Of the “Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century,” the American Library Association notes that 43 have been challenged and/or banned:
- The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
- The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
- The Color Purple, Alice Walker
- Ulysses, James Joyce
- Beloved, Toni Morrison
- The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
- 1984, George Orwell
- Lolita, Vladmir Nabokov
- Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
- Catch-22, Joseph Heller
- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
- The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
- As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
- A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
- Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
- Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
- Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
- Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
- Native Son, Richard Wright
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
- Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
- For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
- The Call of the Wild, Jack London
- Go Tell it on the Mountain, James Baldwin
- All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
- The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
- The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover, DH Lawrence
- A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
- In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
- Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
- Sons and Lovers, DH Lawrence
- Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut
- A Separate Peace, John Knowles
- Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
- Women in Love, DH Lawrence
- The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
- Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
- An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
- Rabbit, Run, John Updike
Of these 43, I’ve read 19% of them, many for my freshman honors history class in college. My favorite was Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. And now I have a few more novels to add to my TBR list.
How many have you read?
