Literature is a tried-and-true art form when it comes to inspiring consumers' imaginations, and this has let well-written stories endure as classics. Some, however, have stood the test of time for... other reasons.
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- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is well known for how many times the book has been banned because of its persistent use of the word "nigger". This is despite the fact that the slave character, Jim, is the smartest character in the whole book and that the book is ultimately anti-racist, as shown when Huck tears up a letter meant to tell where Jim has been captured and goes to save him, despite Huck honestly believing this means that he will go to Hell.
- Alfie's Home is a children's book about curing homosexuality, claiming that dysfunctional families cause kids to be gay because they lack the love from a parental figure. It's much more infamous, however, for a blatant depiction of a child getting molested by his Creepy Uncle, who is also a Karma Houdini.
- While Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass are still considered literary classics, discussions of the author, Lewis Carroll, have been overshadowed by the claims that he was a pedophile, thanks to his nude pictures of little girls and several missing letters.
- The childrens' book Alice and Sparkle is known solely for the heated discourse around A.I.-Generated Artwork it caused, since the entire book was written and illustrated by two different AIs. The "author" (person who provided the AIs with text prompts) even got various death threats about it, although he did agree with some of the less vitriolic complaints about how AI art could negatively impact illustrators, whose work was used without their permission to train AI models.
- The 2020 novel American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins, about the ordeal of a Mexican woman who had to leave behind her life and escape as an undocumented immigrant to the United States with her son, despite initial positive reviews (Oprah Winfrey announced that she had selected it for her book club the day before the book's release), soon became best known for being widely criticized for its inaccurate portrayal of Mexico and Mexicans (with one reviewer noting the protagonist, "is so shocked by her own country's day-to-day realities [...] gives the impression that [she] might not be…a credible Mexican. In fact, she perceives her own country through the eyes of a pearl-clutching American tourist.") to the point of being seen as akin to cultural appropriation.
- The Barbie tie-in book Barbie: I can be a Computer Engineer would likely have remained unknown outside of the little-girl demographic if it didn't attract many complaints
about being unintentionally sexist, especially since it came out during a big push to get more women in tech-related jobs. The book's plot revolves around Barbie accidentally ruining her sister's homework by installing a virus on her laptop, and she relies on her male coworkers to fix this problem. Even before that, Barbie mentioned that the aforementioned men were responsible for the actual programming of the video game she was working on. - Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua came off to many as her being a verbally abusive Education Mama who flaunts off her children like her trophies. While her daughters have come out saying they are grateful to their mother for pushing them to pursue piano and violin, it rubbed many the wrong way. For example, Chua states she wouldn't let her youngest daughter Lulu go to the bathroom or eat dinner until she mastered a certain piano piece, or forbidding both from joining activities such as drama or having playdates or sleepovers. Another instance has her calling her daughter Sophia's birthday card for her "garbage", which appalled many readers who felt this was too harsh for her kids. The controversy increased even further when it was revealed, mid-Me Too movement, that she encouraged her daughter to put up with sexual harassment for the sake of her career.
- From around 2019 onwards, few mentions of The Belgariad series on the internet don't devolve into discussions about the authors' 1970 conviction for physical abuse of their adopted children, also resulting in them losing custody (which occured over a decade before the first Belgariad book was written); the crimes only resurfaced several years after both authors died (Leigh Eddings in 2007, David Eddings in 2009).
- This happened with Blood Heir, from Amélie Wen Zhao, whose publication was delayed several months due to accusations of racism and insensitivity, by a subplot involving the sale of slaves. The author explained that she had been inspired by human trafficking that affects multiple countries around the world, especially Asia, and that she had no intention of making a metaphor about the slavery system that occurred in the past in the United States. This controversy is explained in detail in this article.
- The works of Marion Zimmer Bradley are now massively overshadowed and increasingly rejected due to the revelations she enabled and covered up her husband’s sexual abuse of their own children and others, and her children's testimony that she herself was directly sexually, physically and psychologically abusive towards them, with content in some of her works subsequently being reinterpreted as apologism for paedophilia and incest.
