"Obscene"
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. Merriam-Webster.
Challenged, but the 1,100 copies of the dictionary were returned to the Sparks, Nev. elementary school classrooms (1993). A sixth-grade teacher objected to the book because it includes obscene words.
"Violent"
Of Mice and Men. John Steinbeck; Bantam, Penguin, Viking.
Challenged as an appropriate English curriculum assignment at the Mingus, Ariz. Union High School (1993) because of "profane language, moral statement, treatment of the retarded, and the violent ending." Pulled from a classroom by Putnam County, Tenn. School Superintendent (1994) "due to the language in it, we just can't have this kind of book being taught." Challenged at the Loganville, Ga. High School (1994) because of its "vulgar language throughout."
-------------------------------------
The Savannah Morning News reported in November 1999 that a teacher at the Windsor Forest High School required seniors to obtain permission slips before they could read Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear. The teacher's school board had pulled the books from class reading lists, citing "adult language" and references to sex and violence. Many students and parents protested the school's board's policy, which also included the outright banning of three other books. Shakespeare is no stranger to censorship: the Associated Press reported in March 1996 that Merrimack, NH schools had pulled Shakespeare's Twelfth Night from the curriculum after the school board passed a "prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction" act. (Twelfth Night includes a number of romantic entanglements including a young woman who disguises herself as a boy.) Readers from Merrimack informed me in 1999 that school board members who had passed the act had been voted out, after the uproar resulting from the act's passage, and that the play is now used again in Merrimack classrooms. Govind has a page with more information about the censorship of Shakespeare through history.
http://digital.library.upenn.edu/books/banned-books.html
