Banned Books Week: Top Challenged Literary Classics
Challenged Literary Classics
Below is a list of some literary classics that have been banned/challenged over the years. The titles shown are ones that have been reported to the American Library Association. By clicking on the books you will be taken to our catalog where you can choose to place a "hold" on any title you find of interest. You just need to enter your library card # (starts with 22861 if you are a Fallsburg Library patron) and then your pin # which is the last 4 digits of the telephone # you gave to the library.
#1 The Great Gatsby
The Great Gatsby by The story of the fabulously wealthy Jay Gatsby and his love for the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, of lavish parties on Long Island at a time when The New York Times noted “gin was the national drink and sex the national obsession,” it is an exquisitely crafted tale of America in the 1920s.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language & sexual content.
#2 The Catcher in the Rye
The Catcher in the Rye by Holden Caulfield recounts the days following his expulsion from Pencey Prep, a private school. After a fight with his roommate, Holden leaves school two days early to explore New York before returning home, interacting with teachers, prostitutes, nuns, an old girlfriend, and his sister along the way. J.D. Salinger's classic The Catcher in the Rye illustrates a teenager's dramatic struggle against death and growing up.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, sexually explicit & unsuited to age group.
#3 The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath by Tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity. A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, sexual content, & rape.
#4 To Kill a Mockingbird
To Kill a Mockingbird by Through the young eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Harper Lee explores with rich humor and unswerving honesty the irrationality of adult attitudes toward race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s. The conscience of a town steeped in prejudice, violence, and hypocrisy is pricked by the stamina and quiet heroism of one man's struggle for justice—but the weight of history will only tolerate so much.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language & racism.
#5 The Color Purple
The Color Purple by The Color Purple is Walker’s stunning, Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of courage in the face of oppression. Celie grows up in rural Georgia, navigating a childhood of ceaseless abuse. Not only is she poor and despised by the society around her, she’s badly treated by her family. As a teenager she begins writing letters directly to God in an attempt to transcend a life that often seems too much to bear. Her letters span twenty years and record a journey of self-discovery and empowerment through the guiding light of a few strong women and her own implacable will to find harmony with herself and her home.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, sexually explicit, homosexuality, & unsuited to age group.
#6 Ulysses
Ulysses by A landmark work in which the episodes of Homer's Odyssey are paralleled in an array of contrasting literary styles, perhaps most prominent among these the stream of consciousness technique he perfected.
Reasons for being challenged:
Sexually explicit.
#7 Beloved
Beloved by Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe’s new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
Reasons for being challenged:
Sexually explicit, religious viewpoint, & violence.
#8 Lord of the Flies
Lord of the Flies by William Golding's compelling story about a group of very ordinary small boys marooned on a coral island has become a modern classic. At first it seems as though it is all going to be great fun; but the fun before long becomes furious and life on the island turns into a nightmare of panic and death. As ordinary standards of behaviour collapse, the whole world the boys know collapses with them—the world of cricket and homework and adventure stories—and another world is revealed beneath, primitive and terrible.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, violence, sexual content, racism, & demoralizing.
#9 1984
1984 by In 1984, London is a grim city where Big Brother is always watching you and the Thought Police can practically read your mind. Winston is a man in grave danger for the simple reason that his memory still functions. Drawn into a forbidden love affair, Winston finds the courage to join a secret revolutionary organization called The Brotherhood, dedicated to the destruction of the Party. Together with his beloved Julia, he hazards his life in a deadly match against the powers that be.
Reasons for being challenged:
Sexually explicit & pro-communist.
#10 Lolita
Lolita by Awe and exhiliration--along with heartbreak and mordant wit--abound in Lolita, Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America. Most of all, it is a meditation on love--love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language & sexually explicit/obscene.
