7 Books About Banned Books That Prove Fiction Can Bite Back

This is a slightly different kind of list. Rather than books that were banned for unrelated reasons, these are books about banned books.

A striking number of them have gone on to be challenged or banned themselves, which tends to prove their own point rather better than any critic could.

If you’re after books about censorship for Banned Books Week, or you just want to see how many times the universe has handed novelists this particular joke on a plate, here are seven worth knowing…

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1. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury (1953)

Guy Montag is a “fireman” in a future America where firemen don’t put out fires — they start them, burning any books they find, along with the houses that hide them.

Why It’s On This Banned Books List

The novel is the twentieth century’s defining fable about book burning, and its own publishing history became a genuinely absurd case study in the thing it warns against.

In 1967, publisher Ballantine Books quietly released a “Bal-Hi” (Ballantine High School) edition with more than 75 passages removed (swear words, a reference to abortion, a drunk man rewritten as merely sick) and stopped selling the original entirely by 1973, without telling Bradbury.

Bradbury found out by accident in 1979 and demanded the unexpurgated version be restored; a note about the incident now appears in the book’s own front matter.

The novel has separately been challenged in American schools for decades over profanity and its references to drugs, suicide and abortion (the same “obscene” content the fictional firemen would have burned it for).

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2. 1984 – George Orwell (1949)

Winston Smith works for the Ministry of Truth, rewriting history and destroying inconvenient documents for a totalitarian state that tracks his every thought.

Why It’s On This Banned Books List

Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, whose job is quite literally erasing and rewriting books, has become real-world shorthand for state censorship, and the novel has been banned by at least a dozen governments for contradictory reasons.

The Soviet Union banned it in 1950 as anti-communist propaganda and didn’t legalise it until 1988, while a Florida school district challenged it in 1981 for being pro-communist.

It remains effectively banned in North Korea today, and was banned in Belarus as recently as the 2020s (regimes seeing their own methods reflected a little too clearly in Orwell’s fiction).

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3. The Book Thief – Markus Zusak (2005)

Narrated by Death itself, the novel follows Liesel Meminger, a girl in Nazi Germany who steals books — including from a Nazi book-burning pile — and shares them with a Jewish man hiding in her family’s basement.

Why It’s On This Banned Books List

The novel takes the historical Nazi book burnings of the 1930s as one of its central images, using Liesel’s theft of banned and burned books as an act of quiet resistance.

It has itself faced repeated challenges in American schools since publication, over language, violence and Holocaust-related content, appearing on several state-level lists of contested titles according to library censorship trackers.

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4. Ban This Book – Alan Gratz (2017)

Fourth-grader Amy Anne Ollinger discovers her favourite book has been pulled from her school library after a parent complains, and responds by opening a secret “banned books” lending library out of her own locker.

Why It’s On This Banned Books List

This is the most on-the-nose entry on the list, and its real-world afterlife is almost too neat: in May 2024, a Florida school district in Indian River County voted to remove Ban This Book from its shelves, overruling its own review committee.

Gratz, informed of the irony, told the network, “I guess if you call a book ‘Ban This Book,’ you are kind of asking for it.”

Every fictional banned book Amy Anne shelves in her locker library is a real book that has actually been challenged somewhere in America.

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5. Animal Farm – George Orwell (1945)

Orwell’s satirical fable follows a group of farm animals who overthrow their human owner, only to watch the ruling pigs become the very tyrants they replaced, with control of information as one of their first and sharpest tools.

Why It’s On This Banned Books List

The pigs’ rewriting of the farm’s founding commandments (quietly editing the rules once no one is looking closely enough to object) makes the manipulation of the written word central to the story’s warning.

The novel has been banned in the Soviet Union for its anti-communist satire and remains banned in Cuba and North Korea today, while the United Arab Emirates has restricted it over its depiction of pigs.

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6. Burning the Books: A History of the Deliberate Destruction of Knowledge – Richard Ovenden (2020)

The director of Oxford’s Bodleian Library traces three millennia of deliberate attacks on libraries and archives, from the burning of ancient Alexandria’s collections to the Nazi book bonfires of 1933 to the destruction of the UK’s Windrush immigration records.

This is straightforward nonfiction, written by someone whose day job is protecting exactly the kind of material his book describes being destroyed.

Why It’s On This Banned Books List

Ovenden opens with the 1933 Nazi book burnings, in which university students across more than 30 German towns burned an estimated 250,000 books in a single coordinated purge.

This book was shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize and named a Sunday Times Book of the Year.

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7. The Giver – Lois Lowry (1993)

Twelve-year-old Jonas lives in a tightly controlled “utopia” where memory, history and emotion have been deliberately erased from the population, kept alive only in the mind of a single appointed Receiver of Memory.

Why It’s On This Banned Books List

The novel’s central premise is a community that has quite literally banned its own past (books, history and painful memories have all been suppressed to maintain order).

Despite containing no profanity and no sexual content, The Giver has been challenged more than 11,000 times, largely over scenes depicting infanticide and euthanasia.

Lowry has said she believes the real driver behind the challenges is that parents “feel a loss of control” — which is, pointedly, exactly what the novel is about.

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More Books About Banned Books

I love that books about banned books keep accidentally proving themselves right.

I guess it’s not really a coincidence: a book that names censorship directly tends to make the people doing the censoring rather uncomfortable… which is, in turn, exactly why books like these keep getting written in the first place.

Do you have any others to add to this list? Let me know in the comments below.

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