- The Mists of Avalon gets hit with this especially hard; the fact it heavily features sexual abuse, incest and manipulation from parents/parental figures throughout its plot (e.g. Viviane tricking her niece Morgaine into having sex with her half-brother) makes the controversy surrounding Bradley stick even more closely to this particular work.
- The same particularly applies to the Darkover series; the real-world accusations of incest and child abuse against Bradley have not only tainted the series in general, but cast some of the sexual incidents in the stories in a rather darker light (especially the stuff involving Lord Ardais and his sexual abuse of underage boys).
- SF writer Orson Scott Card has increasingly lost his once-stellar reputation in the 21st century due to his vocal and politically active homophobia (he is a devout member of the Church of Latter-Day Saints). Particularly notorious examples of this include an essay on his website which was widely interpreted (although he claimed in response that this had not been his intent) as suggesting that any attempt to legalize same-sex marriage in the USA on the federal level would be justification for armed rebellion against the government, and his notorious novella Hamlets Father, an External Retcon of Hamlet arguing that the Ghost is an evil force trying to get Hamlet damned (a legitimate minority interpretation of the play) and other changes influenced by his views on homosexuality.note Notable consequences of this include a proposed Superman comic falling through after the assigned artist Chris Sprouse backed out due to Card's homophobia, and, probably, the relative commercial failure of the film version of Ender's Game despite the fact that Card wouldn't receive any additional money from it (as he had sold the film rights to the novel for a flat fee years before). Things got so bad that many people take seriously an online essay suggesting that the protagonist of Ender's Game and its sequels was deliberately written as a sympathetic version of Adolf Hitler!
- The Catcher in the Rye had built up such a sterling reputation that it's still widely known on its own merits, but it's also hard to get away from the notoriety of its being in the possession of three high profile murderers or attempted murderers in the 1980s: Mark David Chapman, John Hinckley Jr., and Robert John Bardo. Chapman became particularly associated with it as he had written "This is my statement" in the book and signed Holden's name.
- The Cormoran Strike Novels written by J. K. Rowling (under her pen name Robert Galbraith) have gained this reputation, thanks to the use of tropes that critics speculated were a reflection of Rowling's outspoken transphobia: The Silkworm, in which one of the antagonists turned out to be a pre-op transgender woman, Troubled Blood, which plays the Creepy Crossdresser trope completely straight (not helped by it being the book she was releasing around the same time her transphobic views were becoming more well-known), and The Ink Black Heart, which has a plot about cancel culture that many felt was based on the backlash Rowling has received.
- Date Me, Bryson Keller is a gay romance novel that became better known for the accusations that it plagiarized the story of Seven Days and the subsequently poorly received justification for it from the author.
- The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a once-obscure work of political satire against Napoleon III, unexpectedly became famous in the 20th century; not for any merit it had as satire, but for being plagiarized to create The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an infamous antisemitic hoax that popularized the belief in an international Jewish conspiracy. While The Dialogue in Hell contains no antisemitic content (indeed, Jews are never mentioned even once), and its author Maurice Joly died 25 years before the Protocols were published, you'll find far more people talking about its relationship to the notoriously damaging forgery than its actual contents.
- Empress Theresa is already known for its extremely poor-quality writing, but it's just as known for the author, Norman Boutin, infamous for his habit of responding to nearly any negative criticism to the book in a variety of hostile ways (including quoting the Bible, outright attacking the character of critics, or just straight-up quoting his own characters as Take Thats to any criticism).
- Fanny Hill is well known for having been a subject of obscenity tests and for having been banned in America from inception until a 1966 Supreme Court case ruled that the book has redeeming social value. When it was published in 1748, it got the author arrested on obscenity charges.
- Flowers in the Attic is a book about four children who are abused by their grandmother. It also has incest between the two teenage siblings. The latter fact has created a lot of controversy and infamy, to the point where people forget about the other elements of the book.
- "The Frost King", a short story written by a pre-teen Helen Keller in 1891, is mostly known for the scandal which occurred when it emerged that a similar story called "The Frost Fairies" had been published several years earlier, which led to Helen being accused of plagiarising "The Frost Fairies", though she denied knowing the story. However, it was found that a friend of her teacher Annie Sullivan could have told it to her and that, when Annie described the colours of autumn (a major theme in both stories) to the deaf-blind Helen, it could have reminded Helen of the story, but not the source, leading to her writing it down in the belief that it came from her own imagination. The incident had a profound effect on Helen's confidence and, for some time afterwards, she was afraid to write again in case what she wrote turned out to be someone else's idea, though she later overcame this.
