Banned Books Week

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Celebrate Your Freedom to Read

Banned Books Week is the national celebration of our freedom to read. Launched in 1982 to draw attention to the problem of book censorship in the United States, Banned Books Week is celebrated in late September each year. 

What is a Banned Book?

Books have been banned as long as there have been books and continue to be banned or challenged even today. A banned book is a book that may be:

  • removed from a library or libraries;
  • not allowed to be published;
  • not allowed to enter an entire country;
  • not allowed to exist: to be physically destroyed, typically by burning, such as the notorious book burning in Nazi Germany.
  • The most extreme form of banning is the death or demand for the death of the author, as during the Inquisition, or more recently with Salman Rushdie.
  • A challenged book is one that someone has tried to ban, but did not succeed.

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