Each US state has its own policies for what books are allowed in its prisons. But, according to quartz.com, Texas goes farther than most in censoring what inmates have access to.
Among the books banned in Texas facilities: Alice Walker’s Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning The Color Purple, Dante’s 14th-century epic poem Inferno, Jeffrey Eugenides’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Middlesex, and Jacob Riis’s 1890 photography book about poverty, How the Other Half Lives. Many of the disallowed books concern civil rights, and a good number are classics.
Other banned books in Texas prisons include Flannery O’Connor beloved story collection Everything that Rises Must Converge, Janet Fitch’s novel White Oleander, and Thomas Moore’s 16th-century work of political philosophy Utopia, from which we derive the term for an ideal place.
Here's a partial list of classics banned in Texas prisons:
- Shakespeare and Love Sonnets, edited by O.B. Duane
- Inferno, Dante Aligheri
- Vintage Hughes, Langston Hughes
- The Color Purple, Alice Walker
- American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis
- Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
- Big Sur, Jack Kerouac
- The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
- Deadeye Dick, Kurt Vonnegut
- The Great American Novel, Philip Roth
- The Deer Park, Norman Mailer
- First Love: A Gothic Tale, Joyce Carol Oates
- Eight Men, Richard Wright
- Villages, John Updike
- Fugitives and Refugees: A Walk in Portland, Oregon, Chuck Palahniuk
- 12 Million Black Voices, Richard Wright
- Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, Art Spiegelman
- Salammbô, Gustave Flaubert
- Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin
- Utopia, Thomas Moore
- Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
- The Way to Paradise, Mario Vargas Llosa
- White Oleander, Janet Fitch
- Hooking Up, Tom Wolfe
- Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O’Connor
- It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis
- How the Other Half Lives, Jacob Riis
- The Essential Gore Vidal, Gore Vidal