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- Go Set a Watchman is best known for the controversial circumstances behind its publication, and for its controversial handling of the character of Atticus Finch. It was originally advertised as the long-awaited sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird, but it eventually emerged that it was really an unpublished early draft of it, which was likely written over 50 years before it was released. Once this became widely known, many people came to suspect that it was published without Harper Lee's permission, since she was in her 80s and in failing physical and mental health at the time. And once people began reading it, it drew sharp criticism for portraying widely-admired character Atticus Finch as a racist, which clashed strongly with his portrayal as a crusader for justice in the original novel; as befitting a book about civil rights written in the 1950s, it contains some grossly outdated views on race, which can't exactly be justified as Deliberate Values Dissonance. Most fans of To Kill A Mockingbird prefer to disown it, or solely treat it as a draft.
- The Greek Seaman, a 2010 self-published novel by Jacqueline Howett, is remembered solely for its author reacting with vitriol to a negative book review from an Internet blogger the following year, resulting in a Flame War. Tellingly, before it was deleted, the novel's article on The Other Wiki almost completely glossed over its plot (it was summed up in about one or two lines at the article's head) but described the blog incident in considerable (and we do mean considerable) detail.
- Handbook for Mortals is most likely to be remembered for its numerous controversies. Firstly, there's the fact its author, Lani Sarem, organized a campaign to buy up large numbers of copies of the book from stores that reported their sales to The New York Times in order to get the book reported as a bestseller, with the intention of getting a hasty movie deal in which she would play the lead. What particularly made this stand out was that, at the time, the #1 book on the bestseller list was The Hate U Give, making Sarem look like she was trying to dethrone a book about police violence against black people, at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement. Once this was discovered, Handbook for Mortals was swiftly booted off the bestseller list. Sarem and her publisher tried to defend their actions as wanting to "match her sales outside of stores", but an examination of the numbers found this didn't add up. In a lesser-known controversy, the book's cover art was also accused of plagiarising the artwork of Australian artist Gill Del Mace.
- "Helicopter Story" by Isabel Fall is a Military Science Fiction story about gender dysphoria, brainwashing and warfare in a dystopian near-future USA, that was published on Clarkesworld in 2020 and notoriously withdrawn after a few days due to massive online controversy, although it was nominated for a 2021 Hugo Award. The issue was that the story's original titlenote and its central concept quoted and literalised a meme notoriously used by online transphobes to mock and insult trans people, which caused some readers to suspect that it was actually written by a far-right-wing troll who wanted to get an anti-trans story on a well-known SF website as a malevolent prank. Subsequent news reports revealed that Fall actually was a trans woman, who had been admitted to a mental hospital and contemplated suicide due to the negative response. Ms. Fall was in the early stages of her transition, and subsequently abandoned it. The whole affair means that a very large number of people who have never read the story have strong opinions about it, and the wider debate it contributed to about how reviewers and readers should respond to fictional works that may or may not be offensive or harmful to minority groups, and whether creators who are members of minority groups should be expected to produce works that are solely uplifting and inspirational in their attitude to that identity.
- His Dark Materials has garnered considerable controversy for its heavy-handed anti-religious themes, with author Philip Pullman openly stating that his goal was to provide an atheist answer to the Christian-based fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia, in which the heroes' ultimate goal is to "kill God."
- Young adult Chick Lit novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life was the highly-publicized debut novel of Kaavya Viswanathan and the first (or only) thing that comes to people's minds when it's mentioned is the plagiarism controversy; most of its Wikipedia article is dedicated to discussing this and the fall-out, with barely any mention of its plot. Shortly after its publication in April 2006, it drew a storm of controversy after it was found that several sections had been plagiarised from other novels. Consequently, all shelf copies of the book were withdrawn, development on a planned movie adaptation was halted permanently and Viswanathan's contract for a sequel was cancelled.
