The banning of books, it would be easy to think, is a relic of less enlightened ages. The Catholic church, in a last spasm of rectitude, added Jean-Paul Sartre, Alberto Moravia and Simone de Beauvoir to its Index of Forbidden Books during the 1940s and 50s, but then abandoned the list, which had lasted four centuries, in 1966.
Public book burnings by Nazis or McCarthyites, too, might be assumed to be nothing more than a baleful warning from the past. Yet the burning of books still appears an irresistible act to some – even in the country with the strongest statutory protection of free speech, the United States. In 2019, students at Georgia Southern University burned copies of visiting Cuban-American author Jennine Capó Crucet’s Make Your Home Among Strangers, some shouting “Trump 2020!”. In 2022, the Nashville pastor Greg Locke held a public bonfire for “demonic” books, including the Harry Potter and Twilight series.
Censorship used to occur largely at the level of governments or other transnational authorities. It still does in authoritarian countries such as Iran and China, but western states generally liberalised in the mid-20th century. Yet a weaker form of censorship has long persisted within the American school system, where individual books are subject to “challenge” by parents who consider them inappropriate material for their children. Often, school boards will respond by removing those books from school libraries, in which case they have effectively been banned.
The phenomenon has accelerated in recent years. The machinery of school censorship in the US has also become significantly more corporate. According to the American Library Association’s analysis of its 2024 data, “the majority of book censorship attempts are now originating from organised movements. Pressure groups and government entities that include elected officials, board members and administrators initiated 72% of demands to censor books in school and public libraries.” Between 2001 and 2020, such groups challenged an average of 46 titles per year. Last year, they challenged 4,190 titles in 12 months.
Donald Trump’s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in schools and universities has led some school districts in Texas and Florida to proactively remove shelf-fulls of potential offenders within the last 12 months. Earlier this year, meanwhile, a man went into a public library in Ohio, checked out a number of books on Jewish, Black and LGBTQ+ history, and burned them all. The caption to a video of the bonfire read: “We are cleansing our libraries of degenerate filth.” Joseph Goebbels would have approved.
Here, then, is a selection of other books that have been considered degenerate filth …
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Atwood’s 2003 post-apocalyptic fantasia, whose heroes smoke weed and watch very bad things on the internet before their everyday lives are swept away by a global pandemic, is among the most widely sanctioned by American schools. The particularly censorious Utah State Board of Education even bans pupils from carrying a copy into school to read in their personal time. All such perilous tomes, advises the board, must not be given away or resold but instead sent to a specified warehouse in a box clearly marked “sensitive materials”. Not to be outdone, in 2024 a Texas school district banned Oryx and Crake because it promoted “gender fluidity”.
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling
The famous children’s books about witches and wizards might be more likely to attract opprobrium these days on the grounds of the author’s political opinions, but long before that, Potterphobes were trying to get the books off school shelves in the US on the grounds that they glorify the occult or actually “promote witchcraft”. They succeeded in a few cases, such as Zeeland, Michigan in 1999, and Nashville, Tennessee, in 2019. Which begs the question, can you promote something if it doesn’t exist?
Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
The Indian-Canadian poet rose to fame on Instagram, and this collection of social media-friendly minimalist verse was initially self-published in 2014 before coming out commercially and going on to sell more than 11m copies. Popularity, however, is no defence against the literary‑prohibition complex, which in this case cited not Kaur’s refusal to employ upper-case letters but the fact that some of her poems explore themes of sexual assault. It was the joint-ninth most-banned book by US school districts in the 2022-23 school year and remains off limits in districts across eight states.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
Hosseini’s 2003 novel set in Afghanistan before the Soviet occupation and then under the Taliban, which has sold more than 8m copies worldwide, has long been among the most banned books in US school districts, for its depictions of homosexuality, violence, or inter-Afghan ethnic tensions. The 2007 film adaptation was banned in Afghanistan itself under the government of Hamid Karzai. The Kite Runner is now one of many books removed from shelves in schools run by the US Department of Defense pending a review announced in 2024 – a ban that chimes with Donald Trump’s targeting of DEI.
