In the excerpt below, Steinle examines the various reasons cited for withdrawing J. D. Salinger's novel The Catcher in the Rye from school district curricula in the 1950s through the 1980s.

In the following essay, Mayo describes and analyzes the ways in which the U.S. occupying forces censored fiction and poetry by Japanese writers and how Japanese writers resisted and subverted attempts at censorship.

In the following essay, Mufti explores the cultural, political, and aesthetic forces at work in the reception of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses.

In the following essay, Podhoretz discusses the pros and cons of censoring pornographic literature, using Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, the works of the Marquis de Sade, and Larry Flynt's Hustler magazine as points of departure.

In the following essay, Willis considers how the political and cultural climate in Britain and America contributed to the censorship of four war novels by Richard Aldington, Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, and Frederick Manning.

In the following essay, Kahf examines the historic problem of censorship and repression faced by writers in Syria.

In the following essay, Rothfeder discusses how the totalitarian government of Nazi Germany deployed bureaucracy on national and local levels to effectively censor literature it considered problematic.

In the following essay, Coetzee considers how censorship by the Communist Party has informed and shaped the poetry of Polish writer Zbigniew Herbert.

In the following essay, Graham-Jones discusses how Argentine playwrights devised ways to incorporate “counter-censorship” into their productions during the repressive 1970s in that country.

In the following essay, Allen compares the religious and political censorship of Arabic literature to the censorship of Western literature, discussing the treatment of writers in Arabic-speaking countries and how writers of Arabic literature confront and resist censorship in their work.

In the following essay, South African author Coetzee explores the influence of censorship on the psychological state and work of writers.

In the following essay, Goodman discusses the process by which Burroughs's novel was seized by the U.S. Customs Service in 1959 and subsequently banned as an obscene work.

In the following essay, Peterson explains how samizdat, or underground émigré publishing, functioned as a response to Soviet censorship in the twentieth century.

In the following essay, the full version of which was published in Solanus 10 (1996), Stelmakh presents an overview of literary censorship in the Soviet Union in the period of the 1960s to the 1980s, noting the rise of samizdat literature and of the spetskhran, or the library of forbidden literature.

In the following essay, originally published in 1972, Webb provides a brief history of the journal Index on Censorship and the state of censorship around the world in the second half of the twentieth century.

In the following interview, conducted in 1972, British journalist and translator Scammel speaks with Joseph Brodsky, a Russian poet who was sentenced to hard labor by the Soviet government before being expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972.

In the following polemical essay, Gordimer argues that South African censorship laws conspire with the apartheid government to both limit and silence writers' life experiences.