#1724 Great Censorship Legal Cases
From Listening to America · 54:04
Show by Listening to America
Clay Jenkinson gives four or five lectures annually for the Smithsonian Associates. In his most recent talk, he analyzed three notorious 20th-century censorship cases, all involving books once regarded as obscene. First, the case against James Joyce's novel Ulysses, thought by some to be the greatest novel of the century, went to trial in 1933. Second, the trial of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1960, banned in England not just for its explicit sex scenes, but because the adulterous affair was between an aristocratic woman and a mere working-class gardener. And finally, Allen Ginsberg's Beat Generation poem Howl, published by City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, was tried in 1957. Each case was full of dramatic twists, irony, and humor, and in each case a judge or jury decided these amazing works of literature were not legally obscene. This episode was recorded on August 15, 2026.
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