Banned Books
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland In 1931, the Governor of Hunan Province in China, distressed by the supposedly disrespectful idea of animals using human language, banned Lewis Carroll’s classic children’s fantasy and ordered copies of it destroyed.
Black Beauty Putting the words ‘black’ and ‘beauty’ together in a book title was thought too racy by South Africa’s old apartheid regime and Anna Sewell’s famous story of a horse’s life was banned.
Fahrenheit 451 In 1992, students at a California school received copies of Ray Bradbury’s science fiction masterpiece in which potentially corrupting words like ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ had been blacked out. Ironically, the book is set in a future society in which books are censored.
Animal Farm George Orwell’s political allegory seems to annoy just about everybody. As a vicious satire on Stalinism, it was banned in the Soviet Union for many years as ‘anti-communist’ but, in some US states, it has been banned from public libraries for being too ‘pro-communist’.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover D.H. Lawrence’s novel was barred from publication for decades because of its sexual explicitness. In 1960, Penguin Books faced prosecution when they tried to publish it. ‘Is this the sort of book you would want your wife or servants to read?’, the jury at the ensuing trial was famously asked. It seems it was and it became a bestseller.
