Top 100 Banned Classic Books
ClassicLiterature.com’s Top 100 Banned Classic Books is a list of the top 100 banned and challenged classic books. These works of classic literature are available for purchase now, but each was banned at some point in history. This list primarily consists of classic novels, with a few nonfiction books and titles considered modern classics.
| Rank | Book Title | Author | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Catcher in the Rye | J. D. Salinger | 1951 |
| 2 | Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | 1955 |
| 3 | To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | 1960 |
| 4 | 1984 (Nineteen Eighty-Four) | George Orwell | 1949 |
| 5 | Brave New World | Aldous Huxley | 1932 |
| 6 | The Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | 1939 |
| 7 | The Color Purple | Alice Walker | 1982 |
| 8 | Of Mice and Men | John Steinbeck | 1937 |
| 9 | Adventures of Huckleberry Finn | Mark Twain | 1884 |
| 10 | The Lord of the Flies | William Golding | 1954 |
| 11 | Ulysses | James Joyce | 1922 |
| 12 | The Great Gatsby | F. Scott Fitzgerald | 1925 |
| 13 | Slaughterhouse-Five | Kurt Vonnegut | 1969 |
| 14 | A Clockwork Orange | Anthony Burgess | 1962 |
| 15 | The Awakening | Kate Chopin | 1899 |
| 16 | Beloved | Toni Morrison | 1987 |
| 17 | Animal Farm | George Orwell | 1945 |
| 18 | The Sun Also Rises | Ernest Hemingway | 1926 |
| 19 | Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | 1936 |
| 20 | A Farewell to Arms | Ernest Hemingway | 1929 |
| 21 | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest | Ken Kesey | 1962 |
| 22 | The Handmaid’s Tale | Margaret Atwood | 1985 |
| 23 | Lady Chatterley’s Lover | D.H. Lawrence | 1928 |
| 24 | I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings | Maya Angelou | 1969 |
| 25 | Catch-22 | Joseph Heller | 1961 |
| 26 | Harry Potter (series) | J. K. Rowling | 1997-2016 |
| 27 | Invisible Man | Ralph Ellison | 1952 |
| 28 | As I Lay Dying | William Faulkner | 1930 |
| 29 | The Satanic Verses | Salman Rushdie | 1988 |
| 30 | Their Eyes Were Watching God | Zora Neale Hurston | 1937 |
| 31 | Native Son | Richard Wright | 1940 |
| 32 | In Cold Blood | Truman Capote | 1965 |
| 33 | Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl | Anne Frank | 1947 |
| 34 | Tropic of Cancer | Henry Miller | 1934 |
| 35 | Naked Lunch | William S. Burroughs | 1959 |
| 36 | The Call of the Wild | Jack London | 1903 |
| 37 | For Whom the Bell Tolls | Ernest Hemingway | 1940 |
| 38 | Fahrenheit 451 | Ray Bradbury | 1953 |
| 39 | The House of the Spirits | Isabel Allende | 1982 |
| 40 | Song of Solomon | Toni Morrison | 1977 |
| 41 | The Bluest Eye | Toni Morrison | 1970 |
| 42 | The Lord of the Rings | J.R.R. Tolkien | 1954 |
| 43 | Go Tell It on the Mountain | James Baldwin | 1953 |
| 44 | The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini | 2003 |
| 45 | The Hunger Games | Suzanne Collins | 2008 |
| 46 | Leaves of Grass | Walt Whitman | 1855 |
| 47 | Candide | Voltaire | 1759 |
| 48 | Sons and Lovers | D. H. Lawrence | 1913 |
| 49 | Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh | 1945 |
| 50 | Women In Love | DH Lawrence | 1920 |
| 51 | The Naked and the Dead | Norman Mailer | 1948 |
| 52 | The Things They Carried | Tim O’Brien | 1990 |
| 53 | Sophie's Choice | William Styron | 1979 |
| 54 | A Separate Peace | John Knowles | 1959 |
| 55 | Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | 1857 |
| 56 | Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | 1899 |
| 57 | All Quiet on the Western Front | Erich Maria Remarque | 1929 |
| 58 | The Jungle | Upton Sinclair | 1906 |
| 59 | Things Fall Apart | Chinua Achebe | 1958 |
| 60 | All the King's Men | Robert Penn Warren | 1946 |
| 61 | An American Tragedy | Theodore Dreiser | 1925 |
| 62 | Rabbit, Run | John Updike | 1960 |
| 63 | American Psycho | Bret Easton Ellis | 1991 |
| 64 | The Sound and the Fury | William Faulkner | 1929 |
| 65 | Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | 1818 |
| 66 | The Scarlet Letter | Nathaniel Hawthorne | 1850 |
| 67 | A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man | James Joyce | 1916 |
| 68 | Doctor Zhivago | Boris Pasternak | 1957 |
| 69 | The Decameron | Giovanni Boccaccio | 1353 |
| 70 | One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | 1962 |
| 71 | On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection | Charles Darwin | 1859 |
| 72 | Uncle Tom’s Cabin | Harriet Beecher Stowe | 1852 |
| 73 | The Adventures of Tom Sawyer | Mark Twain | 1876 |
| 74 | The Autobiography of Malcolm X | Malcolm X and Alex Haley | 1965 |
| 75 | The Wonderful Wizard of Oz | L. Frank Baum | 1900 |
| 76 | His Dark Materials | Philip Pullman | 1995-2000 |
| 77 | Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret | Judy Blume | 1970 |
| 78 | Persepolis | Marjane Satrapi | 2003 |
| 79 | Black Boy | Richard Wright | 1945 |
| 80 | Cat's Cradle | Kurt Vonnegut | 1963 |
| 81 | Forever | Judy Blume | 1975 |
| 82 | Final Exit | Derek Humphry | 1991 |
| 83 | The Master and Margarita | Mikhail Bulgakov | 1967 |
| 84 | Gulliver's Travels | Jonathan Swift | 1726 |
| 85 | The Metamorphosis | Franz Kafka | 1915 |
| 86 | The Canterbury Tales | Geoffrey Chaucer | 1387-1400 |
| 87 | The Prince | Niccolo Machiavelli | 1532 |
| 88 | Giovanni's Room | James Baldwin | 1957 |
| 89 | The Gulag Archipelago | Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | 1973 |
| 90 | Portnoy’s Complaint | Philip Roth | 1967 |
| 91 | Cry, the Beloved Country | Alan Paton | 1948 |
| 92 | The Communist Manifesto | Karl Marx | 1848 |
| 93 | Sister Carrie | Theodore Dreiser | 1900 |
| 94 | Moll Flanders | Daniel Defoe | 1722 |
| 95 | Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee | Dee Brown | 1970 |
| 96 | A Prayer for Owen Meany | John Irving | 1989 |
| 97 | The Well of Loneliness | Radclyffe Hall | 1928 |
| 98 | Flowers for Algernon | Daniel Keyes | 1966 |
| 99 | Last Exit to Brooklyn | Hubert Selby Jr. | 1964 |
| 100 | Maurice | E.M. Forster | 1971 |
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