- "If You Were A Dinosaur My Love" is a Nebula award-winning (and Hugo-nominated) short story in which the fiancée of a comatose paleontologist fantasizes about their love being a Tyrannosaurus rex. It is best known for attracting the ire of science fiction purists who feel that it barely qualifies as speculative fiction and thus did not deserve to win awards for science fiction literature.
- James Bond:
- Thunderball is likely the most notorious of the novels, not because of its content, but because of the fact that its publication led to a copyright infringement lawsuit from screenwriter Kevin McClory. The novel was based on a scrapped screenplay that Fleming and McClory co-wrote; when McClory found out about the novel, he took legal action under the belief that Fleming was taking more credit than he actually had. Part of the settlement was that McClory gained the rights to make a film adaptation of the story, which resulted in Albert R. Broccoli and Harry Saltzman, the producers of the film series, being forced to bring him on board for the film adaptation, and is the reason Never Say Never Again exists.
- The Spy Who Loved Me is generally regarded as the worst in the series and has made little to no dents in popular culture... with the distinct exception of the fact that it includes a female character offering an impassioned defense of the "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization. The much better-regarded film of the same title used almost nothing from the book at Ian Fleming's own request.
- Several other entries in the series are known by the general public more for inspiring movies and containing absolutely cringeworthy Values Dissonance that was extreme even for The '50s. In particular, there's Goldfinger, which states that lesbians are the result of child molestation and can be cured with a good hard penis and that Koreans are a different species.
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- Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928) isn't generally regarded as one of D. H. Lawrence's best novels by literary critics who have actually read it. That honour is usually bestowed upon Sons and Lovers (1913), but the former is his most well-known novel by far to the general public because of its then-shocking content, depicting an upper-class woman having a sexual affair with a lower-class gardener as well as containing language that no public publisher at that time would allow. This resulted in a famous obscenity trial being launched against Penguin Books when they began to publish a new edition in 1960, which Penguin Books won. The publicity over the obscenity trial ensured the edition was sold out to curious readers who had wondered what all the hullabaloo was about, and the event remains the most discussed thing about the novel.
- The Legend of Rah and the Muggles would have mostly been remembered for being poorly-written, but is widely known for the fact that its author, Nancy Stouffer, sued J. K. Rowling for plagiarism without success.
- The Lightlark Saga: The first book, Lightlark, became better known for the controversy around its author Alex Aster and the marketing, to the point a lot of people heard of it via the controversy first and some people are more interested in what it means for the publishing industry than the book itself. The controversy can be boiled down to accusations of false advertising and the author misrepresenting herself, and rumours of Aster being a so-called "industry plant". While there's no solid evidence for Aster being an industry plant (especially as she'd already had two other novels published) it wouldn't be inaccurate to say many readers felt the marketing was misleading, such as pointing out that several scenes, lines and tropes that Aster had promoted as being in the book are nowhere to be found in the finished product, not even in a rewritten form. Things then got even messier with Aster's editor going onto online book groups, including sub-Reddits, to defend the book, and Lightlark getting review-bombed on Goodreads by people who felt Aster had deceived them (some of whom hadn't even read the book yet).
- Lolita is, unfortunately, more famous for the controversy that surrounds it than the actual content and quality of the novel: Vladimir Nabokov went through many publishers who refused to publish it, and after it was published, it was banned in many places for being "pornographic" or "an instruction manual for pedophilia" (which it is not). Even for people who aren't familiar with the history of the book, a lot of the covers/jackets make it look like erotica.
- Looking for Alaska, the book that put John Green on the map as a novelist, is infamous among Moral Guardians for its pulls-no-punches depictions of teenage sexuality and drug use, most notably a quite explicit oral sex scene. Well over a decade after its publication, it remains one of the most frequently banned books in the United States.
- H. P. Lovecraft is one of the most influential writers of the early 20th century, is the Trope Maker and Codifier of Cosmic Horror Story and Eldritch Abomination, and his stories have actually gained appreciation over the years. However, it is difficult to talk about him without acknowledging his white supremacy and anti-Semitism, which was considered virulent even by the standards of his time. Compounding things further is that his bigoted beliefs often seeped into his stories, which makes it more difficult to separate the art from the artist.
