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The Most Dangerous Book

The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

Audiobook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available
"A great story—how modernism brought down the regime of censorship—told as a great story. Kevin Birmingham's imaginative scholarship brings Joyce and his world to life. There is a fresh detail on nearly every page."—Louis Menand, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club
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.
Literary historian Kevin Birmingham follows Joyce’s years as a young writer, his feverish work on his literary masterpiece, and his ardent love affair with Nora Barnacle, the model for Molly Bloom. Joyce and Nora socialized with literary greats like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Beach. Their support helped Joyce fight an array of anti-vice crusaders while his book was disguised and smuggled, pirated and burned in the United States and Britain.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from February 3, 2014
      In this exultant literary history and nonfiction debut, Harvard lecturer Birmingham recounts the remarkable publication saga of Ulysses, often considered the greatest novel of the 20th century. Even before its publication in 1922, Ulysses outraged government censors on both sides of the Atlantic, with its obscenities, masturbation, and adulterous sex. Even the bowdlerized excerpts published in the Little Review resulted in an obscenity trial for the journal’s editors. But a band of literary radicals and free speech activists—Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, Samuel Roth, Bennett Cerf, and Morris Ernst, among others—who were determined to see the book published in America, helped initiate the landmark 1933 obscenity case that set a precedent for First Amendment rights and cultural freedom. The presiding judge, John Woolsey, ruled that the book was not obscene on the grounds of the aesthetic value in its attempt to capture all of life and the roving nature of human thought. This epic of the human body that initially had to be smuggled or pirated became a bestseller and a literary landmark. Drawing upon extensive research, Birmingham skillfully converts the dust of the archive into vivid narrative, steeping readers in the culture, law, and art of a world forced to contend with a masterpiece. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME.

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  • English

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