Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds, Fourth Edition

Book excerpt: Throughout history, tyrants, totalitarian states, church institutions, and democratic governments alike have banned books that challenged their assumptions or questioned their activities. Political suppression also occurs in the name of security and the safeguarding of official secrets and is often used as a weapon in larger cultural or political battles. Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds, Fourth Edition illustrates the extent and frequency of such censorship in nearly every form of writing. Entries include: Animal Farm (George Orwell) The Appointment (Herta Müller) Born on the Fourth of July (Ron Kovic) Burger's Daughter (Nadine Gordimer) Cancer Ward (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn) Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak) The Fugitive (Pramoedya Anata Toer) Girls of Riyadh (Rajaa Alsanea) The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) Gulliver's Travels (Jonathan Swift) The Hate U Give (Angie Thomas) The Jungle (Upton Sinclair) Kiss of the Spider Woman (Manuel Puig) Manifesto of the Communist Party (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels) Les Misérables (Victor Hugo) Mein Kampf (Adolf Hitler) Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut Jr.) Snow (Orhan Pamuk) The Struggle Is My Life (Nelson Mandela) The Things They Carried (Tim O'Brien) The Vaněk Plays (Václav Havel) and more.