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 \u201cchallenge\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
The phenomenon has accelerated in recent years<\/a>. The machinery of school censorship in the US has also\u00a0become significantly more corporate. According to the American Library Association\u2019s analysis of its 2024 data, \u201cthe 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.\u201d Between 2001 and 2020, such groups challenged an average of 46 titles per year. Last year, they challenged 4,190 titles in 12 months<\/a>.<\/p>\n Donald Trump\u2019s crusade against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programmes in schools and universities has led\u00a0some 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<\/a>. The caption to a video of the bonfire read: \u201cWe are cleansing our libraries of degenerate filth.\u201d Joseph Goebbels would have approved.<\/p>\n Here, then, is a selection of other books that have been considered degenerate filth \u2026<\/p>\n Atwood\u2019s 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 \u201csensitive materials\u201d. Not to be outdone, in 2024 a Texas school district banned Oryx and Crake because it promoted \u201cgender fluidity\u201d.<\/p>\n The famous children\u2019s books about witches and wizards might be more likely to attract opprobrium these days on the grounds of the author\u2019s 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 \u201cpromote witchcraft\u201d. They succeeded in a few cases, such as Zeeland, Michigan in 1999, and Nashville, Tennessee, in 2019<\/a>. Which begs the question, can you promote something if it doesn\u2019t exist?<\/p>\n 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\u2011prohibition complex, which in this case cited not Kaur\u2019s 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\u00a0and remains off limits in districts across eight\u00a0states.<\/p>\n Hosseini\u2019s 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\u00a0school districts, for its depictions of homosexuality, violence, or inter-Afghan ethnic tensions. The 2007 film adaptation was banned in Afghanistan<\/a> 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 \u2013 a ban that chimes with Donald Trump\u2019s targeting of DEI.<\/p>\n Orwell\u2019s 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\u2019s second world war epic Life and Fate. But Orwell\u2019s 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\u2019s title on Chinese social media.<\/p>\n The man who stabbed Rushdie in 2022, in an attempt to fulfil the Iranian fatwa, said at his sentencing that the writer \u201cwants to bully other people. I don\u2019t agree with that.\u201d Apparently trying to kill people doesn\u2019t count. Rushdie\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n Morrison\u2019s 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\u2019s list of most frequently challenged books in 2024<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a>. 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\u2019s \u201cgraphic language and images\u201d (a graphic novel is indeed likely to contain graphic images), though one complaining parent wrote to her Illinois school board to ask \u201cwhy a book about Muslims was assigned on September 11\u201d.<\/p>\n If you wanted to curry favour with the Chinese Communist party, you probably wouldn\u2019t use as your novel\u2019s title a phrase taken from President Xi himself, which he uses to describe a \u201cgreat rejuvenation of the Chinese nation\u201d, or indeed have as narrator an ambitious provincial political operative whose job is, as Ma has explained, \u201cto suppress memories of the past and control speech in the present\u201d. This 2018 novel is of course banned in China, as all Ma\u2019s work has been since 1987, but it was the first that no Hong Kong publisher would touch, either. The party, he says, has \u201can army of censors\u201d.<\/p>\n Lolita<\/a> by Vladimir Nabokov<\/p>\n The novel that made Nabokov\u2019s 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 \u201cutter filth\u201d 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 \u201cdull, dull, dull in a pretentious, florid and archly fatuous fashion\u201d, and also \u201crepulsive\u201d. It is currently banned in three American school districts.<\/p>\n 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\u2019 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\u2019s novel unsuitable for teenagers is, as she explained at the Hay festival last year, her use on page 313 of the word \u201cerection\u201d.<\/p>\n The subject of the most celebrated obscenity trial of the 20th century, Lawrence\u2019s 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. \u201cIs it a book you would have lying around in your own house?\u201d asked the lead prosecutor on behalf of the Crown. \u201cIs it a book you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?\u201d The answer seemed to be yes, as Penguin won.<\/p>\n TV adaptations are usually good news for novels. After the 2017 Netflix adaptation of Asher\u2019s 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: \u201cIf we say issues of teen suicide, drinking, sex or sexual assaults are inappropriate, we\u2019re telling teens who may identify with those themes that there isn\u2019t a safe space for them.\u201d<\/p>\n Aristophanes\u2019s 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\u00a0in 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.<\/p>\n Thomas\u2019s much-admired YA novel about a Black teenager who sees her close friend\u00a0shot by a police officer has, predictably, come high on the lists of books that are \u201cmost challenged\u201d in American school districts since it was published in 2017. The various reasons include profanity,\u00a0drug use and sexual references but also \u201cracially insensitive language\u201d \u2013 the latter a concern cited by the white superintendent of the Katy Independent School District in Texas, who personally pulled copies off the shelves. \u201cYou\u2019re basically telling the kids \u2026 that their\u00a0stories shouldn\u2019t be told,\u201d Thomas responded<\/a>. \u201cWell, I\u2019m going to tell them even louder. Thanks for igniting the fire.\u201d<\/p>\n Cleland wrote this pioneering 18th-century tract of very bawdy fiction \u2013 ostensibly the \u201cmemoirs of a woman of pleasure\u201d \u2013 while in debtors\u2019 prison. Within a year of its publication his publishers had been hauled to court on suspicion of \u201ccorrupting the King\u2019s subjects<\/a>\u201d 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\u00a0publisher\u2019s conviction in Massachusetts for printing something so \u201clewd and obscene\u201d. 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.<\/p>\n Dahl\u2019s oeuvre has recently been the subject of enthusiastic Bowdlerisation by Puffin, which released politically corrected versions<\/a> of his texts in 2023 that, among other things, removed the word \u201cfat\u201d. 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\u00a0on the curious grounds that it was \u201cderogatory to children\u201d.<\/p>\n Ellis\u2019s satirical masterpiece of men\u2019s 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\u2019s smallest ever victories it can now be purchased shrink-wrapped, as long as you are over 18.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u2013 and so irresistible. It remains banned in 67 US school districts.<\/p>\n Vonnegut\u2019s 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\u00a0mere three years after its 1969 publication, it was banned in schools in Oakland, Michigan for being, as a judge thought, \u201cdepraved, immoral, psychotic, vulgar and anti-Christian\u201d. In 1973, copies were burned in North Dakota because of its \u201cobscene language\u201d. In 2010 a college professor complained: \u201cThis is a book that contains so much profane language, it would make a sailor blush with shame.\u201d In 2024, the novel was banned by school boards in Texas and Florida<\/a>. So it goes.<\/p>\n![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/325.jpg\")
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