Censored - the books they didn't want us to read (2024)

FAQs

What is the #1 most banned book of all time? ›

What Is the Most Banned Book in America? For all time, the most frequently banned book is 1984 by George Orwell. (How very Orwellian!) The most banned and challenged book for 2020 was George by Alex Gino.

In the novel, Fahrenheit 451, it is illegal to read books because society does not want anyone to gain knowledge or think anything other than what they are told and allowed to think.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that those protections are broad under the First Amendment, and necessary for self-expression. But attempts to ban or restrict access to books, which are often driven by an agenda to divide communities and isolate viewpoints, undermines artistic freedom.

Some school districts aimed to ban the book from schools because they believed the book has unsuitable topics for children to read about. One major complaints was that the story portrayed talking animals that can communicate and act just like humans.

There were concerns over the violence and increasingly dark tone of the later books but most of the censorship attempts were for religious reasons. It was also banned in some Christian schools in the UK.

Get South Florida local news, weather forecasts and entertainment stories to your inbox. Sign up for NBC South Florida newsletters. PEN America's data shows there were more than 4,000 instances of booking banning across the nation during the first half of the 2023-2024 school year.

Fahrenheit 451 wasn't ever banned across the United States, but some censoring did take place. The book was subject to expurgation from the publisher to make the text more appropriate for high school students.

Orwell's “1984” was challenged for its pro-communist and sexually explicit content, alongside other subversive and dystopian stories such as Orwell's “Animal Farm” and Alduous Huxley's “Brave New World,” but has since become known as one of the most significant rationalizations for freedom of speech and expression.

The main reasons why The Giver was banned or challenged include the violent content related to euthanasia, suicide, and infanticide, and the sexually suggestive content in the novel.

Community standards may be taken into account in book banning. Although censorship violates the First Amendment right to freedom of speech, some limitations are constitutionally permissible.

Why is censoring history bad? ›

The process of censoring also downplays or erases entirely the injustices that minorities have faced as well as the historical events where these groups were mistreated. The justification for this was usually that it would make students upset or uncomfortable.

Twisted by Laurie Halse Anderson

Why it's banned: Twisted was banned because its content included sex, child abuse, suicide, and drug abuse.

Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham. Beginning in 1965, it was forbidden to read Green Eggs and Ham in Maoist China because of its “portrayal of early Marxism,” and the ban was not lifted until author Theodor Seuss Geisl's death in 1991.

The "Captain Underpants" books are among the American Library Association's list of the top 100 most banned and challenged books from the past decade, due to complaints from parents about violent imagery.

From the time of its publication in 1947 until 1972, the book was "banned" by the New York Public Library due to the then-head children's librarian Anne Carroll Moore's hatred of the book.

The banning and censoring of the Bible has a long and multifaceted history that continues to this day, and although it is not typically included within popular lists of banned books, it is safe to assert that the Bible is the most banned and censored book in history.

1. The rarest book in the world is a 1593 first edition of Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare. The Bodleian's copy "is the only known copy of this book in existence."

I'm Chris Klimek—let's dive in. Colleen Connolly: So New English Canaan, it's a book that was published in 1637, so that's almost 400 years ago. Klimek: Colleen Connolly recently wrote a piece for Smithsonian about New English Canaan, the first book to be banned in what is now the United States of America.

Since 2001, the American Library Association has posed the top ten most frequently challenged books per year on their website. Using the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century, ALA has also noted banned and challenged classics. The list is sorted alphabetically by default.