The sort of article we love here at HOB
Here’s the introduction ( well worth a read in full)
In the early 1930s, James Joyce’s Ulysses was the most notorious banned book in the United States. Using a stream-of-consciousness style to describe twenty-four hours in the life of a lower-middle class Dubliner named Leopold Bloom, Joyce’s classic, published in 1922, was brilliant, dense, convoluted, complex, and legally obscene. Ulysses was the “only volume of literary importance still under a ban” in the country, Morris Ernst declared. He set out to “liberate” it, and the celebrated case, resolved by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in 1934, was not only a landmark in the law of literary censorship but also a turning point in Ernst’s career.
Joyce’s novel had a long history of suppression in the United States. Ulysses had been banned even before Joyce finished writing it. In 1918, as he was completing Ulysses, Joyce sent chapters to the New York–based literary magazine the Little Review, which published them in installments. The Post Office Department confiscated the issues and burned them. Shortly after, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice had obscenity charges brought against the Review’s editors for having published the chapter in which Bloom masturbates while watching a young woman on the beach. John Quinn, a noted literary lawyer and patron of the arts, defended the editors in court. Despite Quinn’s persuasive argument—Ulysses was so dense and convoluted that no one could possibly understand it, much less be debauched by it, he argued—a three-judge panel, using the Hicklin test, concluded that the book had the potential to corrupt youth and was therefore obscene. After the New York decision, no American publisher was willing to take a chance on Ulysses. The book was eventually issued in Paris in 1922, under the imprint of the avant-garde bookstore Shakespeare and Company. Joyce gave Sylvia Beach, the bookstore’s proprietor, the world rights to Ulysses.
The ban on the book notwithstanding, Ulysses found a wide and receptive audience in the United States. Blue paperbound copies were smuggled into the country and sold at fantastic prices, sometimes as much as fifty dollars. Joyce won critical acclaim for Ulysses; articles and treatises were written about it, its style was widely imitated, and the book achieved masterpiece status. Observed critic Harry Hansen in 1933, a generation of Americans coming of age in the 1920s grew up “with the idea that [Ulysses] is a literary Bible.”
Because Ulysses could not be legally published in the United States, it could not be copyrighted. Samuel Roth, an infamous publisher of pornography, seized on this opportunity and began to publish bowdlerized installments of Ulysses in his magazine Two Worlds Monthly. Joyce sued Roth over the unconsented use of his name. One hundred sixty-seven of Joyce’s literary friends, including T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann, signed a petition protesting the “appropriation and mutilation” of Joyce’s work. Joyce won an injunction in 1927. Meanwhile, US Customs officials seized copies of the book that were imported from Paris. In 1928, the US Customs Court, in an action titled A. Heymoolen v. United States, affirmed the exclusion of Ulysses as an obscene book.