Many books have been banned for not conforming to the political, religious or moral codes of their country.
Here, we shall be looking at ten controversial books which may have been banned around the world.
Although you’re unlikely to be jailed these days, you might have been once so read carefully.
1. Lady Chatterley’s Lover
Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published in 1928. The first edition was printed in Florence, Italy; it could not be published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960. A private edition was issued by Inky Stephensen’s Mandrake Press in 1929. The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical relationship between a working-class man and an aristocratic woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of unprintable words at the time.
The story is said to have originated from events in Lawrence’s own unhappy domestic life, and he took inspiration for the settings of the book from Eastwood in Nottinghamshire where he lived for a while. According to some critics, the fling of Lady Ottoline Morrell with “Tiger”, a young stonemason who came to carve plinths for her garden statues, also influenced the story. Lawrence at one time considered calling the novel Tenderness and made significant alterations to the text and story in the process of its composition. It has been published in three different versions.
2. Naked Lunch
Naked Lunch is a novel by William S. Burroughs originally published in 1959.
The book was originally published with the title The Naked Lunch in Paris in July 1959 by Olympia Press. Because of US obscenity laws, a complete American edition by Grove Press did not follow until 1962. It was titled Naked Lunch and was substantially different from the Olympia Press edition, because it was based on an earlier 1958 manuscript in Allen Ginsberg’s possession.
The article “the” in the title was never intended by the author, but added by the editors of the Olympia Press 1959 edition. Nonetheless The Naked Lunch remained the title used for the 1968 and 1974 Corgi Books editions, and the novel is often known by the alternative name, especially in the UK where these editions circulated.
The novel was included in Time magazine’s “100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005″.
David Cronenberg released a film of the same title based upon the novel and other Burroughs writings in 1991.
3. Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451 is a dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury which was first published in 1953.
The novel presents a future American society in which the masses are hedonistic and critical thought through reading is outlawed. The central character, Guy Montag, is employed as a “fireman” which, in this future, means “bookburner”. The number “451″ refers to the temperature at which book paper combusts. Although sources contemporary with the novel’s writing gave the temperature as 450 °C, Bradbury is believed to have thought “Fahrenheit” made for a better title; however, in an introduction to the 40th anniversary edition of the novel, Bradbury states that a person he spoke with at the local fire department said “Book-paper catches fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit”. The “firemen” burn them “for the good of humanity”. Written in the early years of the Cold War, the novel is a critique of what Bradbury saw as issues in American society of the era.
4. Lolita
Lolita (1955) is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, first written in English and published in 1955 in Paris, later translated by the author into Russian and published in 1958 in New York. The book is internationally famous for its innovative style and infamous for its controversial subject: the protagonist and unreliable narrator, middle-aged Humbert Humbert, becomes obsessed and sexually involved with a 12-year-old girl named Dolores Haze.
After its publication, Nabokov’s Lolita attained a classic status, becoming one of the best-known and most controversial examples of 20th century literature. The name “Lolita” has entered pop culture to describe a sexually precocious adolescent girl. The novel was adapted to film in 1962 and again in 1997.
Lolita is listed in the TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It is fourth on the Modern Library’s 1998 list of the 100 Best Novels of the 20th century.
5. Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary is Gustave Flaubert’s first published novel and considered his masterpiece. The story focuses on a doctor’s wife, Emma Bovary, who has adulterous affairs and lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life. Though the basic plot is rather simple, even archetypal, the novel’s true art lies in its details and hidden patterns. Flaubert was notoriously a perfectionist about his writing and claimed always to be searching for le mot juste (“the right word”).
The novel was attacked for obscenity by public prosecutors when it was first serialized in La Revue de Paris between October 1, 1856 and December 15, 1856, resulting in a trial in January 1857 that made the story notorious. After the acquittal on February 7, 1857, it became a bestseller when it was published as a book in April 1857, and now stands virtually unchallenged not only as a seminal work of Realism, but as one of the most influential novels ever written.
A 2007 poll of contemporary authors, published in a book entitled The Top Ten, cited Madame Bovary as one of the two greatest novels ever written, second only to Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina.
6. The Prince
The Prince (Italian: Il Principe) is a political treatise by the Italian public servant and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli. Originally called De Principatibus (About Principalities), it was originally written in 1513, but not published until 1532, five years after Machiavelli’s death. The Prince was one of the first works of modern philosophy, in which pragmatic ends, as opposed to teleological concepts, are the purpose. The treatise is not representative of the work published during his lifetime, but it is the most remembered, and the work responsible for bringing “Machiavellian” into wide usage as a pejorative term.
7. A Farewell to Arms
A Farewell to Arms is a semi-autobiographical novel written by Ernest Hemingway, first published in 1929. The novel is told through the point of view of Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American serving as an ambulance driver in the Italian army during World War I. The title is taken from a poem by 16th century English dramatist George Peele.
The novel is said to have been written at the home of Hemingway’s in-laws in Piggott, Arkansas and at the home of friends of Hemingway’s wife Pauline Pfeiffer W. Malcolm and Ruth Lowry home at 6435 Indian Lane, Mission Hills, Kansas while she was awaiting delivery of their baby.
The novel is about Hemingway’s World War I experiences and his relationship with Agnes von Kurowsky in Milan. His wife Pauline underwent a caesarean section as Hemingway was writing about Catherine Barkley’s childbirth.
On the surface, A Farewell to Arms is about the tragic romance between an American soldier Frederic Henry, and Catherine Barkley, a British nurse. Below the surface, the novel is about World War I and individual tragedy within the larger picture of greater tragedy. The novel portrays the cynicism of soldiers, the displacement of populations. Hemingway’s stature as an American writer was secured with the publication of A Farewell to Arms. A Farewell to Arms was adapted to film in 1932 and again in 1957.
8. The 120 Days of Sodom
The 120 Days of Sodom, or the School of Libertinism (alternatively The School of Licentiousness) (Les 120 journées de Sodome ou l’école du libertinage) is a novel by the French writer and nobleman Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, written in 1785. It tells the story of four wealthy male libertines who resolve to experience the ultimate sexual gratification in orgies. To do this, they seal themselves away for four months in an inaccessible castle with a harem of 46 victims, mostly young male and female teenagers, and engage four women brothel keepers to tell the stories of their lives and adventures. The women’s narratives form an inspiration for the sexual abuse and torture of the victims, which gradually mounts in intensity and ends in their slaughter.
The work remained unpublished until the twentieth century. In recent times it has been translated into many languages, including English, Japanese and German. Due to its themes of sexual violence and extreme cruelty, it has frequently been banned.
9. Nineteen Eighty-Four
Nineteen Eighty-Four or sometimes unofficially abbreviated to 1984 by George Orwell, published in 1949, is a dystopian novel about the totalitarian regime of the Party, an oligarchical collectivist society where life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, public mind control, and the voiding of citizens’ rights. In the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue), protagonist Winston Smith is a civil servant responsible for perpetuating the Party’s propaganda by revising historical records to render the Party omniscient and always correct, yet his meager existence disillusions him into rebellion against Big Brother, which leads to his arrest, torture, and conversion.
As literary political fiction, 1984 is a classic novel of the social science fiction sub-genre, thus, since its publication in 1949, the terms and concepts of Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Memory hole, et cetera, became contemporary vernacular, including the adjective Orwellian, denoting George Orwell’s writings and totalitarianism as exposited in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm (1945).
(Source: The Independent)
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agree with yr opinion.
thanks for your sharing.
you raised some good points here.