- Lucky, the 1999 memoir of Alice Sebold (author of The Lovely Bones) became this in 2021, with the controversy potentially extending to the author herself. One of the main subjects of the memoir is Sebold's rape in 1981, and the trial and subsequent conviction of Anthony Broadwater for the crime (referred to by a pseudonym in the book). However, during pre-production of a planned film adaptation, one of the producers noticed there were several discrepancies between the memoir and the actual court case, ultimately leading to a re-examination of the evidence and Broadwater's exoneration. It appeared likely that Sebold was coached by the police and prosecution into identifying Broadwater as her attacker, despite her initial doubts; the trial also utilized a method of hair analysis later found to be unreliable. Consequently, the film adaptation had its funding pulled and was shelved; Sebold apologized to Broadwater for her role in his wrongful conviction, and Lucky was later recalled by the publisher for possible revisions.
- It's nearly impossible to talk about Kit Williams' Masquerade, a Fictional Mystery, Real Prize story concerning the location of a jewelled golden hare, without mentioning that the official contest winner, Dugald Thompson, was revealed in 1988 to be a con artist who cheated his way to finding the hare by using a series of personal connections instead of solving the book's puzzle, and used the hare as collateral to publish a computer game called Hareraiser that is widely believed to have been another scam.
- The Men by Sandra Newman imagines a world in which everyone with a Y chromosome has disappeared, including the transgender women. Trans activists on Twitter, understandably, sharply criticized the premise and the implicit equating of trans women with cis men before the novel was published. The essayist Lauren Hough defended the novel by being incredibly rude to its critics, and had her lesbian memoir removed from the Lambda Awards as a result. When advance review copies became available, many reviewers pointed out even worse aspects of the book - a scene where being nonbinary is deemed a fad, the main viewpoint character being a repeat rapist (albeit via Rape by Proxy) who blames her victims for not standing up for her at her trial, a scene where the first men out of a group of them to commit cannibalism are explicitly identified as black men, a scene where a transgender man is violently attacked by a group of women who attempt to kill him for having the wrong genitals, and multiple instances of characters declaring they're much happier without the Y-chromosomed people in their lives (making the scene where the protagonists wonder if they should keep referring to the disappeared as "the men", given that it wasn't just cis men who vanished, come off as insincere ass-covering). All discussion of the book focuses on its outrageous gender, sexuality, and racial content, to the point where its plot is an afterthought.
- The Nicci Chronicles: The part most people remember about the second book Shroud of Eternity - with even its Wikipedia article being more focused on this than the actual plot - is Terry Goodkind publicly denouncing the cover art as "laughably bad", "sexist" and not a true reflection of his books' content or Nicci's characterization as a "strong female character" (he also invited fans to mock the art). The cover artist, Bastien Lecouffe-Deharme, responded that he found this disrespectful, that he painted what he was commissioned to do (Goodkind himself claimed he had no say in the artwork) and he would no longer work with the author; Goodkind subsequently apologized and started criticizing his publishers instead. As this all went down on social media, other people then chipped in; some pointed out that the cover really isn't that sexist note while others called Goodkind's comments hypocritical when his own books have been criticized for problematic depictions of women (e.g. the frequent occurrences of sexual violence against women).
- While Oliver Twist is one of Charles Dickens' most famous novels, it's rather difficult to talk about the book without at least acknowledging that Fagin is a fairly offensive stereotype of Jews. To his credit, however, Dickens later took efforts to make up for this by omitting over 180 instances of Fagin being referred to as "the Jew" in later editions of the book, and would later include multiple sympathetic Jewish characters in Our Mutual Friend.
- The children's book The Pet Goat probably wouldn't have an article on The Other Wiki if it weren't for the fact that George W. Bush was reading it to schoolchildren when he was informed about the September 11th terrorist attacks. Debate subsequently began about his decision to finish the book before going to deal with the crisis.
- The Princess Wei Yang by Qin Jian is best known for the discovery the author had copied almost all of it from other novels and the court case that followed.
- Rage (1977) by Stephen King is probably best known for being pulled out of print after several school shootings were possibly inspired by the novel.
