Banned Books That Are Actually Great

A ban is a form of literary criticism. It tells you that someone in a position of authority found a book dangerous — not offensive in the way bad taste is offensive, but threatening in the way accurate description is threatening. Reading the ban alongside the book reveals the gap between what the authority said was dangerous and what the book actually said. That gap is almost always more interesting than either.

The seven books here were banned by different authorities for different stated reasons. Zamyatin's We was blocked by the Soviet state because it depicted a Soviet-style state. Animal Farm was suppressed by British publishers because wartime alliance with Stalin made Orwell's allegory politically inconvenient. Their Eyes Were Watching God was challenged partly because Hurston wrote her characters in dialect — the same dialect her critics would have preferred she make invisible.

In every case, the ban is evidence of the book's accuracy. The thing that made these books dangerous was the thing that made them good.

There's a meaningful difference between a book being formally banned by a government — We, Animal Farm in Soviet bloc countries — and a book being challenged or removed from school curricula in democratic countries. Both appear on this list. The first is censorship with teeth: Zamyatin was expelled from the Writers' Union and eventually forced into exile. The second is a more complicated argument about appropriateness, age, and community standards.

We don't think the distinction changes which books deserve to be read. But it's worth knowing which kind of danger each book represented. The Handmaid's Tale has been challenged in American school districts hundreds of times; it has never been formally banned. Lord of the Flies has been removed from individual school syllabi in the United States and Canada; it has never been prohibited. To Kill a Mockingbird has been challenged from two opposite directions simultaneously.

All seven remain in print, widely available, and in many cases assigned reading in the schools that once tried to remove them. This is its own kind of evidence.