#11 Of Mice and Men
Of Mice and Men by They are an unlikely pair: George is "small and quick and dark of face"; Lennie, a man of tremendous size, has the mind of a young child. Yet they have formed a "family," clinging together in the face of loneliness and alienation. Laborers in California's dusty vegetable fields, they hustle work when they can, living a hand-to-mouth existence. For George and Lennie have a plan: to own an acre of land and a shack they can call their own. When they land jobs on a ranch in the Salinas Valley, the fulfillment of their dream seems to be within their grasp. But even George cannot guard Lennie from the provocations of a flirtatious woman, nor predict the consequences of Lennie's unswerving obedience to the things George taught him.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, racism, & violence.
#12 Catch-22
Catch-22 by Set in Italy during World War II, this is the story of the incomparable, malingering bombardier, Yossarian, a hero who is furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. But his real problem is not the enemy—it is his own army, which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. Yet if Yossarian makes any attempt to excuse himself from the perilous missions he’s assigned, he’ll be in violation of Catch-22, a hilariously sinister bureaucratic rule: a man is considered insane if he willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions, but if he makes a formal request to be removed from duty, he is proven sane and therefore ineligible to be relieved.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language - excessive use of the word "whore".
#13 Brave New World
Brave New World by Brave New World fantasizes about a future place, Utopia, where everyone is controlled and most people are brainwashed. Birth is a scientific procedure. People are taught to think a certain way when they are young and then programmed to be happy and to enjoy life. Art and religion aren’t allowed. They can’t love, but the government encourages them to have fun and have lots of sex. This book takes a futuristic view to an extreme to show how dangerous control and lack of individuality can be.
Reasons for being challenged:
Insensitivity, nudity, racism, religious viewpoint, & sexually explicit.
#14 Animal Farm
Animal Farm by George Orwell's classic satire of the Russian Revolution is an intimate part of our contemporary culture. It is the account of the bold struggle, initiated by the animals, that transforms Mr. Jones's Manor Farm into Animal Farm--a wholly democratic society built on the credo that All Animals Are Created Equal. Out of their cleverness, the pigs Napoleon, Squealer, and Snowball emerge as leaders of the new community in a subtle evolution that proves disastrous. The climax is the brutal betrayal of the faithful horse Boxer, when totalitarian rule is reestablished with the bloodstained postscript to the founding slogan: But some Animals Are More Equal Than Others. . . .
Reasons for being challenged:
Unfavorable political theories, language, & unsuited to age group.
#15 The Sun Also Rises
The Sun Also Rises by A poignant look at the disillusionment and angst of the post-World War I generation, the novel introduces two of Hemingway's most unforgettable characters: Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. The story follows the flamboyant Brett and the hapless Jake as they journey from the wild nightlife of 1920s Paris to the brutal bullfighting rings of Spain with a motley group of expatriates. It is an age of moral bankruptcy, spiritual dissolution, unrealized love, and vanishing illusions.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, anti-semitism, sexual content & focus on adultery.
#16 As I Lay Dying
As I Lay Dying by As I Lay Dying is Faulkner’s harrowing account of the Bundren family’s odyssey across the Mississippi countryside to bury Addie, their wife and mother. Narrated in turn by each of the family members—including Addie herself—as well as others the novel ranges in mood, from dark comedy to the deepest pathos. Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, references to abortion and masturbation, & questions the existence of God.
#17 A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms by The unforgettable story of an American ambulance driver on the Italian front and his passion for a beautiful English nurse. Set against the looming horrors of the battlefield—weary, demoralized men marching in the rain during the German attack on Caporetto; the profound struggle between loyalty and desertion—this gripping, semiautobiographical work captures the harsh realities of war and the pain of lovers caught in its inexorable sweep.
Reasons for being challenged:
Sexual content/sexually explicit.
#18 Their Eyes Were Watching God
Their Eyes Were Watching God by One of the most important and enduring books of the twentieth century, Their Eyes Were Watching God brings to life a Southern love story with the wit and pathos found only in the writing of Zora Neale Hurston. Out of print for almost thirty years—due largely to initial audiences’ rejection of its strong black female protagonist—Hurston’s classic has since its 1978 reissue become perhaps the most widely read and highly acclaimed novel in the canon of African-American literature.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language & sexually explicit.
