Banned Works of the World

• Ovid — The Art of Love — exiled by Augustus, 8 CE
• François Rabelais — Pantagruel — condemned by the Sorbonne, 1533
• Thomas More — Utopia — placed on the Index of Forbidden Books, 1559
• Galileo Galilei — Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems — banned 1633, under house arrest for the rest of his life
• John Cleland — Fanny Hill — banned/obscene in England for roughly two centuries
• Denis Diderot — Encyclopédie — license revoked by the French crown, 1759
• Marquis de Sade — Justine — Napoleon ordered his detention and the seizure of his papers, 1801
• Gustave Flaubert — Madame Bovary — French obscenity trial, 1857 (acquitted)
• Charles Baudelaire — Les Fleurs du Mal — French conviction, 1857; six poems suppressed until 1949
• Henrik Ibsen — Ghosts — refused stage production across Europe, 1881–1891
• Thomas Hardy — Jude the Obscure — burned by the Bishop of Wakefield, 1895
• Leo Tolstoy — Resurrection — censored in Russia, 1899
• James Joyce — Ulysses — serial installments seized in the US, 1920; UK publication suppressed until 1933
• D. H. Lawrence — The Rainbow — seized under obscenity law in the UK, 1915; 1,000+ copies destroyed
• D. H. Lawrence — Lady Chatterley’s Lover — publisher Vivian Greenwood’s 1929 pirate edition prosecuted; UK clean run until R v Penguin Books, 1960
• Aldous Huxley — Brave New World — banned in Ireland, 1932
• Erich Maria Remarque — All Quiet on the Western Front — burned by the Nazis, 1933
• Heinrich Mann, Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Toller, Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexology — 1933 Nazi book burnings
• George Orwell — Animal Farm & Nineteen Eighty-Four — suppressed across the Soviet bloc
• Boris Pasternak — Doctor Zhivago — banned in the USSR, 1958
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — withdrawn from Soviet circulation, 1965
• Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn — The Gulag Archipelago — published in samizdat; banned in the USSR, 1973

• Jomo Kenyatta — Facing Mount Kenya — banned in colonial Kenya, 1950s
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o — A Grain of Wheat & Petals of Blood — banned in Kenya, 1977
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o — Weep Not, Child & The River Between — withdrawn from Kenya’s school syllabus during the Kamirithu years
• Steve Biko — I Write What I Like — banned under apartheid South Africa
• Nelson Mandela — No Easy Walk to Freedom — banned under apartheid South Africa
• André Brink — Kennis van die aand (Looking on Darkness) — banned in South Africa, 1974
• Wole Soyinka — The Man Died — banned in Nigeria, 1972
• Frantz Fanon — The Wretched of the Earth — restricted under apartheid South Africa
• Hundreds of African National Congress titles — banned under apartheid, c. 1963 onward
• Tsitsi Dangarembga — This Mournable Body — her publisher pulled the novel amid state pressure in Zimbabwe, 2021

• Harriet Beecher Stowe — Uncle Tom’s Cabin — banned across the antebellum South, 1850s
• Frederick Douglass — Narrative — banned in Southern states; enslaved people faced punishment for learning to read
• Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass — Whitman fired from the Interior Department over it, 1865
• Mark Twain — Adventures of Huckleberry Finn — first ban by the Concord, Massachusetts public library, 1885
• James Joyce — Ulysses — United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, 1933; Judge Woolsey’s ruling opened the door to modern literature
• John Steinbeck — The Grapes of Wrath — burned in Kern County, California, 1939
• William Faulkner — Sanctuary — suppressed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1931
• Henry Miller — Tropic of Cancer — obscenity cases in US states through the 1960s; cleared by the Supreme Court, 1964
• Allen Ginsberg — Howl — obscenity trial, San Francisco, 1957 (acquitted)
• William S. Burroughs — Naked Lunch — Massachusetts Supreme Court decision, 1966
• D. H. Lawrence — Lady Chatterley’s Lover — Grove Press v. Christenberry, New York, 1959
• J. D. Salinger — The Catcher in the Rye — among the most challenged American novels of the late 20th century
• Kurt Vonnegut — Slaughterhouse-Five — burned and challenged in US schools, 1970s–80s
• Ray Bradbury — Fahrenheit 451 — ironically banned and challenged in US schools after 1976
• Toni Morrison — Beloved — challenged for sexual content, 1990s onward
• Bret Easton Ellis — American Psycho — challenged in US libraries and schools, 1990s
• Harper Lee — To Kill a Mockingbird — challenged and removed from school curricula, 1960s onward

• Khalil Gibran — The Prophet — banned in Lebanon, and later acclaimed worldwide
• Vladimir Nabokov — Lolita — published in Paris, 1955, after five US refusals; banned in the UK, France and New Zealand before its US release
• Salman Rushdie — Midnight’s Children — briefly subject to legal challenge in India, 1981
• Salman Rushdie — Shame — banned in Pakistan, 1984
• Salman Rushdie — The Satanic Verses — burned in England and India, 1988; fatwa issued 1989; the author lived under a price on his head for a decade
• North Korea — a total national ban on nearly all foreign books

• Percy Bysshe Shelley — Queen Mab — publisher Thomas William Hodgskin imprisoned for seditious libel, 1821
• Ambrose Bierce — The Devil’s Dictionary — banned in several US jurisdictions for irreverence
• Émile Zola — Germinal — prosecuted and withdrawn in Russia, censored elsewhere
• Radclyffe Hall — The Well of Loneliness — UK obscenity trial, 1928; withdrawn
• James Baldwin — banned and rejected across US libraries in the 1960s for candour about race and sexuality
• The banned-books lists of the American Library Association and Anne Haight’s Banned Books — hundreds of further titles catalogued by decades

The ALA and Anne Haight catalogues group hundreds of further titles by decade. The public-domain works they overlap with our own stock are the Suppressed Classics shelf at the top of this page — and every title above links straight to its copy in the library.