I know it strikes some as a cliché, but when I was sixteen and stuck in Two Harbors, it was a godsend.
3:20 pm
“The Anarchist Cookbook”
»» Submitted by Raindog66 at 1:13 PM on September 25
This site is not a pipe bomb.
4:29 pm
Huck Finn.
4:40 pm
The Awakening….a truly wonderful work. Changed my perspective on many things upon reading it in 9th grade. I read it every year.
4:54 pm
Raindog’s link led me to the wiki for banned books. I’m agog at the list of titles.
4:58 pm
That darn Shakespear writing those 5 banned books! I really like Hamlet, but now that I know it was banned for references to the occult, I now know better.
5:05 pm
RE: “….books which have been banned by some organization at some place and time.”
Gee. What books DON’T qualify by that standard.
5:07 pm
I’m not big on book reading, but hitting a few books on that list is like shooting fish in a barrel.
The very idea of banning Fahrenheit 451 is deliciously ironic, but I see at least one book banned because it supports Holocaust denial, which leaves me with mixed feelings, to say the least.
5:20 pm
There’s no real need to ban books when you can simply underfund education. Imagibe — libraries and libraries full of books that nobody is fuctionally literate enough to read.
5:45 pm
HAHAHAA.
“The Lorax by Dr. Seuss (Banned by a school district in California for espousing environmentalism and negatively depicting the lumber industry.) “
5:58 pm
I’m teaching Macbeth to my seniors and Romeo & Juliet to my freshmen. Several of the parents of the freshmen are “concerned” by the suicide aspects.
One parent has asked me, “Do they REALLY need to read it?”
I love this country.
7:05 pm
Of course, there are plenty of books on that Wikipedia list that are among my favorites – Civil Disobedience, 1984, The Rights of Man, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Stupids (series), The Master and Margarita. And of course there are plenty of books on the list of which I take the dimmest possible view (e.g. The Turner Diaries). But I’m guessing that’s kinda the point of the whole “Banned Books Week” deal, dontchya think?
I guess what’s really obscene to me, the thing that is really making me enraged right now, is not that some books are still occasionally banned in this country — because let’s face it, as long as there is a government, there’ll be some idea that Can’t Be Spoken — but rather that working-class institutions like public K-12 schools, public colleges and universities, and yes, even the public library, are constantly under attack.
The fact that this kind of discussion has to happen right now is just about the most obscene thing I can imagine in terms of local government policy. The psychopaths of the Xtian right and the oh-so-clever champions of unchecked corporate greed have been very successful in their mission to prevent regular people from freely accessing and debating ideas. I’d like to think that there was still some hope of taking our cities back, but right now I’m feeling pretty cynical about the whole thing.
7:20 pm
The psychopaths of the Xtian right and the oh-so-clever champions of unchecked corporate greed have been very successful in their mission to prevent regular people from freely accessing and debating ideas.
Nonsense. Ever hear of book stores? Just because you can’t get something free, handed to you courtesy of the taxpayer, doesn’t mean you’re deprived of access. Go buy one. The author will thank you.
11:24 pm
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
8:59 am
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. As funny as Mark Twain.
Am I under a fatwa now?
10:55 am
Nothing sparks my interest in a book like hearing it was banned somewhere. I may take a look at it and find out I’m not interested in reading it anyway, but at least I’ll check it out. If I ever write a book, I hope it is insightful, compelling, and truthful enough to have someone want to ban it.
12:48 pm
The Satanic Verses is superb indeed.
3:12 pm
Years ago my Iowa high school’s arch-rival high school (Kanawha, Iowa) banned The Grapes of Wrath because it was a “dirty” book. We could always count on Kanawha kids for the worst sportsmanship in the old North Star Conference. . . and as I recall, more than a few (gasp) unwed mothers to give the rest of us North Iowa teenagers something to gossip about.
But they didn’t read any dirty books in Kanawha, no siree!
5:18 pm
I recall hearing that back in the days of serfdoms and fiefdoms, they kept the masses deliberately ignorant so they could not be exposed to seditious ideas and overthrow their lords. I recall hearing that in the days of slavery it was a crime to teach a slave to read and a slave who could read was severely punished so they could not incite the other slaves to stage an uprising. Reading is dangerous to the Powers That Be.
Leave it to Fundamentalist, Conservative America to continue the pogrom against BOOKS WITH IDEAS to keep the masses ignorant. By the way, I noticed a comment that one can simply go buy the book if it is unavailable in school or at the library. Yeah, maybe some people can, but I would think many people are too busy feeding their kids to pay bookstore prices for banned books. Banning books is one way of keeping the poor and ignorant, poor and ignorant. Ignorance is lack of access to knowledge, not inability to learn.
9:06 am
well said.