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
Orwell’s story of totalitarian truth-twisting may have been partly inspired by his experience of working for the BBC, but the Soviets felt it was obviously aimed at them, and so the novel was banned in the USSR until 1988, along with homegrown masterworks such as Vasily Grossman’s second world war epic Life and Fate. But Orwell’s relevance has not since diminished: Russians protesting against the Ukraine war have been arrested for giving out free copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four, while it remains forbidden to mention the novel’s title on Chinese social media.
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
The man who stabbed Rushdie in 2022, in an attempt to fulfil the Iranian fatwa, said at his sentencing that the writer “wants to bully other people. I don’t agree with that.” Apparently trying to kill people doesn’t count. Rushdie’s 1988 novel, which contains a dream-sequence riff on the life of the prophet Muhammad, was publicly burned in Bolton and Bradford, and banned in many countries including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Sri Lanka and Venezuela. In India, though, the original banning order seems to have been lost, leading a court to state in 2024 that it may no longer be valid.
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Morrison’s debut novel, a fable about a young Black girl in the US who wishes her eyes would turn blue so that she would be perceived as beautiful, remains surprisingly controversial for a book that was published 55 years ago, coming in third on the American Library Association’s list of most frequently challenged books in 2024, and being banned in 29 school districts in the 2022-3 school year. Her later novel Beloved is almost as popular a target, proving that winning a Nobel prize in literature does not suffice to make your work suitable for teenagers.
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
This graphic novel about a young woman growing up during the Islamic revolution in Iran was originally published in French in 2000. It was banned (as the author had foreseen) in Iran and for a while in Lebanon, but controversy struck when it was banned by the public schools of Chicago in 2013. That decision was later reversed, but Persepolis continues to be challenged and banned in states including, in 2023 and 24, Alaska, Iowa and Wisconsin. Such bans usually cite the book’s “graphic language and images” (a graphic novel is indeed likely to contain graphic images), though one complaining parent wrote to her Illinois school board to ask “why a book about Muslims was assigned on September 11”.
China Dream by Ma Jian
If you wanted to curry favour with the Chinese Communist party, you probably wouldn’t use as your novel’s title a phrase taken from President Xi himself, which he uses to describe a “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”, or indeed have as narrator an ambitious provincial political operative whose job is, as Ma has explained, “to suppress memories of the past and control speech in the present”. This 2018 novel is of course banned in China, as all Ma’s work has been since 1987, but it was the first that no Hong Kong publisher would touch, either. The party, he says, has “an army of censors”.
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The novel that made Nabokov’s fortune was first published in France in 1955, since no American publisher would risk it. Its English-language publisher in France, Olympia Press, lost a lawsuit with the government the following year and the book was banned from sale. Meanwhile in Britain, it was illegal to import such “utter filth” and publication in the UK, as well as in Argentina and South Africa, was banned for several years: in New Zealand, it became legal only in 1964. For the New York Times in 1958 (when the French ban was lifted), Orville Prescott judged the novel “dull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion”, and also “repulsive”. It is currently banned in three American school districts.
Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
This 2007 novel about a school shooting has the dubious honour of currently being the most widely sanctioned book by school districts in the US, according to writers’ group PEN America, with 98 bans. Does suppressing fiction about school shootings reduce the number of actual school shootings? This remains to be demonstrated. In any case, the most commonly cited reason for deeming Picoult’s novel unsuitable for teenagers is, as she explained at the Hay festival last year, her use on page 313 of the word “erection”.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover by DH Lawrence
The subject of the most celebrated obscenity trial of the 20th century, Lawrence’s pastoral romp was banned in Britain and other countries after its original private publication in 1928, though heavily expurgated versions were made available in the US and UK in 1932. Not until 1960 did a mainstream publisher, Penguin Books, attempt to bring out the full text, prompting a showdown with the government. “Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house?” asked the lead prosecutor on behalf of the Crown. “Is it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?” The answer seemed to be yes, as Penguin won.
Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
TV adaptations are usually good news for novels. After the 2017 Netflix adaptation of Asher’s YA teen-suicide novel hit the screens, the book was banned by school districts in eight US states. Some argued that the more sensationalised TV version was much more likely to have encouraged a seeming rash of real-life suicides in the following months. Banning the text, the author told a PBS interviewer, was likely to be counterproductive: “If we say issues of teen suicide, drinking, sex or sexual assaults are inappropriate, we’re telling teens who may identify with those themes that there isn’t a safe space for them.”
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Aristophanes’s 2,500-year-old comedy about women who go on sex strike in order to stop the Greek city states from fighting each other is plainly likely to sap the masculine spirit of any modern nation-state that emphasises marital virtue. Logical, then, that it should have been banned in its homeland under the Nazi occupation and then under the military junta that took over Greece in 1967. From 1873, meanwhile, it was also banned in the US under the Comstock laws that prohibited lewd or obscene material from being sent through the post, a ban that was successfully overturned only in 1954.
The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
Thomas’s much-admired YA novel about a Black teenager who sees her close friend shot by a police officer has, predictably, come high on the lists of books that are “most challenged” in American school districts since it was published in 2017. The various reasons include profanity, drug use and sexual references but also “racially insensitive language” – the latter a concern cited by the white superintendent of the Katy Independent School District in Texas, who personally pulled copies off the shelves. “You’re basically telling the kids … that their stories shouldn’t be told,” Thomas responded. “Well, I’m going to tell them even louder. Thanks for igniting the fire.”
Fanny Hill by John Cleland
Cleland wrote this pioneering 18th-century tract of very bawdy fiction – ostensibly the “memoirs of a woman of pleasure” – while in debtors’ prison. Within a year of its publication his publishers had been hauled to court on suspicion of “corrupting the King’s subjects” and the book was officially withdrawn, though samizdat copies continued to circulate. In the early 19th century a pirated version was published in the US, leading to that publisher’s conviction in Massachusetts for printing something so “lewd and obscene”. Remarkably, police seized a new edition of the novel in London in the 1960s under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959, and the unexpurgated Fanny was not legally revealed until 1970.
The Witches by Roald Dahl
Dahl’s oeuvre has recently been the subject of enthusiastic Bowdlerisation by Puffin, which released politically corrected versions of his texts in 2023 that, among other things, removed the word “fat”. But The Witches (1983) had already long been the subject of complaints in American schools. While liberal critics thought it misogynist because Dahl writes that witches are always women, concerned American parents had it banned in Dallas, Oregon for promoting occultism, and in Dublin, Ohio on the curious grounds that it was “derogatory to children”.
American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Ellis’s satirical masterpiece of men’s fashion, 1980s music pedantry and ultraviolence, having been dropped by its original publisher Simon & Schuster only three months before its publication date and then rescued by Vintage, has excited outrage in the censorially minded forever after. In the late 1990s Germany restricted sales to adults only, and for many years it was officially banned from sale in the state of Queensland, Australia, though in one of literary freedom’s smallest ever victories it can now be purchased shrink-wrapped, as long as you are over 18.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Any author who appears twice on such a list must be doing something right. Since her most famous novel is about a future United States devolving into a repressive sexist theocracy, the routine rightwing attempts to remove it from schools in the present-day US do come across as a case of protesting too much. The Handmaid’s Tale has been removed from school libraries in at least 10 US states. After it was made unavailable to high-school students in Madison County, Virginia, in 2023, Atwood suggested that perhaps the censorious wonks hoped to get teenagers interested in sex again by making mentions of it in print forbidden – and so irresistible. It remains banned in 67 US school districts.
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Vonnegut’s first bestseller, centring on the firebombing of Dresden (which he had witnessed first-hand), but also with a satirically freewheeling attitude to matters religious, sexual and cosmic, was something of a pioneer in the school-banning stakes. A mere three years after its 1969 publication, it was banned in schools in Oakland, Michigan for being, as a judge thought, “depraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian”. In 1973, copies were burned in North Dakota because of its “obscene language”. In 2010 a college professor complained: “This is a book that contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame.” In 2024, the novel was banned by school boards in Texas and Florida. So it goes.
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