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Banned Books Week--Read a Classic Banned Book

Classic Banned Books

Interestingly, many books that are now considered classics have been banned in the past and some continue to be banned or challenged today. We've compiled a few lists of these books so you can see why these classics were banned or challenged. You can also check out the print or eBook versions of many of these books and decide for yourself...

• Award Winning Books That Have Been Banned or Challenged
  This list has books that have won major awards such as the Pulitzer Prize or the Nobel Prize that have been banned like The Color Purple by Alice Walker, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner. 
• Modern Library's 100 Best Novels
  These are books chosen as the best novels published since 1900. This includes novels like The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
• More Banned Classics
  There are even more classics that have been banned or challenged on this list like The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. 

What is a Banned Book?

Books have been banned as long as there have been books and continue to be banned or challenged even today. COM Library stands firmly behind freedom of speech and the American Library Association (ALA) code:

“We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources.”

A banned book is a book that may be:

• removed from a library or libraries;
• not allowed to be published;
• not allowed to enter an entire country;
• not allowed to exist: to be physically destroyed, typically by burning, such as the notorious book burning in Nazi Germany.
• The most extreme form of banning is the death or demand for the death of the author, as during the Inquisition, or more recently with Salman Rushdie.
• A challenged book is one that someone has tried to ban, but did not succeed.

Why Are Books Banned or Challenged?

The reason to ban books generally boils down to ideas that are perceived as dangerous in some way to an individual, group, or government that does not want other people to have access to that idea, whether the idea is about God, government or society.

Issues to Consider

• What happens when people are denied access to books and the ideas contained in them?
• What happens when an author’s right to freedom of speech (in this country) is denied?
• Is it a coincidence that some of the greatest books ever written are also some of the most banned or challenged books?

Go to the Banned Books guide. See all Book & eBook news.