The right to free speech and freedom of the press. These rights are covered under the First Amendment to the Constitution. Despite this, there have been many attempts to ban or remove certain literary works from school and public libraries for various reasons, and some have been 'sanitized' at times in their publishing history (even without author consent).
Banned Books Week (Sept. 25 - Oct. 2 for 2010) is an annual campaign to highlight this issue. Show your support for free speech and free press. Check to see if your local library will be holding any special events, or just pick up a banned or challenged book and read it, and let others know about it.
Here is a list of just a few banned or challenged books, and the various 'reasons' people have gone after them:
Too Political
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Animal Farm - George Orwell
1984 - George Orwell
Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Too Much Sex
Tess of the d'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Ulysses - James Joyce
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
Lady Chatterley's Lover - D.H. Lawrence
Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Peyton Place - Grace Metalious
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
Jaws - Peter Benchley
Forever - Judy Blume
Beloved - Toni Morrison
Irreligious
On the Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
The Lord of the Rings trilogy - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Last Temptation of Christ - Nikos Kazantzakis
Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
Socially Offensive
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin - Benjamin Franklin
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
James and the Giant Peach - Roald Dahl
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
Cujo - Stephen King
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
Ordinary People - Judith Guest
A Thousand Acres - Jane Smiley