#19 Invisible Man
Invisible Man by The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, sexual content, & violence.
#20 Song of Solomon
Song of Solomon by Milkman Dead was born shortly after a neighborhood eccentric hurled himself off a rooftop in a vain attempt at flight. For the rest of his life he, too, will be trying to fly. With this brilliantly imagined novel, Toni Morrison transfigures the coming-of-age story as audaciously as Saul Bellow or Gabriel García Márquez. As she follows Milkman from his rustbelt city to the place of his family’s origins, Morrison introduces an entire cast of strivers and seeresses, liars and assassins, the inhabitants of a fully realized black world.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, sexually explicit, use of racial slurs.
#21 Gone with the Wind
Gone with the Wind by Gone With the Wind explores the depth of human passions with an intensity as bold as its setting in the red hills of Georgia. A superb piece of storytelling, it vividly depicts the drama of the Civil War and Reconstruction. This is the tale of Scarlett O’Hara, the spoiled, manipulative daughter of a wealthy plantation owner, who arrives at young womanhood just in time to see the Civil War forever change her way of life. A sweeping story of tangled passion and courage.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language & racism.
#22 Native Son
Native Son by Right from the start, Bigger Thomas had been headed for jail. It could have been for assault or petty larceny; by chance, it was for murder and rape. Native Son tells the story of this young black man caught in a downward spiral after he kills a young white woman in a brief moment of panic. Set in Chicago in the 1930s, Wright's powerful novel is an unsparing reflection on the poverty and feelings of hopelessness experienced by people in inner cities across the country and of what it means to be black in America.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, violence, & sexually explicit.
#23 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest by A mordant, wickedly subversive parable set in a mental ward, the novel chronicles the head-on collision between its hell-raising, life-affirming hero Randle Patrick McMurphy and the totalitarian rule of Big Nurse. McMurphy swaggers into the mental ward like a blast of fresh air and turns the place upside down, starting a gambling operation, smuggling in wine and women, and egging on the other patients to join him in open rebellion. But McMurphy's revolution against Big Nurse and everything she stands for quickly turns from sport to a fierce power struggle with shattering results.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, violence & glorification of criminal activity.
#24 Slaughterhouse-Five
Slaughterhouse-Five by Slaughterhous-Five is one of the world's great anti-war books. Centering on the infamous fire-bombing of Dresden, Billy Pilgrim's odyssey through time reflects the mythic journey of our own fractured lives as we search for meaning in what we are afraid to know.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, sexually explicit, violence, & use of racial slurs.
#25 For Whom the Bell Tolls
For Whom the Bell Tolls by The story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to an antifascist guerilla unit in the mountains of Spain, it tells of loyalty and courage, love and defeat, and the tragic death of an ideal. In his portrayal of Jordan's love for the beautiful Maria and his superb account of El Sordo's last stand, in his brilliant travesty of La Pasionaria and his unwillingness to believe in blind faith, Hemingway surpasses his achievement in The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms to create a work at once rare and beautiful, strong and brutal, compassionate, moving, and wise.
Reasons for being challenged:
Communistic in nature.
#26 The Call of the Wild
The Call of the Wild by The story is set in the Yukon during the 1890s Klondike Gold Rush—a period when strong sled dogs were in high demand. The novel's central character is a dog named Buck, a domesticated dog living at a ranch in the Santa Clara valley of California as the story opens. Stolen from his home and sold into the brutal existence of an Alaskan sled dog, he reverts to atavistic traits. Buck is forced to adjust to, and survive, cruel treatments and fight to dominate other dogs in a harsh climate. Eventually he sheds the veneer of civilization, relying on primordial instincts and lessons he learns, to emerge as a leader in the wild.
Reasons for being challenged:
Animal cruelty, violence, & unsuited to age group.
#27 Go Tell it on the Mountain
Go Tell It on the Mountain by Go Tell It on the Mountain is a 1953 semi-autobiographical novel by James Baldwin. The novel examines the role of the Christian Church in the lives of African-Americans, both as a source of repression and moral hypocrisy and as a source of inspiration and community. It also, more subtly, examines racism in the United States.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, depictions of rape & masturbation, & violence.
