IBP - Promoting Classics Through Banned Books

[Charlynn]

With our emphasis on paying attention to those books which are being both challenged and banned, I thought that perhaps this could be used to entice teenagers into reading some of the classics that, over the years, have not been so warmly received. A YA librarian could spotlight a banned book once a month, present why it was challenged in the past, and hope to inspire the students to read it, appealing to their naturally curious and rebellious natures. If kids know that there are adults who do not want them to read such works, then I believe they would be more likely to do so. To go with this, below there is a list (of course not complete) of classic works which have been challenged or banned in the past.

Classic Books That Have Been Challenged or Banned

1984 - George Orwell
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) - Mark Twain
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
Age of Reason - Thomas Paine
All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
Andersonville (1955) - MacKinlay Kantor
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Arabian Nights
As I Lay Dying (1932) - William Faulkner
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Beloved - Toni Morrison
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
The Call of the Wild – Jack London
Candide – Voltaire
Canterbury Tales - Chaucer
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
Crucible, The – Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
The Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank
Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
Dracula - Bram Stoker
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
Émile - Jean Jacques Rousseau
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
Fanny Hill - John Cleland
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
Gargantua and Pantagruel - François Rabelais
Ghosts – Henrik Ibsen
Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin
Grapes of Wrath (1939) - John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Grendel – John Champlin Gardner
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
House of Spirits - Isabel Allende
Howl - Allen Ginsberg
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
King Lear - William Shakespeare
Koran
Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman
Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Lolita (1955) - Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lysistrata - Aristophanes
Macbeth - William Shakespeare
Madame Bovary
Merchant of Venice - William Shakespeare
Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
Monk - Matthew Lewis
The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs
Native Son - Richard Wright
Oedipus Rex – Sophocles
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest – Ken Kesey
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Prince - Niccolò Machiavelli
Rabbit, Run - John Updike
Salome – Oscar Wilde
The Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie
Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Separate Peace - John Knowles
Silas Marner – George Eliot
Slaughterhouse Five – Kurt Vonnegut
Sophie's Choice - William Styron
Song of Solomon – Toni Morrison
Sons & Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
A Streetcar Named Desire – Tennessee Williams
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
Tropic of Capricorn - Henry Miller
Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare
Ulysses - James Joyce
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
Women in Love - D.H. Lawrence
Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte


*** If you can think of others which should be added to this list, please let me know. Thanks!