The nation has seen a surge in book bans over the past two years as parents, conservative activists, and elected officials have flooded school districts with requests to wipe scores of titles from classrooms and libraries - with Florida still leading the pack in such incidents.Īfter more than 200 books were banned in various school districts across Florida between the summer of 2021 and 2022, districts continued the crackdown, banning 357 books between July and December 2022, according to the nonprofit organization PEN America. Still, there's one item school districts in Florida appear to have consistently banned more than almost any other U.S. It's part of a nationwide push by conservative politicians to draw their battle lines in the culture wars and signal to their constituency that they're decidedly anti-woke. Ron DeSantis' administration and the state's Republican-dominated legislature have instituted a dizzying number of regulations restricting what Floridians can say, read, and scroll through mindlessly. In cases in which critics of supposedly offensive books were asked to actually read the works in question, they sometimes rescinded their objections.Florida's been banning a lot of things these days.įrom an AP African American studies course to classroom gender-identity discussions to TikTok on university phones, Gov. Note, too, that some librarians, parents, and educators have pushed back against efforts to remove certain books from the shelves. Note that a majority of the titles in question have been criticized at least in part for sexual (and especially LGBTQ-related) content.

10 on our list) counts as one of the most influential Black authors of the 20th century. Salinger, Isabel Allende, George Orwell, Vladimir Nabokov, and Maya Angelou - the last of whom, along with Toni Morrison (No. Among the authors on the ALA list, besides those in the top 25, are such celebrated figures as Aldous Huxley, John Steinbeck, Margaret Atwood, J.D. Literary merit is no protection against challenges.

Data on the places where each book has been banned or challenged comes from Marshall University and other sources, and represents only a portion of the cities or counties where action against books has been taken. The ALA notes that this is just “a snapshot of book challenges,” since an estimated 82-97% of such challenges go unreported. Books are ranked according to the number of public and confidential reports of banning, challenging, or other forms of censorship received by the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom.

To determine the 25 most banned or challenged books in America in recent times, 24/7 Tempo reviewed data on the subject published by the American Library Association for the years 2010-2019. During the Cold War, books perceived to be pro-Communist were condemned in America. In the 19th century, books by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Mark Twain, and other authors were banned for their anti-slavery or other then-controversial content. In 1637, the Puritan government of Massachusetts suppressed Thomas Morton’s 'New English Canaan,' which was critical of Puritan society. The United States has its own long history of book banning, dating back to the colonial era. (He was just getting started at suppression: The following year, he buried 460 Confucian scholars alive to keep them from spreading their doctrine.)įrom 1560 through 1948, the Roman Catholic Church published a periodic “Index Librorum Prohibitorum,” or “Index of Prohibited Books,” banning many thousands of publications of all kinds for supposed religious or philosophical errors. In 213 B.C., the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi had every manuscript in his realm incinerated except those about agriculture, medicine, future predictions, and his own dynasty’s history. ( These are the best states for public libraries.)īook banning has been around since before there were printed books. School and classroom libraries are in fact the primary targets of those who wish to see books pulled from the shelves or restricted to adult readers, accounting for some 58% of the challenges in 2022, with 41% of the efforts aimed at public libraries. About 90% of these attempts were made by conservative organizations, such as Moms for Liberty, a right-wing non-profit founded in 2021 in Florida - a state whose governor has supported new laws requiring some state schools to close their libraries and cover classroom bookshelves. In 2022, according to the American Library Association, there were some 1,269 attempts to ban books around the country - some successful, some not (there had been 729 attempts the previous year).

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