Banned, censored and burned books

BarcelonaPower doesn't usually like uncomfortable questions or being challenged. From the moment writing was born, works have been censored, banned, or condemned to the stake. This isn't just a legacy of the past. In 2024, more than 10,000 books were banned from public libraries and academies in the United States. We've compiled a selection of books that have been banned, stretching from Ancient Greece to the 21st century. Naturally, this is just a very small sample of the books that have been ostracized for political, ideological, or moral reasons.

The books of Protagoras (485 BC - 411 BC) are among the first documented to have been publicly destroyed. The Athenian court condemned him for his agnostic stance on the existence of the gods.

The art of loving (1st century AD), by the Latin poet Ovid, teaches the art of seduction to both men and women. Emperor Augustus condemned her to exile.

In the 3rd century BC, Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi unified China and established an imperial dynasty. To avoid criticism, he ordered a massive burning of books. Among the victims were the aphorisms and dialogues compiled by Confucius's disciples.

Published anonymously in Castile in 1554, when the majority of the population was illiterate, it was a huge success and was translated into French, English, and Italian. Five years later, the Inquisition banned it. It was published in 1573, but with parts cut.

HeIndex librorum prohibitorum These are books banned by the Catholic Church because they were "pernicious." It was promulgated by Pope Pius IV on March 24, 1564.Ethics from Spinoza to the works of Erasmus of Rotterdam, Copernicus and Montesquieu.

John Milton published Areopagitica, where he defended freedom of expression, in 1644. When Charles II was proclaimed king of England, Scotland and Ireland in 1660, he ordered the public burning of some of Milton's works and accused him of treason. The Church also censured him. Paradise Lost.

In 1762, the Spanish Inquisition issued an edict banning all of Voltaire's works, present and future, and in any language, because they were considered scandalous, reckless, and inducing deism and naturalism.

Goethe wrote this work, which explores the destructive power of desire, in 1744 and was a huge success. However, countries like Italy and Denmark, as well as some German cities, banned it because they believed it incited young people to commit suicide.

Gustave Flaubert published the story of Emma Bovary in 1856, causing a huge scandal. The author, publisher, and printer were accused in 1857 of violating public and religious morality.

Both the work of Daniel Defoe and Fanny Hill John Cleland's works were victims of the Comstock Law (1873) in the United States, which condemned many books to censorship because it prohibited sending or receiving material considered "dirty."

Published in 1859, Charles Darwin's work was censored in countries such as the United Kingdom and Greece for religious reasons. sinDarwin questioned the divine origin of man and other species.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the original German text in December 1847, and it was published in London in 1848. The book was banned in Tsarist Russia, Nazi Germany, Turkey from 1848 to 2013, and in Franco's Spain. The first Catalan translation was published in 1930.

James Joyce wrote his monumental novel in 1914 and it was published in installments until, in one of the chapters, the Irish writer presents Leopold Bloom masturbating. Ulysses It was banned in the United States for over 15 years due to its sexual content. In 1933, a judge decided to lift the ban.

George Orwell finished the fable about farm animals rebelling in 1943, but it took him more than a year to get a publisher to publish this satire on dictatorships. It suffered censorship in the Soviet Union, but in the 21st century, it was also banned in some parts of the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and China.

It was banned at various times and in various places: in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, the USSR, and the United States. All of Franz Kafka's work was banned by the Nazis because he was Jewish. The Nazis also burned thousands of works by then-popular German authors, such as Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Stefan Zweig, and Joseph Roth.

The list of books banned by the Franco dictatorship is endless. The first version of Joan Sales's work on the Civil War was published in 1956, despite the censorship's criticism. The final version, published in 1971, had three times as many pages as the first version.

Lewis Carroll's work, originally published in 1865, was banned in China in 1931 for attributing human qualities to animals. Some US schools also censored it in the 21st century because they believed it included references to masturbation and sexual fantasies.

Published in 1955, it was censored in France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, and Austria, and Canada banned its import. However, Vladimir Nabokov's work was never banned in the United States, where it became a best-seller.

The testimony of Anne Frank, who died in a Nazi concentration camp, was first published in 1947. It is now read in many schools, but there are some, especially in the United States, where it is banned because it is considered too sexually charged.

Some Islamic communities consider Salman Rushdie's work blasphemous. It has been banned in Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Qatar, Indonesia, South Africa, and India. Rushdie spent ten years in hiding after Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death. And suffered an attack in 2022.