Have you ever wondered what happens when words become weapons against power? Throughout history, books have been silenced, burned, hidden, and banned simply because they dared to ask uncomfortable questions. Some were kept from readers for decades. Others became symbols of defiance.
During the 2023-2024 school year, PEN America recorded 10,046 instances of book bans, proving that the struggle between literature and authority is far from over. The truth is, when books are suppressed, it’s rarely about protecting people. More often, it’s about protecting power structures from scrutiny.
George Orwell’s 1984: The Novel That Terrified Governments on Both Sides
George Orwell’s dystopian novel centers on totalitarianism, mass surveillance and repressive regimentation, where the Party engages in omnipresent government surveillance and constant propaganda to persecute individuality. What made this book truly dangerous to authorities was its uncanny ability to expose the mechanisms of control.
In 1981, the book was challenged in Jackson County, Florida, for being pro-communism, while it was banned by the Soviet Union in 1950, as Stalin understood that it was a satire based on his leadership. Think about that for a moment. The same book was suppressed in America for being too communist and in Russia for being too anti-communist. It’s anti-authoritarian, which tells you a lot about what really threatens those in power.
Fahrenheit 451: The Irony of Censoring a Book About Censorship
Ray Bradbury’s masterpiece about a future where books are systematically burned stands as one of the most ironic targets of censorship. In the years since its publication, Fahrenheit 451 has occasionally been banned, censored, or redacted in some schools at the behest of parents or teaching staff either unaware of or indifferent to the inherent irony in such censorship.
In 2006, parents of a 10th-grade high school student in Montgomery County, Texas, demanded the book be banned from their daughter’s English class reading list, stopped reading several pages in due to what she considered the offensive language and description of the burning of the Bible, and the parents protested the violence, portrayal of Christians, and depictions of firemen in the novel. It was censored in 1967, where the original references to drunkenness were changed to sickness, and more recently in 2006, parents in Texas challenged the book, citing religious differences because a Bible is burned in the novel.
Here’s the thing that gets me. When Bradbury wrote the novel during the McCarthy era, he was concerned about censorship in the United States, yet the very system he warned about ended up trying to suppress his warning.
Animal Farm: When Political Satire Becomes Too Real
Animal Farm was a target of censors and spies, the satire revolves around farm animals who rebel, and the USSR saw it as a critique of its politics and banned the book. The novella’s journey to publication was a battle in itself.
Animal Farm was denied four times by different publishers, and one publisher agreed to publish the book at first but later changed his decision after the Ministry of Information suggested that they shouldn’t infuriate Britain’s ally. To protect Stalin’s reputation and to preserve communism, the book was forbidden to circulate in the Soviet Union after it was first published in 1945, and the ban continued until the late 1980s, when the Soviet Union collapsed.
It was banned in Russia from 1946 to 1991 when the Soviet Union fell, and has also been banned in Cuba since 1945 and the English version has been banned in China since 1945. Today Animal Farm is still banned in Cuba, Kenya, and the United Arab Emirates, and only a censored version is read in China.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Banned for Threatening a Social Order
During the antebellum period, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was perceived as a direct threat to Southern ideology and was deliberately banned to defend the institution of slavery and maintain the established social and racial hierarchy. This wasn’t just about discomfort with content. It was about suppressing a narrative that exposed the brutal reality of slavery to Northern readers who might otherwise remain indifferent.
The Southern states understood something crucial about books. They can shift perspectives. They can create empathy where none existed before. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel did exactly that, making it one of the most consequential works of American literature and one of the most suppressed.
The Satanic Verses: Religious Authority Meets Literary Freedom
One book that is currently banned throughout the Middle East is The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, which some critics said blasphemed Islam, was burned repeatedly by Muslims in the United Kingdom, and in October, India became the first of several countries in the world to ban the novel.
The controversy surrounding this novel went far beyond typical censorship. In 1998, in Kenya the government banned 30 books and publications for sedition and immorality, including The Quotations of Chairman Mao and Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses. The global reaction demonstrated how religious authorities across borders can coordinate to suppress literary works that challenge established religious narratives.