S-Z
- The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie is remembered more for the ensuing fatwa declared on the author by Ayatollah Khomeini, and for the fallout from that incident than for the novel itself. The controversy over the fatwa has also caused this to bleed over to all of Rushdie's works, despite him being considered one of the greatest British novelists of the last century.
- To this day, the main talking point around Save the Pearls is that it badly bungles its anti-racism message to the point of actually coming off as racist. Victoria Foyt stated this wasn't her intention, but for most readers it's hard not to interpret it this way given its reliance on racial stereotyping and over-emphasis on saintly white people being oppressed and threatened by people of color; Foyt's attempts to defend the duology's content also came off as tone-deaf or unconvincing. Notably, the racism stuff greatly overshadows the more bizarre plot elements, such as the protagonists hanging out with Aztecs and a furry romance.
- The Sheik was a bestseller when it was released, being adapted into a movie. Nowadays, the book is more known for portraying the titular sheik's rape of the female lead, and the Stockholm Syndrome she develops, as romantic.
- The Secret of Castle Cant is only remembered for its author being convicted of and sentenced to six years for possession of child pornography, alienating many readers. Never mind it was a piece of Children's Literature.
- It's difficult to discuss the Something Dark and Holy trilogy without someone bringing up the accusations of the story having antisemitic undertones and the controversial online behaviour of its author, Emily A. Duncan (including allegations of bullying POC authors, being dismissive of incest survivors and getting very defensive over negative reviews or criticisms of the trilogy), some of which only came to light around the same time the final book, Blessed Monsters, was published in 2021. Duncan eventually issued a public apology for some of this in 2021, though the controversy has lingered, with even some readers who previously enjoyed the books stating they no longer felt comfortable supporting the series because of this.
- Benjanun Sriduangkaew was once a popular upcoming fantasy and science fiction author and a finalist for the 2014 John W. Campbell award for Best New Writer. However, in 2015 she was revealed as the controversial online blogger Requires Hate, and multiple allegations of cyberbullying and harassment were made against her by colleagues in the industry, with a piece by Laura J. Mixon critiquing her behavior winning a Hugo award in 2015. Since then, she’s become far more known for her controversial online activities than for any of her creative work.
- Stranger is less known for its content than for the fact that it was unsold for years... simply because agents wanted to make a gay character straight or take him out completely out of fear the book wouldn't sell. The resulting Publishers Weekly post — Say Yes to Gay YA — was widespread and led to a lot more diverse YA being picked up both by publishers and by readers, and it among many other things eventually led to the We Need Diverse Books movement. But how many people know Stranger finally came out in 2014?
- Moby's 2019 memoir Then It Fell Apart is overshadowed due to several accusations of inaccuracies in the book. One of the biggest controversies involved Moby's claim he had a relationship with Natalie Portman when she was 20 and he was 33. Portman publicly stated that she was actually 18 years old at the time and never considered them to be in a serious relationship, saying they only knew each other briefly and that Moby's behavior actually made her feel uncomfortable. ("I was surprised to hear that he characterised the very short time that I knew him as dating because my recollection is a much older man being creepy with me when I just had graduated high school."). Moby continued to insist the two had seriously dated (and claimed she was lying about her age at one point) before eventually apologizing to Portman, though the backlash was bad enough that he cancelled the rest of the tour promoting the memoir.
- Three Rivers, the semi-autobiographical debut novel of Sarah Stusek, became more notable for Stusek's controversial behaviour prior to its release, which ended up getting her dropped by her original publisher (who were then also accused of shifty practices). Early reviews based on advanced copies were largely positive, but things went sideways in June 2023 when Stusek made a TikTok video (which has since been taken down for violating community guidelines) berating a Goodreads reviewer for giving Three Rivers 4 out of 5 stars due to finding the ending predictable, including calling the reviewer a "bitch"; while authors attacking readers over reviews is generally considered to be in poor taste, this case was especially egregious given it was a positive review. When most commenters took the reviewer's side and her publisher SparkPress requested she apologise, Stusek initially refused and claimed it was a joke (she eventually apologised to the reviewer in private). In response, SparkPress announced they were no longer working with Stusek and she had to find a different publisher to keep the release date; Stusek later accused SparkPress of being "sketchy as hell" and compared them to an MLM. The Goodreads page also had to be locked due to people review-bombing the book in response to Stusek's behaviour. Even after the book came out, it's mostly discussed in the context of how not to respond to reviews and whether hybrid publishers like SparkPress are that different from Vanity Publishing.
