Henry Miller. Camera Press/Globe Photos

It isn’t a surprise that Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer made an entry in this list—in fact, it could hardly be a list of banned books without it. After enduring over 100 U.S. obscenity cases along with a plethora of bans in other countries, Henry Miller’s autobiographical account of his sexual exploits as an expatriate in France—which covers sadomasochistic sex, prostitution, and statutory rape, all laced with jumbled philosophizing and breathless celebrations of life—has been deemed not obscene and enjoys the freedom to be shelved next to the most influential texts in literary history. At the time of the novel’s initial publication in France in 1934 (which, it has been rumored, was only allowed because it was written in English, intended exclusively for English-speaking readers), its sexual candor accompanied by its espousal of blatant misogyny, racism, and anti-Semitism spurred authority figures and conservative readers to push for its ban, which then served as the impetus for a large demand for its freedom of publication. Interested readers went to great lengths to smuggle copies of the book into their countries so that they could discover what exactly it was that was being banned. What ensued were a great many confiscations, obscenity cases, and the creation of a distinct aura around Miller as an author, namely by later members of the Beat generation, upon whom he had a significant impact. Although the controversy surrounding that novel was loud, Miller did not let it curb his writing, and he continued to publish novels that followed in the same frank, comedic, and easy-flowing tone about his exploration of human sexuality, which thus allowed him to become widely known as a liberating trailblazer for 20th-century literature.