#28 All the King's Men
All the King's Men by Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, this classic book is generally regarded as the finest novel ever written on american politics. It describes the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for power.
Reasons for being challenged:
Immoral & unsuited to age group.
#29 The Lord of the Rings
The Lord of the Rings by The dark, fearsome Ringwraiths are searching for a Hobbit. Frodo Baggins knows that they are seeking him and the Ring he bears--the Ring of Power that will enable evil Sauron to destroy all that is good in Middle-earth. Now it is up to Frodo and his faithful servant, Sam, with a small band of companions, to carry the Ring to the one place it can be destroyed: Mount Doom, in the very center of Sauron's realm.
Reasons for being challenged:
Irreligious & satanic.
#30 The Jungle
The Jungle by An ardent activist, champion of political reform, novelist, and progressive journalist, Upton Sinclair is perhaps best known today for The Jungle — his devastating exposé of the meat-packing industry. A protest novel he privately published in 1906, the book was a shocking revelation of intolerable labor practices and unsanitary working conditions in the Chicago stockyards. It quickly became a bestseller, arousing public sentiment and resulting in such federal legislation as the Pure Food and Drug Act.|The brutally grim story of a Slavic family who emigrates to America, The Jungle tells of their rapid and inexorable descent into numbing poverty, moral degradation, and social and economic despair. Vulnerable and isolated, the family of Jurgis Rudkus struggles — unsuccessfully — to survive in an urban jungle.
Reasons for being challenged:
Shares socialist views & unsuited to age group.
#31 Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover by Lady Chatterley's Lover is D. H. Lawrence's controversial novel written in 1928, which tells the story of an aristocratic woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley), who has an affair with the estate's gamekeeper when her husband is paralyzed and rendered impotent. Central to the theme of the novel is the need for physical stimulation as well as mental stimulation in order to feel complete as a human being.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language & sexually explicit.
#32 A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange by A vicious fifteen-year-old droog is the central character of this 1963 classic. In Anthony Burgess's nightmare vision of the future, where the criminals take over after dark, the story is told by the central character, Alex, who talks in a brutal invented slang that brilliantly renders his and his friends' social pathology. A Clockwork Orange is a frightening fable about good and evil, and the meaning of human freedom. When the state undertakes to reform Alex to "redeem" him, the novel asks, "At what cost?"
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language & depictions of violence.
#33 The Awakening
The Awakening by In this stunning work of early feminist literature, New Orleans housewife Edna Pontellier attempts to balance motherhood and femininity in a society that stifles women. As she navigates a world of social contracts and expectations while trying to remain true to her desires, Edna becomes increasingly isolated. One of the American South’s first defining novels, The Awakening is a heart-wrenching portrait of a woman struggling with her own identity.
Reasons for being challenged:
Obscene, vulgar, & goes against traditional/Christian values.
#34 In Cold Blood
In Cold Blood by On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues. As Truman Capote reconstructs the murder and the investigation that led to the capture, trial, and execution of the killers, he generates both mesmerizing suspense and astonishing empathy. In Cold Blood is a work that transcends its moment, yielding poignant insights into the nature of American violence.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language, violence, & sexual content.
#35 The Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses by One of the most controversial and acclaimed novels ever written, The Satanic Verses is Salman Rushdie’s best-known and most galvanizing book. Set in a modern world filled with both mayhem and miracles, the story begins with a bang: the terrorist bombing of a London-bound jet in midflight. Two Indian actors of opposing sensibilities fall to earth, transformed into living symbols of what is angelic and evil. This is just the initial act in a magnificent odyssey that seamlessly merges the actual with the imagined.
Reasons for being challenged:
Blasphemous & anti-Islam.
#36 Sophie's Choice
Sophie's Choice by Three stories are told: a young Southerner wants to become a writer; a turbulent love-hate affair between a brilliant Jew and a beautiful Polish woman; and of an awful wound in that woman's past--one that impels both Sophie and Nathan toward destruction.
