A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway
Paris on an empty stomach
The expatriate city as it was actually lived — cafés, cold flats, and hunger as a muse.
First banned, then canon
For three decades, some of the best books in this catalog traveled in false dust jackets and coat linings. Boston banned Hemingway; the U.S. Post Office burned Miller; and 'printed in Paris' on a title page meant, to a customs officer, probable cause.
This list is the contraband shelf: what was banned, why, and what the scandal was actually covering for. The pattern holds remarkably well — the censors reliably attacked the books that told the truth slant-free.
The case that ended it
The main event. Refused by every London and New York house, published by Paris's Obelisk Press in 1934, and contraband in the English-speaking world until Grove Press forced the issue in 1961 — through more than sixty prosecutions and into the Supreme Court. The verdicts ended literary censorship in America, more or less for good.
Tropic of Capricorn
Henry Miller
Banned alongside its sibling, sight mostly unseen. The New York prequel spent twenty-two years as the second-most confiscated title in American luggage.
Black Spring
Henry Miller
Least deserved
Guilt by association: the quietest of Miller's Paris books was banned with the loud ones, which tells you the censors weren't reading closely. The best prose on the contraband shelf.
A Farewell to Arms
Ernest Hemingway
The respectable scandal
Yes, Hemingway too: the Scribner's Magazine serialization was banned in Boston in 1929, and Italy's Fascist government banned the novel outright for its account of Caporetto. Different censors, same reflex.
Banned in Boston and burned in Berlin — for frankness that reads almost quaint now, which is itself the lesson: yesterday's outrage is today's syllabus.
Feared everywhere
Never formally banned in France — the scandal was aesthetic. But translations were cut and bowdlerized for decades, and Soviet, Italian, and German censors each took their turn. Every regime found something in it to fear, which may be the sincerest review it ever got.
Related lists
A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway
Where to start with the moderns
First books first: the right entry point for each of the era's four voices — and what to read second.
The Friday Letter
One book they didn't want you to read, every Friday.
One book, one honest argument for it, and what to read next. Written by a person, sent on Fridays.
Join 2,400 thoughtful readers.