The most dangerous book : the battle for James Joyce's Ulysses / Kevin Birmingham.

9781594203367
1594203369

Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

New York : The Penguin Press, 2014.

©2014

English

417 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

PR6019.O9 U6257 2014

823/.912

For more than a decade, the book that literary critics now consider the most important novel in the English language was illegal to own, sell, advertise or purchase in most of the English-speaking world. James Joyce's big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. All of the minutiae of Leopold Bloom's day, including its unspeakable details, unfold with careful precision in its pages. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice immediately banned the novel as "obscene, lewd, and lascivious." Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce's inspiration in 1904 to its landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 403-405) and index.

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