Banned Book Trivia
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88 free Banned Book trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 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 88 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which publisher arranged the seizure of Ulysses that led to the 1933 US ruling clearing it of obscenity?
Random House
Random House's Bennett Cerf had a copy seized by US customs to force a test case, and Judge John Woolsey then ruled the novel not obscene.
Q 02Ulysses drew a New York obscenity prosecution while being serialised in which magazine?
The Little Review
The Little Review's serialization ended after a New York court ruled the novel obscene in 1921, a year before the full book came out.
Q 03Penguin Books was prosecuted at the Old Bailey in 1960 for publishing which novel?
Lady Chatterley's Lover
Lady Chatterley's Lover was acquitted, and the trial came to symbolize the permissive new values of the 1960s.
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 05Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini issued a 1989 fatwa calling for Salman Rushdie's death over which novel?
The Satanic Verses
The Satanic Verses brought Rushdie more than 30 years of death threats, and in 2022 he suffered life-changing injuries in a stabbing in New York state.
Q 06Which English city's protesters publicly burned a copy of Salman Rushdie's novel in January 1989?
Bradford
Bradford's protesters burned the novel because some Muslims considered it blasphemous.
Q 07Which poet was arrested in 1957 for publishing Allen Ginsberg's Howl?
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Ferlinghetti was acquitted when Judge Clayton Horn ruled that Howl was not obscene.
Q 08Which organization led attacks on The Grapes of Wrath in California in 1939?
The Associated Farmers
The Associated Farmers opposed its portrait of California growers, yet the novel became an immediate best-seller across the country.
Q 09In 1973 a school board in which state burned every copy of Slaughterhouse-Five in its furnace?
North Dakota
North Dakota's Drake school board burned 32 copies in the school furnace, and Kurt Vonnegut wrote to chairman Charles McCarthy that he had been insulted.
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
Central Park Zoo keepers gave the male penguins Roy and Silo an egg to hatch, and the chick they raised, Tango, gave the book its title.
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 13In 1981, which novel was both the most censored and the second most taught book in US public schools?
The Catcher in the Rye
Q 21Which erotic novel did the US Supreme Court finally clear of obscenity?
Fanny Hill
John Cleland's Fanny Hill had been ruled obscene by Massachusetts's highest court before the Supreme Court overturned that in Memoirs v. Massachusetts.
Q 22Gustave Flaubert was prosecuted for obscenity in January 1857 over which novel?
Madame Bovary
Madame Bovary's trial ended with Flaubert cleared, and the scandal helped make the novel a bestseller when it appeared in two volumes that April.
Q 23In 1964 the US Supreme Court declared which Henry Miller novel not obscene?
Tropic of Cancer
Tropic of Cancer was cleared in Grove Press v. Gerstein, which overturned a Florida ban on the book.
The Catcher in the Rye drew challenges mainly over its profane and vulgar language, along with its sexual references.
Q 14Lolita was first published in Paris in 1955 by which publishing house?
Olympia
Olympia Press put out the first edition, and after British customs began seizing copies, the French government banned the novel too, in 1956.
Q 15Ray Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 during which period of American history?
The Second Red Scare
Bradbury wrote it amid the Second Red Scare, but he later insisted the novel was really about television killing interest in literature.
Q 16Doctor Zhivago was smuggled out of the USSR and first published in 1957 in which country?
Italy
Italy's Giangiacomo Feltrinelli published it first, and the CIA later had copies printed in Russian and handed to Soviet tourists at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair.
Q 17Which country banned The Da Vinci Code in September 2004 after Catholic leaders deemed it offensive?
Lebanon
Lebanon banned it after Catholic leaders objected to its portrayal of Christ marrying Mary Magdalene and fathering a child.
Q 18Which George Orwell book was banned in the schools of the United Arab Emirates in 2002?
Animal Farm
Animal Farm was banned along with 125 other books for clashing with Islamic and Arab values, its leader being a talking pig.
Q 19Which spy memoir did the British government fight to suppress from 1985 until 1988?
Spycatcher
Spycatcher came out in Australia in 1987 after Britain lost its court case there, and the government's fight to stop it in the UK failed the next year.
Q 20Which newspaper editor led the 1928 campaign to suppress The Well of Loneliness?
James Douglas
James Douglas of the Sunday Express called for the novel's suppression, and Home Secretary William Joynson-Hicks then started legal proceedings.
Q 24The Nazi book burnings of 10 May 1933 in Berlin took place at which square?
Opernplatz
Opernplatz is where Joseph Goebbels told the crowd that the age of excessive Jewish intellectualism was over as the books burned.
Q 25Which organisation actually carried out the 1933 Nazi book burnings?
The German Student Union
Its 'Action against the Un-German Spirit' targeted authors from Marx and Heine to Helen Keller, Hemingway and Jack London.
Q 26Which children's book did Alabama segregationists attack in 1959 for promoting racial integration?
The Rabbits' Wedding
The Rabbits' Wedding showed a white rabbit marrying a black one; Alabama's state library chief answered the attacks by moving it to reserve shelves, where librarians could still request it.
Q 27Which 1873 US law, named for an anti-vice crusader, made mailing 'obscene' literature a federal crime?
The Comstock Act
The Comstock Act was enforced by Anthony Comstock himself as a special Post Office agent, and he used it to make arrests.
Q 28Which 1982 Supreme Court case, a Brennan plurality, addressed removing library books?
Island Trees v. Pico
Island Trees v. Pico began when a Long Island school board pulled books it called anti-American, anti-Christian and just plain filthy, and students sued.
Q 29Which library activist helped found Banned Books Week in 1982?
Judith Krug
Judith Krug helped launch it amid a sudden surge in challenges to books in libraries, bookstores and schools.
Q 30Which graphic memoir was the American Library Association's most challenged book in 2021, 2022 and 2023?
Gender Queer
Gender Queer drew challenges over its LGBTQIA+ content and over claims that it was sexually explicit.