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Since the very beginnings of the written word, texts have been banned, censored and burnt, and writers tried in court, vilified and their lives threatened for putting their imaginations into print. The recent physical attack on British author Salman Rushdie reminds us that the art of fiction can sometimes be literally a matter of life and death. In almost every instance though, banned books evolve into historic turning points, whether that’s in literary way with a loosening of censorship regulations, or in a societal way with the changing of laws and ways of thinking. In many respects, banned books mark the progress of human enlightenment and understanding of ourselves. The book lovers at Country House Library have selected ten vintage publications from our ‘top shelves’.
“Muscles aching to work, minds aching to create - this is man.” ― John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Nobel Prize winning author in 1962, John Steinbeck’s (1902 – 68) best known work The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939. The story is an epic account of the efforts of an emigrant farming family, the ‘Joads’, to reach the ‘promised land’ of California from the dust bowl of Oklahoma. Attacked from the political left and right wings in America the book was banned, burnt, but “above all, it was read” according to Steinbeck biographer, Peter Lisca. Some of the most vociferous opponents of the book were the Californian farmers who said the depiction of their cruel attitude to emigrant workers was "communist propaganda”.
“I don't exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.” ― J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
The first recorded challenge to J(erome) D(avid) Salinger’s (1919 – 2010) novel, narrated by adolescent Holden Caulfield, took place in 1960, when an Oklahoma teacher was fired for teaching the book to her 11th grade students. Although she successfully appealed her dismissal, the book was removed from the school. Between 1986 and 2000, at least nine different attempts to remove The Catcher in the Rye from US schools were based on the novel’s use of profanity and sexual references. Three of these attempts were successful. Another commonly cited reason is the novel’s use of vulgar and obscene language, as well as statements defamatory to God. Other, less common reasons for challenging the novel include accusations that the book is anti-white, immoral, and/or violent. The reclusive author rejected many offers to adapt his work for the screen. In 1999 his ex-lover said, "The only person who might ever have played Holden Caulfield would have been J. D. Salinger."
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
George Orwell, the pen name of Eric Arthur Blair (1903 – 1950), wrote his two most successful novels, both political satires, close to his untimely death from tuberculosis, aged 47. Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1950) brought inevitable comparisons with the 19th century political satirist Jonathan Swift. Hard to exaggerate the massive influence the repeatedly banned book Nineteen Eighty Four has exerted, not just in science fiction, but also popular culture including music, journalism, and real-life politics and law-making. Some of Orwell’s fictions such as ‘newspeak, ‘doublethink, the ‘thought police’, and ‘Big Brother’ have resonated through the modern age and passed into common language.
Published in 1748 and more usually known as Fanny Hill, John Cleland’s (1709-89) erotic novel enjoyed enormous sales for that era, netting the publishers over £10,000, but earnt its author only 20 guineas! Cleland was summoned before the Privy Council for indecency but discharged. The work employs the main protagonist in an absorbed examination of sexuality, in both men and women, in its many varieties and in minute physiological detail.
“Sex and a cocktail: they both lasted about as long, had the same effect, and amounted to the same thing.” ― D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover
Often the most thumbed literary work in many a school library, D. H. Lawrence’s (1885 -1930) tale of Lady Constance Chatterley and her gamekeeper lover Oliver Mellors, written in 1932, was banned in the UK until the landmark trial of 1960. Lawrence’s detailed and poetic descriptions of sexual union and uncompromising use of four-letter words was deemed to be unpublishable. Penguin publishers were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act of 1959 but acquitted after testimony by eminent authors including E. M. Forster, R. Hoggart, and Dame Helen Gardner. The victory had profound effect on both writing and publishing in subsequent decades.
“Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” ― Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
First published in 1932, Brave New World is a fable about a world state in the 7th century AF (after Ford), where social stability is based on a scientific caste system. Human beings, graded from highest intellectuals to lowest manual workers, hatched from incubators and brought up in communal nurseries, learn by conditioning to accept their social destiny. With a liberal smattering of ‘casual’ sex, the book was first banned in its year of publication in Ireland for being anti-religion, anti-family, and blasphemous. Australia quickly followed suit, and then eight states in the US. Although frequently cited as a horrific work, critics have argued that it is really a black comedy. Invest in this classic vintage issue from Penguin books and avoid any proscribed thinking!
“It is as painful perhaps to be awakened from a vision as to be born.” ― James Joyce, Ulysses
Written and serialized over a period of eight years, from 1914 to 1921, in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, work was suspended in 1920 after a chapter provoked a prosecution for obscenity. The final work was banned in the USA until 1933 and in Britain until 1937. The various chapters roughly correspond to the episodes of Homer’s Odyssey. Joyce described the theme of the Odyssey as ‘the most beautiful, all-embracing theme…greater, more human, than that of Hamlet, Don Quixote, Dante, Faust...’
“He had carefully avoided her out of the natural cowardice that characterizes the stronger sex.” ― Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert (1821-80) is considered to be one of the masters of 19th century fiction. Born in Rouen, the son of a noted physician, his first published novel Madame Bovary (1857) is the story of the adulteries and eventual suicide of a doctor’s wife in provincial Normandy. Certain passages were judged to be offensive to public morals and both the author and his publisher were tried but acquitted, following which the novel became an instant best-seller. The book is still considered by past and existing writers to be one of the most perfect works of fiction ever written. Henry James said, "Madame Bovary has a perfection that not only stamps it, but that makes it stand almost alone..” and Vladimir Nabokov said that "stylistically it is prose doing what poetry is supposed to do".
“The longest way must have its close - the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning.” ― Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin
The only female author in this selection of banned books and yet Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 – 1896) is probably the one who changed the world most profoundly. Her 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin depicting the lives and terrible conditions endured by the enslaved African Americans, stirred the collective consciences of the northern states and fermented outrage in the southern. In less than a year the book sold an unprecedented 300,000 copies and generated a slew of ‘Anti-Tom’ novels from writers in the South attempting to depict a more benign view of slavery. After the start of the civil war, Stowe met President Lincoln in Washington where Lincoln was alleged to have said “so you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war”.
“To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.” ― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
This 1962 novel by Anthony Burgess (1917 – 93), marking a new development in the Joycean tradition of ‘stream of conciousness’, with inventive word-play and rhyming slang, reached cult status following the film version by Stanley Kubrick in 1972, and is considered to be one of the most influential dystopian novels ever written. The story follows the 15 year old gang leader Alex and his friends (the ‘droogs’) as they wreak extreme violence in a near-future cityscape. The book was banned for its obscene language by some educational establishments in the US and the film was also controversial for its depiction of the novel’s rape scene. It was withdrawn from circulation in 1973 by Kubrick’s request, as he believed recent crimes in the UK may have been influenced by the film’s violent scenes. Burgess himself had a complicated relationship with the book saying, “I do not like the book as much as others I have written: I have kept it, till recently, in an unopened jar — marmalade, a preserve on a shelf, rather than an orange on a dish”.
Not only a selection of proscribed publications spanning two centuries, but also a roll call of some of the finest writers in the English (and French!) language. With a range of prices and literary genres, there’s something here for all readers and collectors of world-changing books.
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