ReZoom

In celebration of Banned Books week, ReZoom has collected seven oft-outlawed page-turners.

In celebration of the American Library Association's Banned Books Week, which runs from Sept. 29 through Oct. 6, we've put together a list of our seven favorite books that were once or are now banned.

Celebrate your intellectual freedom by picking one up today!

The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie. Perhaps the ultimate banned book, "The Satanic Verses" is a hallucinatory epic about the history of Islam and the codependency of good and evil. It's also what inspired Iranian leader Ayatollah Khomeini to issue an edict calling for the execution of its author.

"Even if Salman Rushdie repents and becomes the most pious man of [our] time," he declared, in response to an apology Rushdie issued while in hiding, "it is incumbent on every Muslim to employ everything he has, his life and his wealth, to send him to hell."

The government of India banned the book a few weeks before its release, in September, 1988, and within a few weeks, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Somalia, Bangladesh, Sudan, Malaysia, Indonesia and Qatar followed suit. South Africa banned the book even though it wasn't being released there, while Venezuela declared the act of reading "The Satanic Verses" a crime punishable by up to 15 months' imprisonment. Perhaps as a result of its surrounding controversy, the book became a bestseller in Europe and the United States. Rushdie remained in hiding under protection of Britain's Scotland Yard for nine years.

"The use of fiction was a way of creating the sort of distance from actuality that I felt would prevent offence from being taken," Rushdie wrote. "I was wrong."

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. The censorship history of Twain's novel about a rambunctious boy and an escaped slave on the Mississippi River is a long one, beginning with the year of its publication in 1884, when the Concord, Mass. Public Library banned the book, calling it "trash suitable only for the slums." The Brooklyn Public Library removed it from its shelves in 1902, objecting to Huck's use of the word "sweat" as opposed to perspiration.

Despite these setbacks, "Huck Finn" grew to become an American classic and a mainstay of school reading lists until the late 1950s, when the NAACP began protesting the novel's alleged racism. (No less an authority than "Invisible Man" author Ralph Ellison denounced the book's central relationship, stating that it demeaned the stature of black men.) Since then, the novel has endured continued opposition from school boards and special interest groups, mostly for its liberal use of the N-word.

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. Denounced by one British critic as "filth" and "unrestrained pornography" when it was first published, Nabokov's novel about the unlikely named Humbert Humbert and his cross-country wanderings with 12-year-old Lolita Haze could not find a publisher in the United States. Nabokov wound up having the novel published in 1955 by Olympia Press in France, where it was banned within the year. Publisher Maurice Girodias asked the author for help in fighting the ban, eliciting Nabokov's famous reply, "My moral defense of the book is the book itself."

Two years later, United States Customs determined that "Lolita" was not objectionable and allowed it to pass into the country – meaning that while the novel could not be exported from France, it could be imported into the United States. The next year, American publisher G.P. Putnam's Sons published "Lolita" to relatively little controversy and huge critical acclaim.

The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. The most frequently banned book in schools between 1966 and 1975, Salinger's 1951 coming-of-age novel about 16-year-old Holden Caulfield's misadventures in New York City first ran into trouble in 1957, when Australian Customs seized a shipment of the books that were given as a gift by the U.S. ambassador.

Holden's over-reliance on swear words would become the recurring theme of most concerned parents groups over the years, though in 1978, the leader of a group in Issaquah, Wash. took a different tact, alleging that "The Catcher in the Rye" was part of a Communist plot "in which a lot of people are used and may not even be aware of it."

Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Vonnegut's "famous book about Dresden" has a long history of school bans and removals since its publication in 1969. Reasons have ranged from alleged obscenity, immoral subject matter, an "unpatriotic" portrayal of war and the suggestion that the Almighty wears pants. ("The gun made a ripping sound like the opening of the zipper on the fly of God.")

Highlights of this history include the arrest of a McBee, S.C. English teacher in 1973 for using "obscene materials" and the permanent banning of the book from all public schools in Fitzgerald, Geo., in 1987, after concerned parents Farise and Maxine Taylor filed a formal complaint when their daughter brought the book home from school one day. "If we don't do anything about it," the Taylors stated, "they're putting that garbage in the classroom and we're putting our stamp of approval on it."

Go Ask Alice by Anonymous. Presented as the diary of a teenage drug addict and runaway, "Go Ask Alice" became a target of bans since its publication in 1971. School libraries in Kalamazoo, Mich., Eagle Pass, Tex., and Trenton, N.J., removed the book citing "objectionable" language and explicit sexual scenes, while in 1982 "Go Ask Alice" was one of 11 books banned by the school board in Island Trees Free School District No. 26 in New York. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned the school district's decision, stating that the First Amendment rights of students had been violated.

Four years later, the Gainesville, Ga. Public Library prohibited young people from checking the book out by keeping it in a locked room along with other books that addressed drug use, sexual dysfunction, hypnosis and breast feeding.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. Harper Lee's only novel was published, to much acclaim, in 1960, but challenges to its inclusion on school reading lists did not begin until the late 1970s, when the Eden Valley, Minn. school district banned the book for its use of the words "damn" and "whore lady."

African American parents in Warren Township, Ind., attempted to remove the book from school reading lists in 1981, saying that its use of the N-word was harmful to their children's learning. These efforts were unsuccessful. In August 2002, Muskogee High School in Oklahoma removed the book after parents and students complained about the racial slurs. In response, The Muskogee Public Library aired the film version of "To Kill a Mockingbird," followed by presentations by the child stars of the film. Three months later, the book was brought back to Muskogee High School.

Honorable Mentions go to "Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1852), "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller (1934), "Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl" (1947), "1984" by George Orwell (1949), "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury (1953) and "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison (1970).