Messed Up Reasons These Books Were Banned

The burning and banning of books have been associated with some of the darkest moments in human history. In 1933, the Nazi party of Germany began burning books that they believed undermined their ideology, among them works by Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Helen Keller, as well as socialist and anti-war works by Jack London and Ernest Hemingway.

But the fact is that the suppression of literature is no rare event, and attempts to get books banned or, at any rate, taken from the shelves of public schools and libraries, recurs around the world today. Most of the time, people's objections to works of literature come from a genuine belief in the book's unsuitability — that certain books are too "adult" for children, or that coarse language or graphic scenes might cause offense to readers. The American Library Association keeps track of how often books are "challenged" by members of the public, to draw attention to the ongoing, potentially dangerous phenomenon of censorship. It seems, with the frequency of attempted bans, it could be argued that we are barely less puritan in our taste in literature than we were when the ALA first began monitoring censorship back in the 1980s.

The Irish wit Oscar Wilde, whose own writings were often subject to censorship, wrote in his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray: "The books that the world calls immoral are books that show the world its own shame." That was written in 1890, but perhaps it is a point that we still have yet to learn. Here are some of the most misguided attempts to suppress books that have occurred over the years.

There were many reasons for James Joyce's masterpiece, Ulysses, to cause a stir when it was first published in 1922. Ostensibly the tale of Leopold Bloom's travels around Dublin over the course of 24 hours, the novel also includes scenes of defecation and masturbation, as well as many passages that were deemed blasphemous. Politics and Prose claims that Ulysses was "burned in serialized form in the U.S. in 1918 before it was burned as a published manuscript in Ireland in 1922, Canada in 1922, and England in 1923." The novel was banned in the US two years before publication following its serialization in Ezra Pound's magazine The Little Review and was banned in England, per the British Library.

However, the literary critic Kevin Birmingham has highlighted the irony of the suppression of Ulysses, namely, that it the censors aimed "to protect the delicate sensibilities of female readers," while the truth is that Ulysses "owes its existence to several women," such as the publisher Sylvia Beach, Joyce's patron Harriet Weaver, and, most importantly, Joyce's partner, Nora Barnacle. It is Barnacle who is now widely believed to be the model for the character Molly Bloom, whose stream-of-consciousness monologue forms the finale of the book and is a groundbreaking representation of the female psyche and sexual desire. In many ways, Ulysses' censors were attempting to keep women from seeing themselves represented too candidly.

Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a cornerstone of nonsense literature and a tour de force of illogical imagining. The White Rabbit, the Hatter, and Cheshire Cat have all entered the popular consciousness, while the absurdist language used is now legendary.

However, as Britannica mentions, Carroll's magnum opus was banned in one U.S. school in 1900 under the apprehension that the novel contains sexual subjects and allusions to — bafflingly — masturbation. However, critics have since pointed out that the ban was due to anxieties over the author's own personal life, rather than what could be found in the book itself.

In the 1930s, the book was then banned in a province of China after the governor took issue with the book's speaking animals, apparently "worried that the consequences of elevating animals to the same echelon as humans could be catastrophic for society," according to Britannica. In the 1960s, a decade after the animated Disney movie was released, the book again raised anxieties for American parents who saw parallels between the book's imagery and the psychedelic stylings of the decade's LSD-loving hippie movement ... although Carroll's book was a century-old by then.

Not that suppressing landmark American poetry is anything new. All the way back in the nineteenth century, Walt Whitman — in many ways one of the forebears of the Beat Generation — was having his own epic and era-defining work challenged by the censors of his day.

Many critics and fellow poets took issue with Whitman's defining work, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, though revised numerous times throughout the poet's life. The collection is characterized by its overt sensual and sexual imagery which, though tame by today's standards, so scandalized one reader that they burned their copy, according to the critic James E. Miller, while one critic described it as a "mass of stupid filth" due to the perception that it promoted free love, per the Walt Whitman Archive.

According to the Whitman Archive, the New England Society for the Suppression of Vice — a real society, with branches all over America — lobbied in 1882 to have Leaves of Grass withdrawn from publication, claiming it defied, "the Public Statutes concerning obscene literature." Potential alterations that could make the volume suitable for publication were suggested to Whitman, who refused them. His book was then famously "banned in Boston," which, though unfortunate, reportedly helped to boost sales of the collection elsewhere.

High on the American Library Association's list of frequently challenged books is Nobel Prize-winning author William Golding's 1954 tale of a group of British schoolboys are stranded on an eerie, uninhabited island, their attempts to form a rudimentary society of their own, and their subsequent descent into paranoia and animalistic violence.

ThoughtCo. explains some of the specific reasons why Lord of the Flies has been challenged by potential censors, most strikingly the racial slurs that recur throughout the novel. It is this aspect of the novel that has drawn opposition in 1988 from parents of schoolchildren in Toronto, Canada, who have stated that the book "denigrated Black people."

More widely, however, there have been a number of challenges that seem to oppose the very message of the book itself. The ALA notes that, in 1981, Lord of the Flies was challenged at schools in North Carolina due to the novel being "demoralizing inasmuch as it implies that man is little more than an animal." In this case, it would appear that those opposing the book just don't want to hear what it has to say.

It is surprisingly common for mainstream children's literature to attract vocal opposition from worried parents who find the content of this highly popular genre too immoral, too non-religious, or too adult for their children to cope with. The Harry Potter series is one of the most challenged books in recent years due to being perceived by many as anti-Christian, while according to Reading Partners, Roald Dahl's James & the Giant Peach is often challenged as too scary for its target age group. Although, I'm sure most of us can remember having a fascination with the more macabre elements of the entertainment we engaged with as children.

Another children's book to make a surprising appearance on the "most challenged" list is Maurice Sendak's 1963 classic Where the Wild Things Are. According to PEN America, Sendak's publishers, Harper & Row, were originally hesitant to publish the story of a boy who goes to bed without any dinner and, in his hunger, is transported to a jungle-tangled island inhabited by giant beasts. But its themes of "rebellion, fear, punishment, and escape" are, as PEN states, "exactly why it was an immediate hit."

The story's darker elements have, however, also drawn the censors, especially in the south of the US, where it was removed from many schools and libraries, while some opponents claim that the sending of a child to bed with no dinner is basically abuse.