1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant’s Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
To find out more about why these books were banned, please visit this link.
Wordly Obsessions 
Wow, I can’t belive all of these were banned! I knew ‘Catcher in the Rye’ was very controversial, but many of these books-twenty, at least-I’ve read with my school! Amazing how things have changed.
Not every book on this list has been banned, the ones in bold have, and the ones that are coloured are ones I’ve read. It seems any book that’s actually got something worth saying has been either banned or challenged.
Things haven’t changed that much Kayla, some of these titles are still challenged in various parts of the US. Some schools are forbidden to have them on their reading lists. I suppose it varies from state to state, but I’m glad I got to read some of them 🙂
While I believe no book should be banned, some of these I understand the uproar, such as the Satanic Verses, but most of the list is ridiculous
My sentiments exactly Kate. Which is why I love this list so much! Haven’t read Satanic Verses yet, but I look through it once and it confused me a lot!
I looked at the reasons for some of them, and I mean… really? LoTR banned for being satanic in 2001??
Some of them were to be expected during a certain time period like Nineteen-Eighty-Four and To Kill a Mockingbird, but some are just bizarre. I wish the site explained why Winnie-the-Pooh and Charlotte’s Web was banned. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?! – it, uhhh, encourages space travel? idek.
My favourite explanation was for Brave New World – “it made promiscuous sex ‘look like fun'”.
Awesome post, though.
WIll be following your blog too!
Hi Friande, thanks for the following and welcome to my blog 🙂
Yes, I can understand that some novels really were pushing the limits in terms of the accepted norms at the time. Somehow it always fascinates me how when a thing is ‘spoken’, it’s value is dismissed, but when it’s ‘written’ it suddenly becomes unacceptable. ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ deals with issues that are still considered a bit taboo even by our modern standards. ‘1984’ was prophetic in its dystopic depiction of the near future.
My favorite story concerning banned books is without a doubt the almost-annual attempts in Texas to ban Fahrenheit 451. (http://abclocal.go.com/ktrk/story?section=news/local&id=4625303)
The dialogue of that debate sort of goes like this:
Parents: You can’t make my children read this. I saw that there’s cussing in it and they burn the Bible.
Teachers: Yes… but when they burn the Bible, it’s supposed to be a *bad* thing. Anyway, how about we assign your child an alternate novel to read for class?
Parents: That’s not good enough. This book should be banned!
Teachers (having a seizure): Ga-a-ah!
Now I have the urge to go out and buy ‘Fahrenheit 451’! I can’t stand people telling me ‘don’t read this’… what on earth do they mean by don’t read it?!
Nobody has the right to censor books. I’m guessing that the girl who complained about the book is not very popular in school anymore. First of all, these parents should be taught to READ, read the damn book and discover what it’s actually TRYING to SAY!
How dumb can you get? Trying to ban a book whose very subject matter concerns the banning and burning of books. AND you try to do it on ‘Banned Book Week’. Lovely. Give the man a medal.
Been searching all over. Called the ALA, searched library databases, cannot find “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” on any list as having been banned or challenged. Need the info for a report on the book. Where did you get this list? ALA does NOT have it on their lists.
You obviously haven’t been looking hard enough Julian. Neither at my blogpost nor the ALA website. I clearly state that the titles in BOLD have been banned at some point, the rest have been challened. But anyway, the ALA on this link: http://www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/challengedclassics shows an oddly incomplete list, however I did take mine from this page.
As you can see some titles are missing from the list. They have obviously either tampered with it or done something.
Yet if you click on the other link it takes you to the complete list. Here are the titles they have (in hindsight) omitted: http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/radcliffes-rival-100-best-novels-list/
I’m starting to consider that the ALA website is a bit of a joke. They can’t even stick to the bloody list they put up the first place! Plus if nothing else convinces you then just read between the lines of the ALA’s careful wording of their reluctance to name some books as banned: “The titles not included may have been banned or challenged, but we have not received any reports on them.”
They are sitting on the fence for some reason. But I have seen Hitchhikers Guide turn up on lists for Banned Book Week over and over again. In fact one blogger states it was banned in Canada over a minor language issue. Check this: http://waggingthefox.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/rabid-reads-hitchhikers-guide-to-galaxy.html
The ALA dissapoint me. They explicitly state that they do not keep close tabs on banned/ challenged books and their records only go back to 1990. If I were you I’d do your research elsewhere.
Everybody keeps quoting that waggingthefox blog, but it quite clearly does NOT say that H2G2 was ever “banned in Canada”. It says it was banned in one school in Canada.
Hi Derek, I forgot about this conversation 🙂 I wish someone would clear this up. That list is not to be trusted really. Wish we had a definitive one.
Furthermore to the issue you raised Julian, it seems Douglas was an atheist and the book contains references to their being ‘no god’ (babelfish). I have not read the book yet but I suppose this would be enough grounds for banning in certain states in America. I can see it happening unfortunately.