Sexual
Sexual content was the dominant censorship pretext of the 19th and 20th centuries. Flaubert was tried in France for Madame Bovary (1856); Lawrence was prosecuted in Britain for Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928); Miller's Tropic of Cancer was banned in the US until 1961; Nabokov's Lolita circulated in a grey zone for years. Many of the most celebrated works of world literature were first encountered by their audiences as contraband. The books listed here were prosecuted โ and are now in print everywhere.
A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess
A Court of Thorns and Roses
Sarah J. Maas
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
A Separate Peace
John Knowles
Abyssinian Chronicles
Moses Isegawa
Agostino
Alberto Moravia
All Boys Aren't Blue
George M. Johnson
American Psycho
Bret Easton Ellis
An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser
Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt
Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret
Judy Blume
Ars Amatoria
Ovid
Beloved
Toni Morrison
Black Boy
Richard Wright
Bless Me, Ultima
Rudolfo Anaya
Borstal Boy
Brendan Behan
Boy
James Hanley
Brave New World
Aldous Huxley
Breathless
Jennifer Niven
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
Elizabeth Smart
Carrie
Stephen King
Catch-22
Joseph Heller
Crank
Ellen Hopkins
Drama
Raina Telgemeier
Droll Stories
Honorรฉ de Balzac
Dubliners
James Joyce
Duffy
James Plunkett
East of Eden
John Steinbeck
Eleanor & Park
Rainbow Rowell
Elmer Gantry
Sinclair Lewis
Ender's Game
Orson Scott Card
Family Limitation
Margaret Sanger
Fanny Hill
John Cleland
Fifty Shades of Grey
E.L. James
Fight Club
Chuck Palahniuk
Flowers for Algernon
Daniel Keyes
For Bread Alone
Mohamed Choukri
Forever
Judy Blume
Frisk
Dennis Cooper
Fun Home
Alison Bechdel
Gender Queer: A Memoir
Maia Kobabe
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin
Girls in Their Married Bliss
Edna O'Brien
Girls of Riyadh
Rajaa Alsanea
Go Ask Alice
Anonymous
Go Tell It on the Mountain
James Baldwin
God's Little Acre
Erskine Caldwell
Howl and Other Poems
Allen Ginsberg
Hubert Selby Jr.: Last Exit to Brooklyn
Hubert Selby Jr.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou
In the Dream House
Carmen Maria Machado
Inside Linda Lovelace
Linda Lovelace
Into the River
Ted Dawe
Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
It
Stephen King
Justine
Marquis de Sade
Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue
Marquis de Sade
Ka
Taslima Nasrin
Kaffir Boy
Mark Mathabane
Lady Chatterley's Lover
D.H. Lawrence
Lady Chatterley's Lover (Japanese translation)
D.H. Lawrence
Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman
Les 120 Journรฉes de Sodome
Marquis de Sade
Les Fleurs du Mal
Charles Baudelaire
Les Onze Mille Verges
Guillaume Apollinaire
Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov
Looking for Alaska
John Green
Looking on Darkness
Andrรฉ Brink
Lysistrata
Aristophanes
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Marks of Identity
Juan Goytisolo
Marquis de Sade: A Biography
Donald Thomas
Marriage and Morals
Bertrand Russell
Memoirs of Hecate County
Edmund Wilson
Milo Manara: The Harem
Milo Manara
Moll Flanders
Daniel Defoe
Myra Breckinridge
Gore Vidal
Naked Lunch
William S. Burroughs
Nana
รmile Zola
Native Son
Richard Wright
Nineteen Minutes
Jodi Picoult
On the Road
Jack Kerouac
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel Garcรญa Mรกrquez
One Thousand and One Nights
Anonymous
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
Samuel Richardson
Peyton Place
Grace Metalious
Portnoy's Complaint
Philip Roth
Ragazzi di vita
Pier Paolo Pasolini
Reborn
Forough Farrokhzad
Red Sorghum
Mo Yan
Running Loose
Chris Crutcher
Satan's Stones
Moniru Ravanipur
Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih
Serve the People!
Yan Lianke
Sexual Ethics
Auguste Forel
Shanghai Baby
Wei Hui
Show Me
Will McBride
Sister Carrie
Theodore Dreiser
Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut
Snow Falling on Cedars
David Guterson
Sold
Patricia McCormick
Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison
Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence
Speak
Laurie Halse Anderson
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
Tessa, a Gata
Cassandra Rios
The 'Genius'
Theodore Dreiser
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sherman Alexie
The Awakening
Kate Chopin
The Barracks
John McGahern
The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
The Blind Owl
Sadeq Hedayat
The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison
The Butcher Boy
Patrick McCabe
The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger
The Chocolate War
Robert Cormier
The Clergyman's Daughter
George Orwell
The Collected Stories of Seรกn O'Faolรกin
Seรกn O'Faolรกin
The Color Purple
Alice Walker
The Country Girls
Edna O'Brien
The Dark
John McGahern
The Decameron
Giovanni Boccaccio
The Diary of a Young Girl
Anne Frank
The Ginger Man
J. P. Donleavy
The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
The Hive
Camilo Josรฉ Cela
The House of the Spirits
Isabel Allende
The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros
The Informer
Liam O'Flaherty
The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
The Land of Spices
Kate O'Brien
The Little Red Schoolbook
Sรธren Hansen & Jesper Jensen
The Lonely Girl
Edna O'Brien
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
Brian Moore
The Lord of the Flies
William Golding
The Monk
Matthew Lewis
The Moon and the Bonfires
Cesare Pavese
The Naked and the Dead
Norman Mailer
The Noodle Maker
Ma Jian
The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosiลski
The Patience Stone
Atiq Rahimi
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Stephen Chbosky
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Oscar Wilde
The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
The Rainbow
D.H. Lawrence
The Stone Virgins
Yvonne Vera
The Story of O
Pauline Rรฉage
The Story of Zahra
Hanan al-Shaykh
The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway
The Tailor and Ansty
Eric Cross
The Things They Carried
Tim O'Brien
The Tin Drum
Gรผnter Grass
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
The Yacoubian Building
Alaa Al Aswany
Thirteen Reasons Why
Jay Asher
Tobacco Road
Erskine Caldwell
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
Total Abuse
Peter Sotos
Touba and the Meaning of Night
Shahrnush Parsipur
Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller
Tropic of Capricorn
Henry Miller
Ulysses
James Joyce
Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
Water for Elephants
Sara Gruen
Woman at Point Zero
Nawal El Saadawi
Women Without Men
Shahrnush Parsipur