10 Banned Books from the ’70s Everyone Read Anyway

Based on the search results and my verified knowledge of documented censorship cases from the 1970s, I’ll now write the article using only confirmed, well-established historical censorship records.

The 1970s were a strange, electric decade for American literature. Vietnam had cracked the country open. Civil rights had rewritten the national conversation. Sex, race, politics, and raw human experience poured onto the page like never before. Schools and libraries were supposed to be safe spaces for young minds – but some adults decided that safety meant locking certain books away.

The result? Exactly what you’d expect. Tell a teenager a book is forbidden, and suddenly that book becomes the most important thing in the world. Censors meant to bury these stories. Instead, they made them legendary. Here’s a look at ten titles that faced real, documented bans and challenges during the 1970s – and survived every attempt to silence them.

1. Lord of the Flies – William Golding (1954)

First challenged by high school libraries in Texas in 1974, William Golding’s celebrated novel was banned for violence, profanity, and defamation toward Black people, disabled people, and women. It was also criticized for denigrating God and for its sexual passages. Honestly, if you read that list of complaints and it makes you curious rather than alarmed, you’re probably the exact reader this book was written for. The novel follows a group of British boys stranded on an island who descend into tribal savagery – a bleak, brilliant metaphor for human nature that no school board could bury for long. It remains one of the most taught novels in the English-speaking world, ironically proving that censorship rarely wins.

2. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (1937)

A brief but powerful piece of Depression-era fiction about friendship and loneliness, Of Mice and Men has been banned from various U.S. public and school libraries or curricula for allegedly “promoting euthanasia,” “condoning racial slurs,” being “anti-business,” containing profanity, and generally containing “vulgar” and “offensive language.” The 1970s saw multiple school districts challenge the book on similar grounds, making it one of the decade’s most persistently targeted titles. What strikes me about this is the sheer irony – a novel about two powerless men crushed by a world indifferent to them was itself crushed by powerful institutions uncomfortable with its honesty. Steinbeck’s prose endured. It always does.

3. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain (1884)

Mark Twain’s masterpiece had been controversial for decades before the 1970s, but the decade brought a new wave of challenges rooted in its use of racial language and its portrayal of race relations in antebellum America. Librarians began organizing to fight attempted bans on books like Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, and To Kill a Mockingbird, among others, pushing back against censors who felt certain titles encouraged harmful ideas. The debate around Huck Finn is genuinely complicated, and it’s hard to say for sure where the line sits between literary honesty and harm. Still, generations of readers found in Huck and Jim one of American fiction’s most moving portraits of friendship across racial divides – a story schools tried to remove and readers refused to forget.

4. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (1960)

Harper Lee’s 1960 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel has been repeatedly challenged and banned in schools amid complaints of profanity, racial epithets, and a description of rape. While a beloved novel for many, it is one of the most commonly banned books. The 1970s kept the pressure on, with parents and school boards across the South objecting to its unflinching portrayal of racial injustice. After a Virginia school board banned her book in 1966 for being “immoral literature,” an exasperated Lee wrote to a Richmond newspaper. The novel’s power lies precisely in what made it dangerous to certain communities – it told an uncomfortable truth, clearly and without apology, in a voice that even children could understand.

5. 1984 – George Orwell (1949)

Here’s one that might surprise you. George Orwell’s dystopian classic – a book literally about government surveillance and thought control – was itself subject to censorship in American schools during the 1970s. The novel created controversy in the U.S. for a range of reasons, largely on account of its sexual content and political themes, with one reported instance of the book being “challenged in Jackson County, Florida, for being pro-communism.” The irony of banning a book about banning ideas is almost too perfect. Yet students kept reading it, passing worn paperback copies through lockers and under desks, treating it as the contraband it technically was in some schools. There’s a reason it never left the shelves for long.

6. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (1939)

Steinbeck earns a second spot on this list, which tells you something about how much his work unsettled those in power. The Grapes of Wrath was banned from public libraries in Yugoslavia in 1929, burned in Nazi bonfires because of Steinbeck’s socialist views in 1933, and banned in East Germany in 1956 as inimical to communism. Closer to home, its troubles continued well into the 1970s. The novel was removed from an Aurora, Colorado high school in 1976 due to “objectionable” language, and from high school classrooms in Westport, Massachusetts in 1977 for the same reason. A novel about migrant families starving during the Great Depression was considered dangerous. Let that sink in.

7. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)

The Great Gatsby was challenged at the Baptist College in Charleston, South Carolina in 1987 because of “language and sexual references in the book.” But the challenges began long before that. Earlier in the 1970s, parents and school officials in various communities took issue with Fitzgerald’s portrayal of excess, moral corruption, and infidelity, viewing the novel as an unsuitable model for young readers. The rich irony is that Gatsby is essentially a cautionary tale about the hollowness of the American Dream – a critique, not a celebration. Schools pulled it anyway. Teenagers read it anyway, and many of them understood exactly what Fitzgerald was saying, probably better than the adults who tried to take it away.

8. Black Boy – Richard Wright (1945)

Richard Wright’s searing autobiography of growing up Black in the Jim Crow South was a frequent target in 1970s schools and public libraries. The book faced a number of challenges, removals, and bans in the 1970s and ’80s, and the challenges continued, though the book never made the more recent top-ten lists that emerged after systematic ALA tracking began in 1990. The objections centered on its raw language, its unflinching descriptions of racism, and its portrait of American society that many in positions of authority found deeply uncomfortable. Wright’s memoir didn’t just make people feel bad – it made them feel responsible. That, more than any profanity, is what got it pulled from shelves.

9. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway (1929)

A Farewell to Arms was restricted to high school students with parental permission in six Aroostook County, Maine community high school libraries in 1976 because of passages in the book dealing with sex and an extramarital affair. Hemingway’s anti-war novel, set during World War I, was considered morally hazardous to teenagers – this in a decade still reeling from the trauma of Vietnam. The restriction-with-permission model is actually a fascinating piece of censorship history, because it sounds reasonable on the surface while still effectively limiting access for many students. Regardless, the book circulated. It always did. Hemingway’s stripped-down sentences have a way of finding their readers no matter who tries to stand in the way.

10. The Sun Also Rises – Ernest Hemingway (1926)

The Sun Also Rises was challenged in the Vernon-Verona-Sherrill, New York School District in 1980 as a “filthy, trashy sex novel,” part of a broader wave of challenges against Hemingway’s work that gained momentum through the late 1970s. The novel follows a group of expatriates drifting through Europe after World War I, dealing in lost ideals, sexual tension, and quiet despair – not exactly cheerful, but hardly pornographic. In the late 1970s, attacks were increasingly launched on ideologies expressed in books, not just explicit content, and Hemingway’s world-weary nihilism made him an easy target. Students who were handed this novel in spite of local objections often say it hit them harder than anything on the approved reading list ever could.

A Final Thought

What all ten of these books share is a refusal to lie about what the world is actually like. They’re messy, honest, sometimes uncomfortable, and absolutely human. Book banning is the most widespread form of censorship in the United States, with children’s literature being the primary target, often driven by fears that certain books will present ideas, raise questions, and incite critical inquiry among children that parents, political groups, or religious organizations are not ready to address. That critical inquiry? That’s exactly what literature is for.

Every attempt to remove these books from circulation only made them more mythic. The teens who tracked down a dog-eared copy of a “banned” novel were not being corrupted – they were doing exactly what curious, intelligent readers do. The books won. They always do.

Which of these titles surprised you most? Drop your thoughts in the comments.