- The Uncle Remus stories are a group of actual fables told by slaves and former slaves in the American South, making them a valuable cultural resource. However, though once popular, they are now nearly unknown. Compiler and editor Joel Chandler Harris' fictional character who tells the stories, Uncle Remus, was written as an elderly, cheerful ex-slave and sharecropper, seemingly content to continue working for a white family. The implied racism is now almost all that is known of the stories. The fables themselves, taken out of the Remus context, are stories about animals using their wiles to trick each other, and man, in order to survive. Unlike Aesop's fables, they are not meant to be morally instructive but are a commentary on man resorting to animal-like behaviors in desperate circumstances.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin, when it was first released, drew up massive controversy due to its massive anti-slavery themes, particularly in the years leading up to The American Civil War. The backlash was so heavy, it spawned a genre of literature (known as "anti-Tom literature") that tried to defend slavery.note However, few people have actually read the book, due to the fact that Minstrel Shows tended to exaggerate it to the point some see it as being actually racist.
- Under the Same Stars was a planned memoir by Young Adult author Rose Christo about how she wrote My Immortal to help find her brother after the two were separated in the New York City foster care system. Today, the book is mostly known about how the author was exposed to lying about everything by her brother on Kiwi Farms. The book was cancelled after she was revealed to be lying, and Christo has been scrubbed off the face of the Internet.
- It's hard to talk about War of the Spark: Forsaken without getting into how it controversially retconned Chandra Nalaar's bisexuality and claimed that she was exclusively attracted to men, which eventually led to both Wizards of the Coast and the author apologizing.
- Whenever the Warrior Cats novella Spottedleaf's Heart is brought up, the sole thing people discuss is how Thistleclaw was depicted as sexually grooming a young Spottedleaf, how it derails both characters, and the poor handling of the sensitive topic of child grooming.
- Where the Crawdads Sing and its film adaptation are increasingly overshadowed by the controversy surrounding author Delia Owens; namely, that her ex-husband and former stepson are implicated in the televised 1995 killing of an alleged poacher in Zambia, where the Owenses were once involved in conservation work.note While Delia Owens herself isn't believed to be directly involved in the alleged murder, she is considered a potential witness and several people have pointed out the eerieness of the novel's plot heavily featuring a murder and one that is ultimately portrayed as a righteous act the killer gets away with, when the author herself is linked to a potential unsolved homicide (along with other similarities). Some have speculated Owens may have used the incident as inspiration for the novel. Additionally, the Owenses had been accused of expressing racist views towards Africans, with some readers feeling this may be reflected in the portrayals of the black characters in the book. These controversies had been public knowledge for decades before Where the Crawdads Sing was written, but came to renewed attention in the early 2020s, after the novel became a bestseller and the film adaptation went into production.
- With the release of The Woman in the Window, author A.J. Finn (real name: Dan Mallory) himself has been outed for his extensive history of lying to his audiences about his health—and that of his family members—as a means of garnering sympathy and bolstering his career. Combined with the accusations of The Woman in the Window ripping off elements from other movies and books in the genre, this novel's runaway success has also drawn considerable backlash, to the point of alienating several would-be readers.
- The World Rose is a self-published 2014 novel by Richard Brittain (of 2006 Countdown champion fame) that was already infamous because its protagonist is based on a real young woman that Brittain had been stalking for at least two years prior to writing it. However, it managed to become more infamous for being at the centre of an extreme author tantrum. When another young woman posted a negative review of the book online, Brittain used Facebook to find out where she worked, then proceeded to travel hundreds of miles to her workplace and smash a wine bottle over her head, leading to the woman's hospitalization and Brittain's arrest. The woman in question was so traumatized that she quit going to college and admitted she lost trust with people. Most, if not all, reviews of the novel are negative, and are just as likely to bring up Brittain's unprofessional behavior.