Spycatcher: When Governments Fear Their Own Secrets
Peter Wright’s book includes speculation that a former MI5 chief was a Soviet mole and discussion about how the domestic spy service may have conspired to topple PM Harold Wilson’s government, and Britain’s Cabinet Office was still blocking access to some of the Spycatcher files decades after its publication.
The book was banned in Britain, and the British government waged a lengthy and expensive legal battle to prevent its publication in Australia, with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher saying that if Wright ever returned to Britain, he would be prosecuted for breaching the country’s Official Secrets Act. The government’s desperate attempts to suppress the book only made it more popular, proving that censorship often backfires spectacularly.
Operation Dark Heart: The Pentagon’s Book Burning
The US Army Reserve suggested modest changes to Shaffer’s memoir about his time in an Afghanistan intelligence post, then the US Defense Department stepped in, paying $47,000 to buy and destroy the first print run of 9,500 copies, and journalists raced to get a copy of the next censored print run to see what was blacked out.
This represents a modern form of censorship that’s particularly chilling. The government literally bought and destroyed books to prevent citizens from reading about intelligence operations. The extreme vetting ensured the book was a hit, demonstrating once again that forbidden knowledge becomes infinitely more attractive.
The Bluest Eye: Challenging Racial Narratives in Modern America
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s debut novel, has been banned by multiple school districts across the US for reasons including sexually explicit material, lots of graphic descriptions and lots of disturbing language, and an underlying socialist-communist agenda, and in 2022, The Bluest Eye was the third most banned book in the US.
The novel is set in Lorain, Ohio, and follows protagonist Pecola as she comes of age in the aftermath of the Great Depression, and as a young African-American girl, she is isolated and deemed ugly by her peers, obsessively fantasising about having lighter skin and blue eyes, and it’s a searing novel which critiques how crippling societal racism can tear individuals’ lives apart. Honestly, the discomfort it creates is precisely why it needs to be read.
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings: When Painful Truth Becomes Unacceptable
In 1987, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou was removed from the required reading list for Wake County, North Carolina, high school students because of a scene in which the author, at the age of seven and a half, is raped. The suppression of Angelou’s autobiography reveals a troubling pattern where authorities prioritize avoiding discomfort over acknowledging difficult realities.
Maya Angelou’s memoir doesn’t just tell a story of trauma. It tells a story of survival, resilience, and the power of literature itself to heal and empower. Yet that message was deemed too dangerous for young readers to encounter.
The Handmaid’s Tale: Dystopia That Hits Too Close to Home
The Handmaid’s Tale is one of the most banned books in the US, owing to its sexual content, material that may discomfort students, and its discussion of feminism and extremism. Set in a dystopian rendering of the US renamed Gilead, the novel follows the story of a handmaid living in a totalitarian, fundamentalist Christian state where fertile women are forced to bear children for the ruling class, and given that it grapples with topical issues like surveillance, power and reproductive coercion, it’s little wonder that it remains stringently censored.
Margaret Atwood’s novel continues to provoke attempts at suppression precisely because it asks readers to imagine how quickly democratic freedoms can erode. The discomfort it generates isn’t a flaw. It’s the entire point.
Conclusion: The Battle Between Words and Power Continues
In 2025, the current wave of book challenges, particularly targeting works that engage with race, gender, and LGBTQ+ identities, reflects an alarming trend toward ideological control and the suppression of diverse voices, and of the 10,046 instances of book bans across the country in the 2023-2024 school year alone, one must question whether these actions were truly taken with society’s greater good in mind.
The books we’ve explored weren’t suppressed because they were wrong. They were suppressed because they were right, and that made them dangerous. Defending literary freedom is not just about protecting books, it is about protecting the people, histories, and truths they carry. Every banned book is a conversation someone in power doesn’t want you to have.
The next time you see a book being challenged or removed from shelves, ask yourself what uncomfortable truth it might be revealing. What would you risk to read it?
