Banned in the U.S.A.
I just couldn't resist stealing this list of banned books from mistressrenet.
List of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you’ve read. Italicize the ones you’ve read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.
#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (Hooray! Proof that sheltered Vermonters can actually change the world!)
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (Anne Frank, I have no doubt, is a kindred soul. If she lived today, she'd have her own fanfic webpage.)
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce (Ugh. I'd successfully blocked out the chapter of this I was forced to read in college. My professor's introduction: "I apologize in advance, and would normally not wish this on my worst enemy. But you've got to give it a try.")
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Wow! It's an Orwell streak.)
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (As far as I'm concerned, Hemingway is nothing but the emperor's new clothes--someone important decided they liked him, and *boom,* we're all stuck reading his books over and over again for one English class after another.)
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (I hate this book. I hate Scarlett. And I hate the sort of girl who likes either of them.)
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (By the by, the only way I can get into my office is because the lock's code is 451.)
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (I read this just this summer, in fact.)
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (I loved this series so much that I once openly wept out of jealousy because one of my friends took a grand tour of the places where it was set. I was 22 at the time.)
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (Whoa. More than just a band. Who knew?)
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Solzhenitsyn once threatened to shoot me, but I still never read any of his books. [What. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. In the 80s he lived on the edge of some public land where my class was hiking. We ended up on his lawn, and he ended up waving a shotgun at us.])
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (I think being raised by a man obsessed with Heinlein prejudiced me against him forever.)
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
I read 90 percent of these puppies during a year-long Great Books class in college. I liked about 5 percent of them =X
Also, some additions of my own to the list:
#111 Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret, Judy Blume
#112 the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
#113 The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
#114 A Wrinkle in Time (Get this: Wrinkle is often banned because it includes Jesus as part of a list of great philosophers. Other folks on the list? Buddha. Socrates. Etc.)
#115 The Witches of Worm, Zilpha Keatly Snyder (In college I had a crush on a boy whose last name was Snyder. I was sure that the only thing that could make him more attractive was if Zipha was his grandmother.)
List of the top 110 banned books. Bold the ones you’ve read. Italicize the ones you’ve read part of. Underline the ones you specifically want to read (at least some of). Read more. Convince others to read some.
#1 The Bible
#2 Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
#3 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
#4 The Koran
#5 Arabian Nights
#6 Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
#7 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
#8 Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
#9 Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
#10 Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
#11 The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
#12 Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (Hooray! Proof that sheltered Vermonters can actually change the world!)
#13 Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (Anne Frank, I have no doubt, is a kindred soul. If she lived today, she'd have her own fanfic webpage.)
#14 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
#15 Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
#16 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
#17 Dracula by Bram Stoker
#18 Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
#19 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
#20 Essays by Michel de Montaigne
#21 Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
#22 History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
#23 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
#24 Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
#25 Ulysses by James Joyce (Ugh. I'd successfully blocked out the chapter of this I was forced to read in college. My professor's introduction: "I apologize in advance, and would normally not wish this on my worst enemy. But you've got to give it a try.")
#26 Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
#27 Animal Farm by George Orwell
#28 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Wow! It's an Orwell streak.)
#29 Candide by Voltaire
#30 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
#31 Analects by Confucius
#32 Dubliners by James Joyce
#33 Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
#34 Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway (As far as I'm concerned, Hemingway is nothing but the emperor's new clothes--someone important decided they liked him, and *boom,* we're all stuck reading his books over and over again for one English class after another.)
#35 Red and the Black by Stendhal
#36 Das Capital by Karl Marx
#37 Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
#38 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
#39 Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
#40 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
#41 Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
#42 Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (I hate this book. I hate Scarlett. And I hate the sort of girl who likes either of them.)
#43 Jungle by Upton Sinclair
#44 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
#45 Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
#46 Lord of the Flies by William Golding
#47 Diary by Samuel Pepys
#48 Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
#49 Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
#50 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (By the by, the only way I can get into my office is because the lock's code is 451.)
#51 Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
#52 Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
#53 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
#54 Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
#55 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
#56 Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
#57 Color Purple by Alice Walker
#58 Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
#59 Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
#60 Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
#61 Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
#62 One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
#63 East of Eden by John Steinbeck
#64 Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
#65 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
#66 Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#67 Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
#68 Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
#69 The Talmud
#70 Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
#71 Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (I read this just this summer, in fact.)
#72 Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
#73 American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
#74 Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
#75 Separate Peace by John Knowles
#76 Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
#77 Red Pony by John Steinbeck
#78 Popol Vuh
#79 Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
#80 Satyricon by Petronius
#81 James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
#82 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
#83 Black Boy by Richard Wright
#84 Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
#85 Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
#86 Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
#87 Metaphysics by Aristotle
#88 Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder (I loved this series so much that I once openly wept out of jealousy because one of my friends took a grand tour of the places where it was set. I was 22 at the time.)
#89 Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
#90 Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (Whoa. More than just a band. Who knew?)
#91 Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
#92 Sanctuary by William Faulkner
#93 As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
#94 Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
#95 Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
#96 Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
#97 General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
#98 Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
#99 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
#100 Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
#101 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
#102 Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
#103 Nana by Émile Zola
#104 Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
#105 Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
#106 Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Solzhenitsyn once threatened to shoot me, but I still never read any of his books. [What. You think I'm kidding? I'm not. In the 80s he lived on the edge of some public land where my class was hiking. We ended up on his lawn, and he ended up waving a shotgun at us.])
#107 Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein (I think being raised by a man obsessed with Heinlein prejudiced me against him forever.)
#108 Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
#109 Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
#110 Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
I read 90 percent of these puppies during a year-long Great Books class in college. I liked about 5 percent of them =X
Also, some additions of my own to the list:
#111 Are You There God, It's Me, Margaret, Judy Blume
#112 the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling
#113 The Merchant of Venice, William Shakespeare
#114 A Wrinkle in Time (Get this: Wrinkle is often banned because it includes Jesus as part of a list of great philosophers. Other folks on the list? Buddha. Socrates. Etc.)
#115 The Witches of Worm, Zilpha Keatly Snyder (In college I had a crush on a boy whose last name was Snyder. I was sure that the only thing that could make him more attractive was if Zipha was his grandmother.)