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49 free Banned Book trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This banned book trivia quiz covers censorship from the Index Librorum Prohibitorum and the Nazi book burnings to the school-board fights of the 2020s. You will get questions on the great obscenity trials (Madame Bovary, Ulysses, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Howl, Tropic of Cancer, Fanny Hill), the classics pulled from libraries and classrooms (Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, The Grapes of Wrath, Slaughterhouse-Five, Fahrenheit 451, The Diary of a Young Girl), the books banned by governments (Doctor Zhivago, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Alice in Wonderland, Frankenstein, The Satanic Verses) and the recent record-setters (And Tango Makes Three, Maus, Gender Queer). It is written for readers, librarians, teachers and anyone planning a Banned Books Week round, with difficulty running from easy to expert. The questions ask who banned what, where, when and why, and what happened next. Every answer was checked against a reference page before publishing, so the dates, verdicts and details hold up.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which 1933 US court ruling by Judge John Woolsey cleared James Joyce's most famous novel of obscenity?
United States v. One Book Called Ulysses
The Second Circuit affirmed 2-1 that offensive language in serious literature is not obscene unless it promotes lust; the UK ban lasted until 1936.
Q 02Ulysses drew a New York obscenity prosecution while being serialised in which magazine?
The Little Review
Because the magazine could be bought in a New York bookshop, the district attorney was able to prosecute its sellers.
Q 03Penguin Books was prosecuted at the Old Bailey in 1960 for publishing which novel?
Lady Chatterley's Lover
The jury acquitted after a six-day trial under the Obscene Publications Act 1959, a result often called the start of Britain's permissive society.
Q 04Who prosecuted the Lady Chatterley trial, asking jurors if they'd let their wife or servants read it?
Mervyn Griffith-Jones
Gerald Gardiner defended and Laurence Byrne presided; Roy Jenkins had written to The Spectator calling the prosecution a misapplication of the law.
Q 05Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie on which date?
14 February 1989
A month earlier, protesters in Bradford, England, had publicly burned copies of The Satanic Verses.
Q 06Which English city publicly burned The Satanic Verses in January 1989?
Bradford
Journalist Robert Winder said the images evoked medieval, not to mention Nazi, intolerance.
Q 07Which poet-publisher of City Lights Books was arrested in 1957 for selling Allen Ginsberg's Howl?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Store manager Shigeyoshi Murao was arrested too; Judge Clayton Horn ruled the poem not obscene on October 3, 1957.
Q 08Which organisation led the most fervent attacks on The Grapes of Wrath over its portrayal of the state's growers?
The Associated Farmers
The novel was publicly banned and burned by citizens, yet was the best-selling book of 1939 and won the Pulitzer.
Q 09In 1973 a school board in which state burned every copy of Slaughterhouse-Five in its furnace?
North Dakota
Board head Charles McCarthy called the novel obscene; Kurt Vonnegut wrote him a letter defending his character and his work.
Q 10Which Pulitzer-winning graphic novel did a McMinn County, Tennessee, school board remove in 2022?
Maus
The vote cited profanity, violence and nudity; Art Spiegelman's book promptly shot to No. 1 on Amazon.
Q 11And Tango Makes Three is based on two real male penguins at which zoo?
Central Park Zoo
Roy and Silo hatched an egg given to them by keepers; the authors found the story in a New York Times article.
Q 12Which institution's committee excluded Huckleberry Finn in 1885, calling it 'the veriest trash'?
Concord Public Library
The trustees found it 'more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people'; the ALA still listed it fifth most banned in 2007.
Q 13Between 1961 and 1982, which novel was the most censored book in US high schools and libraries?
The Catcher in the Rye
Q 21Which 1818 novel was banned in apartheid South Africa in 1955 for 'obscene' or 'indecent' material?
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley's novel joined a long list of works suppressed under apartheid-era censorship.
Q 22Which country banned The Da Vinci Code in September 2004 after Catholic leaders deemed it offensive?
Lebanon
The same country has banned Sophie's Choice and Schindler's Ark for their positive depiction of Jews.
Q 23Which Orwell novella was banned in the schools of the United Arab Emirates in 2002?
Animal Farm
Vietnam also bans its translations for 'promoting false socialism ideology'.
In 1981 it was simultaneously the most censored and the second most taught book in American public schools.
Q 14Issaquah, Washington, school board members briefly banned The Catcher in the Rye in 1978 as part of what?
An overall communist plot
A Tulsa teacher had been fired in 1960 just for assigning the book.
Q 15Rejected by US and British publishers, Lolita was first published in 1955 in Paris by which house?
Olympia
Maurice Girodias's list was three-quarters pornography, and France banned the book from 1955 to 1958.
Q 16Which critic named Lolita one of the three best books of 1955 in the Sunday Times, helping launch its reputation?
Graham Greene
The book had come out as a pair of green paperbacks 'swarming with typographical errors'.
Q 17Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 during which period of American history?
The Second Red Scare
He drew on the Nazi book burnings and Soviet repression; an editor at Ballantine urged him to expand his novella The Fireman.
Q 18Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out of the USSR and first published in 1957 in which country?
Italy
Publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli arranged it; Pasternak's Nobel Prize the next year enraged the Soviet Communist Party.
Q 19Nineteen Eighty-Four was banned in the Soviet Union in 1950 for what reason?
Stalin saw it as a satire of his own rule
The USSR only legalised it in 1990, after editing; Vietnam still refuses it publication certification.
Q 20Which children's classic was banned in Hunan in 1931 for showing animals acting like humans?
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
The KMT government objected to anthropomorphised animals acting with human complexity.
Q 24Which anti-slavery novel was banned in the Confederate States during the Civil War?
Uncle Tom's Cabin
It sold 300,000 copies in its first year and was the second best-selling book of the 19th century in America, after the Bible.
Q 25Which 1985 memoir by a former MI5 officer was banned in the UK until 1988 for revealing secrets?
Spycatcher
Peter Wright's book could not be sold in Britain even as it was freely available in Australia and elsewhere.
Q 26Which editor said he would rather hand a child prussic acid than The Well of Loneliness?
James Douglas of the Sunday Express
A British court judged it obscene, and it was not published again in England until 1949.
Q 27John Cleland was arrested in 1749 for 'corrupting the King's subjects' with which erotic novel?
Fanny Hill
Also known as Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, it was banned in the US in 1821 and again in 1963 before the Supreme Court cleared it.
Q 28Gustave Flaubert was prosecuted for obscenity in January 1857 over which novel?
Madame Bovary
He was acquitted on 7 February 1857 and the book became a bestseller when published in two volumes that April.
Q 29In which year did the US Supreme Court declare Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer non-obscene?
1964
Grove Press's 1961 US edition triggered a wave of obscenity trials.
Q 30The Nazi book burnings of 10 May 1933 in Berlin took place at which square?
Opernplatz
Now called Bebelplatz, it holds Micha Ullman's memorial The Empty Library; the first books burned came from Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sexual Research.