> 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.<p>LOL. The kids are too dumb to be corrupted by this book!<p>The best part is that it is true. If you have enough constitution to be able to get through the prose you aren't going to be turned into a sex maniac by it.<p>I did appreciate the explanation of how the novel became so infamous so quickly, with lurid portions of the book apparently being excerpted in newsmagazines of the time. It always seemed strange to me that such a dense and nigh-unreadable novel would attract the ire of censors. How would they have even gotten to the objectionable material?
This part is fun:<p><i>A few days later the book showed up at Random House—it had passed through customs. Furious, Ernst personally marched the package over to the customs office and demanded that it be searched. When the inspector opened it and found Ulysses, he muttered, “Oh, for God’s sake, everybody brings that in. We don’t pay attention to it.” Ernst insisted that he seize it.</i>
I highly recommend the podcast Re:Joyce by Frank Delaney if you're at all interested in Ulysses.<p>He reads Ulysses and discusses it - sometimes an episode is dedicated to just one sentence, sometimes a paragraph.<p>Tragic that he died before completing it and that his website has gone untended.<p><a href="https://feeds.feedburner.com/libsyn/sQtR" rel="nofollow">https://feeds.feedburner.com/libsyn/sQtR</a>
There's an excellent book about this by Kevin Birmingham, "The Most Dangerous Book"<p><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Book-Battle-Ulysses/dp/0143127543" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Most-Dangerous-Book-Battle-Ulysses/dp...</a>
My favorite part about this episode in history is the name of the supreme court case "United States v. One Book Called Ulysses". The whole of the United States going up against just one book? That's a fight I would love to see.
> Because Ulysses could not be legally published in the United States, it could not be copyrighted<p>I'm struggling to understand that particular statement. Can anyone explain?<p>EDIT: "Copyright exists automatically in an original work of authorship once it is fixed in a tangible
medium"[0]<p>If you write out your original thoughts on a piece of paper, that's fixing them in a tangible medium, right?<p>[0] <a href="https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ01.pdf</a>
Ulysses is literary viagra and should be consumed with care. The government acted responsibly in controlling its availability until its side effects on consumers became apparent. With the benefit of hindsight we can see that the strong moral fiber of our society is quite capable of withstanding subversive materials such as this.
I've yet to hear a good justification for why there is any accepted legal case for banning any work of fiction for things like "obscenity" in the US given the first amendment, nor other jurisdictions with similar foundational laws. It seems pretty cut and dry