banned books
Prohibited reading material
Banned books are works that authorities—governments, schools, libraries, or religious institutions—have prohibited or restricted.
The banning typically targets content deemed obscene, politically dangerous, or morally corrupting.
Many celebrated works have been banned somewhere: Ulysses, The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird.
Banned Books Week, observed annually, promotes the freedom to read.
- samizdatClandestine dissident publishing
- librariesPublic book lending institutions
- obscenityIndecent word or act
- school boardsBodies governing local education
- age appropriateFitting for one's maturity
parental advisory · censorship · McCarthyism · government · underground press · dissidents · Fahrenheit · Inquisition · Ulysses · Lady Chatterley · literature · blasphemy · content warning · political dissent · thought police · underground publishing · intellectual freedom · Soviet Union
- banned books1984, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Lady Chatterley
- library exhibitsfirst editions, illustrated books, medieval manuscripts, illuminated texts, graphic novels
- Literary Historyliterary canon, ancient literature, medieval period, Elizabethan era, Victorian era
- media regulationcensorship, content moderation, press censorship, film censorship, art censorship
- Dissident Literaturesamizdat, underground press, prison writing, protest poetry, manifestos
- literature curiositieslast words, unfinished works, apocrypha, hidden messages, marginalia
banned booksrequired reading
Assigned essential literature
recommended reading · curriculum standards · textbooks · classics