For a writing coach, I feel that I haven’t read as many of the classics, or even today’s bestsellers, as I should. So, imagine my surprise when I realized that I had read most of the books on the Radcliffe Publishing Course Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century, a list compiled at the request of Modern Library, an American book publishing imprint associated with Random House.
That surprise turned to shock when I discovered that almost half of those classics had either been challenged or banned by some libraries or schools around the country. As you will see on the list compiled by the Office for Intellectual Freedom, the banned books include:
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Grapes of Wrath & Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- 1984 by George Orwell
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
- For Whom the Bell Tolls by Earnest Hemingway
- The Call of the Wild by Jack London
- The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
- Sophie’s Choice by Willaim Styron
I could go on, but you get the point. And those banned books are just the start.
“Efforts to ban books in the United States have surged at a rate the American Library Association calls ‘unprecedented,’ with attempts currently at their highest level since the organization began tracking them 20 years ago,” wrote Carrie Spector in a 2022 article about banned books for the Stanford Graduate School of Education.
According to the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF), which reports on restricted and banned books, “Between January 1 and August 31, 2023, OIF reported 695 attempts to censor library materials and services and documented challenges to 1,915 unique titles – a 20% increase from the same reporting period in 2022, which saw the highest number of book challenges since ALA began compiling the data more than 20 years ago. The vast majority of challenges were to books written by or about a person of color or a member of the LGBTQIA+ community.”
Reading about others with different life situations and perspectives opens us up to one another. Not being able to do so because one segment of the population has banned books it objects to only divides us further than we are already.
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