The battle over the U.S. publication of "Ulysses"

The intriguing court battle it took to get Joyce's book published in America

During a first-season episode of the excellent AMC TV series Mad Men, set in the New York advertising world of the 1960s, several secretaries are seen gathered around the office water cooler, whispering.

Finally, one secretly passes along a well-thumbed copy of the erotic literary classic Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which was only approved for legal publication in the early 1960s.

The fact that a mere novel could hold such cultural power seems almost quaint at this point in time.

However, such curious secretaries may never have had the chance to whisper about D.H. Lawrence’s famous novel if not for a landmark legal battle that took place 75 years ago.  The case involved one passionate Irishman, challenged the censorship of perhaps the greatest novel ever written, and changed the way Americans read.

A Time for Censorship

Censorship debates, of course, are still with us.  Debates over free or “inappropriate” speech seem to arise every other week, whether it’s controversial magazine covers or shock jocks who, in the minds of some, “go too far.”  Then too, lyrics in music performed by gangster rappers or heavy metal rockers always seem to offend somebody.

So it is easy to believe we did not have these rancorous debates in the good old days, when it seemed that all entertainment was wholesome, everything was black and white, the good guys always won, and jazz – which is now studied in universities and played only on publicly-supported radio stations – was the most provocative form of music.

But censorship was on everyone’s mind in 1933.

The most immediate and pressing issue, in the minds of Irish-Americans and many other Catholics across the U.S., were gangster movies, among them The Public Enemy in which James Cagney played Irish Chicago killer Tom Powers.

But even as cinematic gangsters were killing cops, corrupting women, and shipping illegal booze, a different kind of censorship battle was unfolding in a Manhattan courtroom.

At its center was, of all things, an 800-page novel with the strange title Ulysses, by a brooding Irishman named James Joyce.

All in all, it took nearly 15 years of arrests, court fights, and even book burnings before the battle over Ulysses was finally settled in the fall of 1933.

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Nster.com