Nicholas J. Karolides - Banned Books - Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds (2006).jpg

Throughout history, tyrants, totalitarian states, church institutions, and democratic governments alike have banned books that challenged their beliefs or questioned their activities. Political censorship was even applied to ancient Greek dramas during the Nazi occupation in 1942. 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. Such censorship has affected every form of writing. "Literature Suppressed on Political Grounds, Revised Edition" illustrates the extent and frequency of political censorship of many kinds of literature. The 10 entries new to this edition include works by Nobel Prize winners Wole Soyinka and Gao Xingjian, as well as works by Ha Jin and Edward Said. This edition also includes many updates to existing entries, such as "Gulliver's Travels". New and updated entries include: "After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?" (Jonathan C. Randal); "Animal Farm" (George Orwell); "Born on the Fourth of July" (Ron Kovic); "Burger's Daughter" (Nadine Gordimer); "Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee" (Dee Brown); "Cancer Ward" (Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn); "The Case for India" (Will Durant); "Did Six Million Really Die?" (Richard E. Harwood); "Doctor Zhivago" (Boris Pasternak); "El Senor President" (Miguel Angel Asturias); "The Fugitive" (Pramoedya Ananta Toer); "The Grapes of Wrath" (John Steinbeck); "Gulliver's Travels" (Jonathan Swift); "The Jungle" (Upton Sinclair); "Les Miserables" (Victor Hugo); "The Man Died" (Wole Soyinka); "Manifesto of the Communist Party" (Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels); "Mein Kampf" (Adolf Hitler); "The Patriot" (Hanoch Levin); "The Prince" (Machiavelli); "Slaughterhouse-Five" (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.); and "The Struggle Is My Life" (Nelson Mandela).