10 book bans that backfired on their authors and 10 that paid off

The legal proceedings brought in the United Kingdom against Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1960 did nothing to dampen the novel’s success. This book, which explores social classes, desire, and an affair that defied conventional social boundaries, became a true national sensation, and Penguin had already printed 200,000 copies in anticipation of an acquittal.

The ban on Ulysses in the United States helped make it the obscenity case that everyone still remembers today. This dense and unruly novel by Joyce, which chronicles an ordinary day in Dublin, went from being a notorious contraband to a literary monument once Judge John Woolsey authorized its import into the United States.

The obscenity trial surrounding Howl gave Allen Ginsberg’s poem a legal aura that no marketing budget could ever have achieved. This raw, breathless text about alienation, sexuality, and the spiritual collapse of the modern era thus took its place in the history of American free speech, rather than being buried in it.

The Well of Solitude was banned in Great Britain because of its depiction of lesbian life, but that ban only served to reinforce its status as a seminal work. This serious and poignant novel about isolation, identity, and the price one pays for being considered unnatural has gained symbolic power precisely because the authorities tried so hard to silence it.

"Lolita" is one of those books for which controversy and commercial success have become inseparable. This ambiguous and unsettling novel by Nabokov, which explores obsession, manipulation, and the predatory nature of an adult, only attracted more attention and fascination when bans in several countries attempted to censor it.

For decades, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer was considered legally objectionable, but culture evolved under its influence. Its laid-back, explicit, and self-mythologizing portrayal of sex, poverty, and life as an expatriate in Paris has become one of the prime examples cited to explain why censorship laws have changed.

One might have thought that Fanny Hill would be the kind of book that respectable authorities could simply dismiss out of hand. Instead, this 18th-century novel—which deals with seduction, survival, and sexual misadventures—found itself at the center of a major case before the Supreme Court, which is not exactly a resounding victory for the censors.

The Satanic Verses became one of the most controversial books of the late 20th century, as attempts to ban it turned the novel into a major source of controversy on a global scale. Rushdie’s sprawling, dreamlike work—which explores migration, faith, identity, and blasphemy—did not disappear under pressure; it has become impossible to discuss modern censorship without mentioning it.

The protests against Harry Potter in schools and libraries were not enough to consign the series to oblivion. An extremely popular series of novels exploring magic, friendship, death, and coming of age was bound to be a huge success, and these repeated protests only served to heighten its appeal—the allure of the forbidden fruit.  

When Chicago’s public schools briefly removed Persepolis from their shelves in 2013, the decision drew exactly the kind of attention that censors generally claim to want to avoid. Satrapi’s graphic memoir about childhood, the revolution, repression, and daily life in post-revolutionary Iran generated even more buzz once adults tried to make it disappear.

The second half of this list is less reassuring, as some bans are indeed effective. Here are ten cases where books have long been kept out of readers’ hands.

The Qin dynasty’s book burning is still talked about today, as it appears to have destroyed most copies of the Confucian classics. Texts dealing with ethics, order, governance, rituals, and the ideal organization of society had to be reconstructed afterward—which is pretty much the pinnacle of what censorship can achieve in terms of concrete victory.

The Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books endured for centuries, and this longevity is not without significance. While it certainly did not succeed in eradicating all dangerous ideas, it undeniably functioned as a system for controlling access to works on theology, philosophy, science, and political thought for many Catholic readers.

Galileo’s work, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was placed on the Index in 1633 and was not removed from it until 1835. This book, presented in the form of a conversation about the workings of the universe and clearly favoring heliocentrism, was banned for generations in Catholic countries.

William Tyndale’s English translation of the New Testament was condemned in England, seized, and publicly burned. A translation intended to make the Scriptures accessible to the general public became so dangerous that its distribution required the use of smuggling networks rather than free circulation.  

Doctor Zhivago became an international bestseller, but in the Soviet Union, the ban remained in effect for decades. Pasternak’s novel, which deals with love, upheaval, individual conscience, and the Russian Revolution, was published abroad in 1957 and was not officially published in the Soviet Union until 1987.

“The Gulag Archipelago” shocked readers outside the Soviet Union, but that does not mean that Soviet censorship failed. Solzhenitsyn’s sweeping account of arrests, imprisonment, forced labor, and the apparatus of state terror was denounced within the country itself, and the regime used every means at its disposal to prevent its normal distribution.

These days, school bans can take much more subtle and petty forms, such as simply removing a book from a student’s immediate reach. Looking for Alaska, a novel that explores grief, desire, guilt, and the search for identity among teenagers, has been removed from American public schools on several occasions, meaning that real students could no longer easily access it.

The novel Nineteen Minutes has also been banned on several occasions in U.S. public schools, and these removals have a real, tangible impact. Picoult’s novel, which deals with bullying, violence, and the aftermath of a school shooting, does not need to disappear from the entire country for censorship to achieve its goal; it is enough for it to disappear from the bookshelf at the end of the hallway.

In recent years, Sold has been banned time and again, which shows just how effective censorship in schools can be. A novel that deals with child trafficking, exploitation, and the loss of innocence becomes much harder to find when it is systematically removed from places where young readers might have discovered it.

“Tricks” rounds out this list because it shows just how effectively today’s censorship can target a book and exert constant pressure. Hopkins’s novel, which follows teenagers trapped in situations of abuse, trafficking, and sexual exploitation, has been banned so often that many students simply never get the chance to read it where they should be able to do so freely.