These Beloved Books Were Once Banned Across The Country

Considered a teen classic today, this book was widely banned due to its frank discussions of bras, menstruation, and middle school crushes. Main character Margaret also faced confusion over religion, coming from an interfaith family.

You can now buy Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret from Amazon.

The Lorax was a children's introduction to environmental responsibility, in which the narrator learns the errors of chopping down Truffula trees with abandon. In 1989, it wasn't schools that called for the book to be banned, but members of the logging industry.

You can now buy The Lorax from Amazon.

The mystery of why Alcott's famous tale of the March sisters was banned persists. Some think it has to do with the strong-willed Jo marrying an older "boring" man at the end, which some feminist scholars see as a diminishing of her character.

Back in the 19th century, the book also caused a stir for the opposite reason: Some readers thought the concept of women choosing their own paths was far too radical.

You can now buy Little Women from Amazon.

Tarzan wasn't banned because of his lack of pants, but because authorities didn't see enough evidence that Tarzan and Jane were married before they settled down in the jungle. And where did this take place? Tarzana, California, of course.

You can now buy Tarzan of the Apes from Amazon.

This book of silly poetry became one of the most banned book in the 1990s — beginning in 1993 in Florida, when a school district claimed it promoted "disrespect, horror, and violence," as well as mention of demons and ghosts.

You can now buy A Light in the Attic from Amazon.

Apparently, in a corner of one of the Waldo books' famously crowded pages, there's a lady sunbathing topless. (We've never found it, either.)

But someone was looking very carefully, and outrage was sparked. Although all that outrage likely did was make everyone abandon their search for Waldo and start looking for the topless lady.

You can now buy Where's Waldo? on Amazon.

Many of Shakespeare's plays have fallen under suspicion, but in 1996, a school in New Hampshire removed this comedy because of the cross-dressing and the allusion to same-sex romance (which actually doesn't happen in the narrative) — which they saw as breaking the school's rule on "prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction."

You can now buy Twelfth Night on Amazon.

Even this beloved children's classic about the friendship between barn animals, a spider, and a young girl faced censure. A parents' group from Kansas had the book removed from classrooms.

Why? Because, they claimed, talking animals (even if they never spoke with the human characters) were clearly the work of the devil, and imbuing animal characters with human traits was "sacrilegious." The rest of the country loved it, though.

You can now buy Charlotte's Web on Amazon.

After writing this, Steinbeck was attacked from both sides of the political spectrum for how he portrayed California farmers and migrant workers of the Depression. Some saw his book as communist propaganda and took issue with how Steinbeck characterized the farmers and their attitudes towards migrant workers.

You can now buy The Grapes of Wrath on Amazon.

In what was perhaps the most ridiculous reasoning behind banning a children's book about a bear, this book made the banned list in Texas in 2010.

Why? Because Bill Martin, Sr., the author, bore the same name as a relatively unknown Marxist theorist. But no one checked to see if the Bills were the same person. They were not.

You can now buy <i>Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?</i> on Amazon.

This story about a hapless young donkey who finds a magical, wish-granting pebble wasn't banned for its references to magic, but rather for the illustrations. Police departments and school districts took issue with the police characters being drawn as anthropomorphic pigs, even though pig characters of various occupations were also portrayed.

You can now buy Sylvester and the Magic Pebble from Amazon.

Despite how ubiquitous this series was, there were some who were less than thrilled with the story's focus on magic, and the words "witchcraft and wizardry" spooked a number of parents, as well. A Catholic school pulled all seven of the books in 2007, citing the magical aspects of the story inappropriate for their students.

You can now buy the Harry Potter series on Amazon.

Believe it or not, this has happened several times to both the American Heritage and the Merriam Webster.

A school board moved to ban it from classrooms because it included a definition for "oral sex," and one in Alaska for including the racy slang definitions for words like "bed" and "knockers." Because with those scary words lurking about, who needs to know the rest of the language?

Plenty of other books, many of them now considered classics and staples of any library, have been banned for a variety of reasons throughout history, but it usually just makes them come back even more popular.

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