A new report on book bans in US schools finds It author Stephen King is the writer most likely to be censored, with the country divided between states actively restricting works and those attempting to limit or eliminate bans.
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PEN America’s “Banned in the USA,” released on Wednesday, tracks more than 6,800 instances of books being temporarily or permanently pulled for the 2024-2025 school year. The new number is down from more than 10,000 in 2023-24, but still far above the levels of a few years ago, when PEN didn’t even see the need to compile a report.
Some 80 per cent of those bans originated in just three states that have enacted or attempted to enact laws calling for the removal of books deemed objectionable – Florida, Texas and Tennessee. Meanwhile, PEN found little or no instances of removals in several other states, with Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey among those with laws that limit the authority of school and public libraries to pull books.
“It is increasingly a story of two countries,” said Kasey Meehan, director of PEN’s Freedom to Read programme and an author of Wednesday’s report. “And it’s not just a story of red states and blue states. In Florida, not all the school districts responded to the calls for banning books. You can find differences from county to county.”
King’s books were censored 206 times, according to PEN, with Carrie and The Stand among the 87 of his works affected. The most banned work of any author was Anthony Burgess’s dystopian classic from the 1960s, A Clockwork Orange, for which PEN found 23 removals. Other books and authors facing extensive restrictions included Patricia McCormick’s Sold, Judy Blume’s Forever and Jennifer Niven’s Breathless, and numerous works by Sarah J. Maas and Jodi Picoult.
Reasons often cited for pulling a book include LGBTQ themes, depictions of race and passages with violence and sexual violence. An ongoing trend that PEN finds has only intensified: Thousands of books were taken off shelves in anticipation of community, political or legal pressure rather than in response to a direct threat.
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