Arts & Entertainment
The Courage to Stand Up to Censors
Banned Books Week celebrates schools, libraries and bookstores who did not bend to pressure to remove controversial titles from their shelves. What's your favorite banned book?
In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s classic novel, residents “report” their neighbors to the authorities for having books, which are then burned and their owners killed or punished.
Censorship is one of the main themes, but for many years the novel was itself banned, considered inappropriate because it involved a scene in which the Bible is burned.
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In being blacklisted, Fahrenheit 451 joined the list of classics such as The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies, Catcher in the Rye, Beloved and many others considered immoral, obscene and just "inappropriate" for the public.
Banned Books Week, which began Sunday and runs through October 6, honors authors who have the courage to write about taboo topics as well as the schools, libraries and book stores who did not cave in to pressure to remove controversial titles from their shelves.
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And don't think that censorship is a thing of the past. Last year alone, there were 326 attempts in the U.S. to ban or restrict books from schools and/or libraries, according to the American Library Association.
Want to see which books have been targeted over the years? Check out the list below, then tell us your favorite banned book in the comments.
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck
To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
The Color Purple, by Alice Walker
Ulysses, by James Joyce
Beloved, by Toni Morrison
The Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
1984, by George Orwell
Lolita, by Vladmir Nabokov
Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner
A Farewell to Arms, by Ernest Hemingway
Their Eyes Were Watching God, by Zora Neale Hurston
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
Gone with the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
Native Son, by Richard Wright
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, by Ken Kesey
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
The Call of the Wild, by Jack London
Go Tell it on the Mountain, by James Baldwin
All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair
Lady Chatterley's Lover, by D.H. Lawrence
A Clockwork Orange, by Anthony Burgess
The Awakening, by Kate Chopin
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie
Sophie's Choice, by William Styron
Sons and Lovers, by D.H. Lawrence
Cat's Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut
A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
Naked Lunch, by William S. Burroughs
Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh
Women in Love, by D.H. Lawrence
The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
An American Tragedy, by Theodore Dreiser
Rabbit, Run, by John Updike
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