Mr. Vosovic was my literature teacher my freshman year in high school. I loved that class. We read books that still regularly make it to the banned books list. There wasn’t a Banned Books Week when I was in school, but there was talk about the books we read as not being appropriate for high school-aged kids. Personally, I think if students knew the books they were required to read were on the banned list, those covers would be cracked open!
For the past 30 years, the last week of September has been set aside as Banned Books Week. The goal is to highlight the benefits of intellectual freedom, drawing attention to the harms of censorship by spotlighting books that are or have been banned, as well those books where banning has been attempted. I guess the fight for intellectual freedom and access to literature will continue as long as there are people who want to control.
Radcliffe’s Rival 100 Best Novels is a list of what’s considered the top 100 novels of the 20th century by the Modern Library board. The list is below. Those titles and authors that are bolded, are known to either have been banned or attempted to be banned at one time. To find out the reason for these books being banned or challenged, check out Banned and/Or Challenged Books.
- 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
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
- 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
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
- Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne
- 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
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
- Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
- Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
- The World According to Garp by John Irving
- All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
- A Room with a View by E.M. Forster
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
- The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
- Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- My Antonia by Willa Cather
- Howards End by E.M. Forster
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
- The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
- Jazz by Toni Morrison
- Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
- Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
- Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
- A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
- Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
- Sons and Lovers by D.H. Lawrence
- Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
- Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
- A Separate Peace by John Knowles
- Light in August by William Faulkner
- The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
- A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
- Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
- Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
- In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
- The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias by Gertrude Stein
- The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
- The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
- Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
- White Noise by Don DeLillo
- O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
- Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
- The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
- Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
- The Bostonians by Henry James
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
- Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
- The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
- This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
- The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
- Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
- Kim by Rudyard Kipling
- The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike
- Where Angels Fear to Tread by E.M. Forster
- Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
I was surprised that I’ve read all 46 of the challenged titles and 96 of the 100 books on the list! How many have you read?
If you’re interested in what books have made the banned and challenged lists for the 21st century, check out the American Library Association’s site. You might be surprised by some of the books on the 2011 list. To tempt you to go look, The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins and To Kill a Mockingbird are two books on that list!