20 Times Banning A Book Completely Backfired

Ray Bradbury’s 1953 book Fahrenheit 451 (about the burning of books) was expurgated by its own publisher. In a high school edition, his publisher, Ballantine Books, quietly began removing words like “hell” and “damn” in 1967. Bradbury learned of these edits only in 1979, and promptly made his publisher put back the text.

Soviet publishers turned down Doctor Zhivago in 1956, but in November 1957, it was published in Italy by Feltrinelli. The CIA printed copies in Russian, which were then distributed to Soviet visitors at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The book spent 26 weeks at number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and its author, Boris Pasternak, was awarded the 1958 Nobel Prize in Literature (which Moscow coerced him into refusing).

George Orwell’s 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four was banned in the Soviet sphere under Glavlit censorship rules the following year and remained so until 1988. Ironically, the kind of authoritarian regime the book warned about was especially concerned with suppressing it. A person could be sentenced to a labor camp merely for possessing the book, while it circulated freely in the West and became a centerpiece of political discourse. Orwell couldn’t have asked for a more unsettling demonstration of his own point.

Finally deemed more likely to be “emetic” (i.e., vomit-inducing) than “aphrodisiac,” James Joyce’s Ulysses was pronounced not obscene by U.S. Judge John M. Woolsey in December 1933. Previously, U.S. Customs had incinerated copies of the book, which was originally published in February 1922 by a Parisian publisher. Random House published the American edition in January 1934, and sales were brisk. So much for keeping people from reading it!

The Kern County Board of Supervisors banned Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath from the county’s schools and libraries in August 1939. Groups of growers even organized public bonfires to burn copies of the book. And while the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel sold more than 430,000 copies in 1939, it remained banned in Kern County until 1941. Clearly, the bonfires weren’t doing much to hurt sales!

The Paris-based Olympia Press published Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita in 1955, and the book was banned in France the following year under pressure from the British. When G. P. Putnam’s Sons published Lolita in the U.S. two years later, it sold 100,000 copies in just three weeks and shot to number one on the New York Times bestseller list.

When George Orwell finished writing his novel Animal Farm in 1943, it was rejected by several publishers for fear of offending the Soviet Union, a wartime ally. (It was even turned down by T. S. Eliot of Faber & Faber.) Secker & Warburg finally published it in August 1945, and 4,500 copies were sold within four days. It was banned in the Soviet Bloc until the late 1980s.

Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in February 1885, was banned just a month later by the Concord Public Library, which pronounced the book “trash and suitable only for the slums” and objected to its coarse language and dialect. Twain was delighted, though. He assured his publisher that the ban was worth a “rattling tiptop puff” and 25,000 more sales. He certainly knew free publicity when he saw it!

The unabridged version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was privately printed in Florence in 1928; D. H. Lawrence died two years later. The full text remained banned in Britain and America for decades. In late 1960, the Penguin Books edition was tried at London’s Old Bailey, but Penguin was acquitted, and the novel sold 3 million copies in its first six weeks of release.

The Catcher in the Rye was written by J.D. Salinger and published in July 1951. While no national ban has ever been placed on the book, local school boards and libraries throughout the U.S. have challenged it for decades because of its profanity and portrayal of teenage rebellion. Despite all that controversy, the book has sold more than 65 million copies worldwide. Clearly, Holden Caulfield wasn’t going anywhere.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in March 1852 and became the second best-selling book of the 19th century after the Bible. More than one million copies were sold in Britain within twelve months of publication, while 300,000 were sold in the U.S. in its first year. Southern towns and states suppressed the book and intimidated booksellers that had it for sale, but to no avail. By then, readers clearly weren’t going to be told what they could and couldn’t read.

When Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, published in Paris in 1934, was finally released by Grove Press in the United States in June 1961 (after being banned and smuggled for 27 years), it sparked more than 60 local obscenity suits. It sold more than 1.5 million paperbacks in its first year. In June 1964, the Supreme Court ruled the book constitutionally protected.

Madame Bovary was originally serialized in La Revue de Paris in late 1856. Its author, Gustave Flaubert, was then put on trial for offending public morals, but was acquitted in February 1857 after his lawyer argued that the tragic end of the heroine was itself a moral lesson. When the standalone version of Madame Bovary was published two months later, it became an instant bestseller. Nothing like a public trial to get readers curious!

Fanny Hill, written by John Cleland in a debtors’ prison in London, was banned in Massachusetts in 1821 in the first obscenity case on record in the U.S. After 145 years under the ban, Fanny Hill was finally declared legal in March 1966, when the Supreme Court ruled that nothing should be censored unless it was “utterly without redeeming social value.”

Nazi stormtroopers disrupted screenings of the film adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s book, All Quiet on the Western Front, in 1930. Later, the regime banned Remarque’s novel, which was destroyed during a book burning in Nazi Germany on May 10, 1933. Even so, the novel sold one million copies in Germany within twelve months of its publication in January 1929, and foreign sales continued to climb.

Published anonymously by Voltaire in January 1759, Candide was banned by the Catholic Church and Geneva’s Grand Council for its ridicule of politicians and the clergy, but the proscription inspired more than 20 clandestine editions during the same year. In 1929, when Candide was being assigned for a Harvard University class, US Customs confiscated the books, but academic pressure caused Customs to drop the action.

In 1903, Jack London published The Call of the Wild, a story about a dog, which Mussolini’s Italy banned in 1929 because its themes of individualistic survival worried the regime. Nazi Germany also banned and publicly burned the book in 1933 because of London’s socialism. That’s a lot of controversy for a story about a dog!

The expanded Leaves of Grass was published in late 1881. Whitman refused to remove any poems when Boston’s district attorney threatened the Boston publisher, James R. Osgood & Co., with obscenity charges in May 1882, so the company canceled publication. David McKay of Philadelphia reissued Leaves of Grass later that year, and so much publicity surrounded the book that the entire new print run sold out upon release.

The novel The Well of Loneliness, published in July 1928, caused a literary scandal due to its exploration of female homosexuality (though it does not describe a sex act). James Douglas, editor of the Sunday Express, wrote that he’d sooner give a child “prussic acid” than the novel. British courts ordered the destruction of all UK copies in November 1928. A New York court cleared the US publisher of author Radclyffe Hall of charges in April 1929, and a so-called “Victory Edition” became a bestseller.

In August 1954, under the Comstock Act, rare translated copies of Aristophanes’ 411 BCE comedic satire Lysistrata, about a sex strike by Athenian women, were declared obscene contraband and seized in the US mail. After Attorney Edward de Grazia filed a federal suit, Postmaster General Arthur Summerfield backed down in March 1955 to avoid a trial, and the censors reluctantly released the books. A 2,400-year-old joke had gotten past them!

This content was created with the help of AI.