America’s Top Ten Banned Books

Amazon(NEW YORK) – For 30 years now, the sponsors of Banned Books Week have united in defense of literature that others deem offensive, insensitive, anti-family, satanic, sexually explicit or racist, or all of the above.

Many of the titles occupy library and school bookshelves across the country with hardly a ripple, which lightens the load for anti-censorship advocates such as the Chicago-based American Library Association.

But one reader’s treasured classic is another’s source of agita, or even outrage.

Here are some of the most challenged (and sometimes banned) books in the United States that can still draw the ire of critics who see them as a corrupting force with little social value, especially when the perceived innocence of children is a stake.

1. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain (1884)
2. And Tango Makes Three – Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson (2005)
3. Harry Potter – J.K. Rowling (1997-2007)
4. The Chocolate War – Robert Cormier (1974)
5. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (1951)
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou (1969)
7. It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health – Robbie Harris (1994)
8. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (1937)
9. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (1960)
10. The Grooming of Alice – Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (2000)

Copyright 2012 ABC News Radio