John Quinn, a noted literary lawyer and patron of the arts, defended the editors in court. 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. The Post Office Department confiscated the issues and burned them. 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. Ulysses had been banned even before Joyce finished writing it. Joyce’s novel had a long history of suppression in the United States. (Featured image: Ernst defends Flaubert’s November in 1935.) 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. Ulysses was the “only volume of literary importance still under a ban” in the country, Morris Ernst declared. 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. In the early 1930s, James Joyce’s Ulysses was the most notorious banned book in the United States.
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