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John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, hands down. To ban a work that so touchingly drives home the lesson of human compassion for "using offensive language and being unsuited to age group" has always set my spine a-bristlin'. Huckleberry Finn and To Kill A Mockingbird are right up there with it. Irony?...showing up on some banned books lists of late has been none other than Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451...about burning books!  
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old hand
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The Globe and Mail (Canada's National Newspaper!  ) put out a poster, many years ago, which I still have, that depicts "A collection of bestsellers that have been banned or burned throughout history." The pictures are all of the charred remains of burned books (quite poignant), except the last, which shows a book still on fire. Here they are, in order with their dates: 387 BC - Homer - The Odyssey 250 BC - Confucius - Analects 553 - Various Authors - The Bible 1497 - Dante, Alighieri - La Divina Commedia 1517 - Luther, Martin - Works 1632 - Galilei, Galileo - Dialogo dei due Massimi Sistemi del Mondo 1597 - Shakespeare, William - The Tragedie of King Richard the Second 1641 - Descartes, Rene - Meditationes de Prima Philosophia 1726 - Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels 1733 - Voltaire, Francois - Lettres Philosophique sur les Anglais 1852 - Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter 1885 - Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 1895 - Wilde, Oscar - Salome 1922 - Joyce, James - Ulysses 1925 - Darwin, Charles Robert - On the Origin of Species 1934 - Miller, Henry - Tropic of Cancer 1955 - Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye 1969 - Roth, Philip - Portnoy's Complaint 1988 - Rushdie, Salman - The Satanic Verses I'm embarrassed to admit I've only read about five of them....So many books, so little time! (I don't concentrate on banned/burned literature, though...!) I still have the poster up, to remind me of what I'm missing. It was an ad for the "National Books Bestseller List" on Saturdays. Let us go in peace to love and serve the board.
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Now don't get the impression that I'm jumping off a proper and politically correct bandwagon just because it is headed over a cliff. I'm not. I can knee-jerk with the best of them. But when it comes to books I am bound to a higher loyalty; The unencumbered right to pursue the truth. And I think that the fluff-headed folks at the ALA wouldn't know the truth if hit in the head with a volume of truth by John Stuart Mill. ***Why does Banned Book Week list no banned books, only "challenged" books? Why the heck can't books be challenged? *** Are these the same "Butchers of English" who gave us " Visually Challenged" for the blind, and "Vocally Challenged" for the mute? ***Are these paternalistic namby-pambies trying to take away the inalienable right of we the people to burn books of own choosing? What's wrong with a good old-fashioned book burning? Who do you like best - books or people? ***Public Library boards select daily for books to put in the children's sections of our libraries. We pay their salaries. Why should we not have any input into what they buy? I challenge anyone of you ALA-leaning Awaders to post some of the salacious, offending, sentences that were "challenged" by others, on this high-minded, open-minded, liberal-minded forum; the self-same sentences that have been put in the kiddie section of some of our public libraries. ***Name a book that a state, county, or city has banned by law in the last 50 years. ***Why was the innocuous Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury challenged? Maybe for the "ironic effect". Maybe it was challenged in anonymity by those who know what is best for the pedestrian masses. If so, the ironic effect was wasted on me. - As for me, I'm saving my righteous indignation for touchie-feelie causes that have a toe-hold in reality.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Milo's rantHuh? BTW, most of the books banned or challenged were mostly in high school and secondary school libraries, not in the "children's section" of libraries as you put it. Nobody's talking about the 10 and under crowd here. Banning books is as much, if not more so, a product of the puritanical (a.k.a. moralistic) religious right as it is by the self-deceptively fascistic PC left, and I don't think anybody here is condoning this practice by either extreme. To pigeonhole book-banning as some liberal agenda is just ludicrous propaganda. The censorship of literature, and censorship in general, is something I take with only a grain of amusement. ". Maybe it was challenged in anonymity by those who know what is best for the pedestrian masses. If so, the ironic effect was wasted on me. - Sieg Heil, Milum...Sieg Heil...ha...ha  Sheesh!
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"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
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by challenged books, i think they mean books that are fighting legal challenges-- that have been banned by some school or locality.
as for burning books, by all means, burn any one of your book you want, but please don't think you* are better able to decide what i should or shouldn't be reading, and don't start burning my books.
*you being anyone who want to impose their values on me, not you personally!
I was raised in very conserative religious household. (age 13 or so, i read Pearl Buck's The Good Earth and thought it racy!-- the same Pearl Buck that was conserative enough for reader's digest.
but my parents never banned any book. they discouraged junk, ie, Valley of the Dolls, and encouraged literature ie, Portrait of Doren Grey, and were frightened by my intest in subjects like The Microbe Hunters (which they thought to be morbid), but they did not stop me from reading what ever i chose.
Some would have use wrap our children in cotton wool, and not have them exposed to people with other values, experience and religions.
Humans can be evil, or good, stupid or wise, hurtful or helpful, couragous or cowardly... and any one person can be all of these at different times in their lives. if we only allow children to know read about good, wise, helpful, couragous people, and fail to show them that even these characters have flaws we do them a huge disservice.
banning books that express ideas you don't like doesn't make the ideas go away. it just make them taboo to discuss.
Dicken's, in David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, takes on unwed motherhood, poor houses, child abuse and other issues. the details how we as a society deal with these issues have changed, but these issues are current. and unwed motherhood occures when woman have sex... and there is another taboo topic. Not discussing sex doen't mean kids don't engage it, it just means it can't be talked about-- and not talking about it, means no easy way to get information on birth control, (or even information on building self esteem, and chosing not to have sex, not because of an externally imposed religious taboo, but because a teen is making an informed choice!)
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veteran
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How about banning the Bible - think of all the filthy stuff in itStrangely enough it is on Auntie's second list, Bill, for precisely the reasons you suggest.  But isn't the Bible itself a selective compilation, partially defined by what was not deemed appropriate content?
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veteran
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1988 - Rushdie, Salman - The Satanic Verses
Although still depicted as "burning" this book can be purchased anywhere in the West, can't it? Could make a very interesting read in light of the last year-and-a-bit's events.
Why doesn't Lady Chatterley's Lover get a mention? Probably if you talked about banned books in the UK it would be the first association. Or just possibly Spycatcher, though that has no sex in it.
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
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Helen, I think you're right on the definition of "challenged."
Fishlet, Lady Chatterly's Lover *was banned in the US, when it first came out (late 20s?). My grandmother had a copy "smuggled" to her by a Brit friend who came to visit a few years later (either the ban was lifted first in the UK or else she had a bootleg copy...). The ALA list doesn't go back more than a couple of decades, far as I can tell.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Forgive me for being repettious, but I still get a chuckle out of cartoon in New Yorker
long ago, showing excited author yelling to his friends: "I'm a success, my book has
been banned in Boston!"
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