The Most Dangerous Book

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.

Starred review from May 1, 2014
Modernism's "battle against an obsolete civilization," encapsulated in the struggle to publish one taboo-shattering masterpiece.In his sharp, well-written debut, Birmingham (History and Literature/Harvard Univ.) reminds us that the artistic experiments of James Joyce (1882-1941) were part of a larger movement to throw off Victorian social, sexual and political shackles. Indeed, authorities in England, Ireland and America were quite sure that Joyce's shocking fiction was, like the feminists, anarchists, socialists and other reprobates who presumably read it, an attempt to undermine the moral foundations of Western society. Guilty as charged, replied the diverse group that supported the impoverished Joyce as he struggled to write Ulysses while wandering across Europe during and after World War I, plagued by increasingly grim eye problems (described here in gruesome detail). Ezra Pound advocated for Joyce with his literary contacts on both sides of the Atlantic, and Dora Marsden and Harriet Weaver gave him his first break in the English avant-garde magazine The Egoist. American iconoclasts Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap risked punitive fines and jail terms to publish chapters of Ulysses in The Little Review, adopting a defiant stance that dismayed lawyer John Quinn, who had scant sympathy for radicals but thought Joyce was a genius and that his book must be defended. The clandestine edition of Ulysses published in Paris by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company in 1922 became the identifying badge of cultural insurgents everywhere and the target of confiscation and burnings by censors until Judge John Woolsey's landmark 1933 decision permitted the novel to be sold in the U.S. and dramatically revised the legal concept of obscenity. Birmingham makes palpable the courage and commitment of the rebels who championed Joyce, but he grants the censors their points of view as well in this absorbing chronicle of a tumultuous time.Superb cultural history, pulling together many strands of literary, judicial and societal developments into a smoothly woven narrative fabric.

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April 15, 2014
Convinced that Joyce's Ulysses contained unmitigated filth and obscenity, Sir Archibald Bodkin was determined in 1922 to burn all copies already in the UK and to ban importation of additional copies. Birmingham here tells the story of how Bodkin and his American counterparts (John Sumner and Anthony Comstock) lost the battle to keep Joyce's explosive book out of readers' hands. To be sure, Birmingham starts by recounting Joyce's travails in simply writing the book. But others (including Ellmann, Gorman, and Bowker) have already examined that torturous composition process. What Birmingham delivers for the first time is a complete account of the legal war wagedchiefly by publisher Bennett Cerf and attorney Morris Ernstto get Joyce's masterpiece past British and American obscenity laws. Readers dismayed by the rising tide of pornography may view the obscenity laws breached for Joyce's high art less dismissively than does Birmingham. But for readers who value Ulysses for the revolution it effected in fiction, Birmingham has chronicled an epoch-making triumph for literature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

April 1, 2014

Published in 1922, James Joyce's Ulysses relates in pointillist detail a single day--June 16, 1904--in the life of Dubliner Leopold Bloom, cast loosely as the eponymous Homeric hero. But the saga of the novel and its road to publication and sale goes far deeper than just the story between the covers, observes Birmingham (history & literature, Harvard Univ.). One of the most lauded, controversial, and frequently banned books ever published, Joyce's masterpiece was a touchstone for the icons of modern literary and intellectual endeavor--Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, and Ernest Hemingway, among them--and nearly a century later stands at the pinnacle of novels published in English. Covering three decades, from the book's conception in 1905 through Joyce's infatuation with Nora Barnacle (who would later become the novel's Molly Bloom) to the push-and-pull of wildly disparate critical opinion and the groundbreaking 1933 obscenity trial decision ruling in favor of publication in the United States, Birmingham brings to life a work after which "modernist experimentation was no longer marginal. It was essential." VERDICT What begins as simply the "biography of a book" morphs into an absorbing, deeply researched, and accessible guide to the history of modern thought in the first two decades of the 20th century through the lens of Joyce's innovative fiction. Important for literary historians, as well as any readers interested in cultural politics at the advent of the modern in post-World War I Europe and America. [See Prepub Alert, 1/6/14.]--Patrick A. Smith, Bainbridge Coll., GA

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2014

Harvard literary historian Birmingham's study is really the biography of a book, tracing the evolution of James Joyce's Ulysses from Joyce's first glint of inspiration in 1904 to the 1933 federal obscenity trial that finally allowed for its U.S. publication.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.