Banned & beloved

Joseph Heller

The paradox that named every no-win rule since: sane enough to fear flying is sane enough to fly.

John Steinbeck

The Joads drive west from the Dust Bowl into the promise of California — and the promise breaks. Pulitzer, 1940.

Lois Lowry

A community without pain, color, or choice — and the boy given all the memories they traded away.

S.E. Hinton

Stay gold, Ponyboy — the teenage classic written by an actual teenager.

Harper Lee

Challenged somewhere in America nearly every year since 1960.

George Orwell

Banned for being pro-communist and anti-communist. Orwell would smile.

Alice Walker

Pulitzer Prize and permanent banned-list resident.

Toni Morrison

The ghost story school boards keep trying to bury.

Margaret Atwood

Banned hardest exactly where it reads most like a warning.

George Orwell

Refused by publishers in 1944, banned by regimes ever since.

Ray Bradbury

The book about burning books, expurgated by its own publisher.

J.D. Salinger

The most banned and most taught book of its century.

Kurt Vonnegut

Burned in a North Dakota furnace in 1973. So it goes.

Maya Angelou

Angelou's candor keeps it on both lists: banned and required.

William Golding

Schoolboys, an island, no adults — and the thin crust of civilization cracking.

Sylvia Plath

A brilliant young woman's New York summer — and the glass descending.

Ken Kesey

McMurphy vs. Nurse Ratched — the ward as America, the bet as everything.

Philip Pullman

A girl, her daemon, and a truth-telling compass against the theocracy of two worlds.