Kevin Birmingham - The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

Kevin Birmingham - The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's "Ulysses" (Penguin, 2014).

ISBN: 9781594203367 | 432 pages | ePUB + MOBI


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. The long struggle for publication added to the growing pressures of Joyce's deteriorating eyesight, finances and home life.

Salvation finally came from the partnership of Bennett Cerf, the cofounder of Random House, and Morris Ernst, a dogged civil liberties lawyer. With their stewardship, the case ultimately rested on the literary merit of Joyce's master work. The sixty-year-old judicial practices governing obscenity in the United States were overturned because a federal judge could get inside Molly Bloom's head.

Birmingham's archival work brings to light new information about both Joyce and the story surrounding "Ulysses". Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, THE MOST DANGEROUS BOOK is the fullest recounting we have of the struggle to publish "Ulysses" and a gripping examination of how the world came to say yes to "Ulysses".

Thanks to ultramoom for bringing this great new book to my attention!


Reviews

"A great story -- how modernism brought down the regime of censorship -- told as a great story. Birmingham's imaginative scholarship brings Joyce and his world to life. There is a fresh detail on nearly every page." -- Louis Menand

"Birmingham, a lecturer in history and literature at Harvard, appears fully formed in this, his first book. The historian and the writer in him are utterly in sync. He marches through this material with authority and grace, an instinct for detail and smacking quotation and a fair amount of wit. It's a measured yet bravura performance." -- Dwight Garner, The New York Times

"Impressively researched and especially useful for its meticulous accounts of various legal battles. It is meant to be fun to read and, setting aside my fogeyish cavils, it is." -- Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

"The Most Dangerous Book is the fullest account anybody has made of the publication history of Ulysses. Birmingham's brilliant study makes you realize how important owning this book, the physical book, has always been to people." -- The New Yorker

"Birmingham recounts this story with a richness of detail and dramatic verve unexpected of literary history, making one almost nostalgic for the bad old days, when a book could be still be dangerous." -- Vanity Fair

"The story of Ulysses has been told before, but not with Mr. Birmingham's thoroughness. The Most Dangerous Book makes use of newspaper reports, court documents, letters and the existing Joyce biographies. It looks back to a time 'when novelists tested the limits of the law and when novels were dangerous enough to be burned' and makes one almost nostalgic for it." -- The Wall Street Journal

"Birmingham… writes with fluidity and a surprising eye for fun. He probably has read through the mountains of books and scholarly articles on Ulysses and seems obsessed with the book itself, but wears it all lightly. [A] vivid narrative [that] . . . makes you want to go back and read -- and treasure -- Joyce's novel because he liberally salts the novel's backstory with memorable anecdotes and apercus, especially at the close of each chapter." -- Boston Globe