Reasons for being challenged:
Sexual content.
#37 Sons and Lovers
Sons and Lovers by First published in 1913, this provocative semi-autobiographical novel reflects the struggles of Paul Morel, an artist who cannot reciprocate love for other women while under the influence of his stifling mother. Unconsciously taught to despise his father and eschew other women, Paul comes even further under his mother's psychological grasp after the death of his older brother. When he eventually does fall in love, the results of confused affection and desire are painful for all concerned. While "Sons and Lovers" scandalized its original English readers for its oedipal implications and social criticism, it remains a powerful story of terrifying inner and outer conflict and intense sensuality.
Reasons for being challenged:
Sexual content.
#38 Cat's Cradle
Cat's Cradle by Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s Cradle is one of the twentieth century’s most important works—and Vonnegut at his very best.
Reasons for being challenged:
Sexual content.
#39 A Separate Peace
A Separate Peace by Set at a boys’ boarding school in New England during the early years of World War II, A Separate Peace is a harrowing and luminous parable of the dark side of adolescence. Gene is a lonely, introverted intellectual. Phineas is a handsome, taunting, daredevil athlete. What happens between the two friends one summer, like the war itself, banishes the innocence of these boys and their world.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language.
#40 Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch by "Naked Lunch" is the unnerving tale of a monumental descent into the hellish world of a narcotics addict as he travels from New York to Tangiers, then into Interzone, a nightmarish modern urban wasteland in which the forces of good and evil vie for control of the individual and all of humanity.
Reasons for being challenged:
Obscene, drug use, & offensive language.
#41 Brideshead Revisited
Brideshead Revisited by The wellsprings of desire and the impediments to love come brilliantly into focus in Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece-a novel that immerses us in the glittering and seductive world of English aristocracy in the waning days of the empire.
Through the story of Charles Ryder's entanglement with the Flytes, a great Catholic family, Evelyn Waugh charts the passing of the privileged world he knew in his own youth and vividly recalls the sensuous pleasures denied him by wartime austerities. At once romantic, sensuous, comic, and somber, Brideshead Revisited transcends Waugh's early satiric explorations and reveals him to be an elegiac, lyrical novelist of the utmost feeling and lucidity.
Reasons for being challenged:
Sexual content & homosexuality.
#42 Women in Love
Women in Love by Women in Love begins one blossoming spring day in England and ends with a terrible catastrophe in the snow of the Alps. Ursula and Gudrun are very different sisters who become entangled with two friends, Rupert and Gerald, who live in their hometown. The bonds between the couples quickly become intense and passionate but whether this passion is creative or destructive is unclear.
Reasons for being challenged:
Sexuality.
#43 The Naked and the Dead
The Naked and the Dead by The Naked and the Dead centers on a platoon of soldiers on the Asian island of Anopopei sent on a mission behind enemy lines. As the platoon advances, the novel flashes back to the soldiers’ lives at home, showing how their identities have been shaped by their ethnic, racial, and regional cultures.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language.
#44 Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Cancer by Set in Paris in the 1930s, it features a starving American writer who lives a bohemian life among prostitutes, pimps, and artists. Banned in the US and the UK for more than thirty years because it was considered pornographic, Tropic of Cancer continued to be distributed in France and smuggled into other countries.
Reasons for being challenged:
Offensive language & sexual content.
#45 An American Tragedy
An American Tragedy by An American Tragedy follows the life of Clyde Griffiths from late childhood to his infamous death. Beginning his life as the impoverished son of street missionaries, young Clyde aspires to a more affluent life with luxuries, fine clothes, and a woman who'll love him. As a young man, Clyde achieves a measure of this as a bellhop for the Green-Davidson hotel in Kansas City until a car accident involving the death of a little girl forced him to flee the city.
Reasons for being challenged:
Sexual content & violence.
#46 Rabbit, Run
Rabbit, Run by Publication Date: 1996-08-27Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.
Reasons for being challenged:
Obscene, offensive language, promotes promiscuity, & sexual content.