Description

This timely new study provides a systematic, comparative, and compre­hensive view of literature’s involvement in the obscenity question.

The year 1890 roughly marks the beginning of a sexual revolution in the fiction published in the United States. Today, the gains realized generally are regarded as beneficial, and the right of writers to express themselves and, per­haps more importantly,the right of people to read, usually are taken for granted, though they are not without peril, as recent Court cases have shown.

The year 1890 marks also the beginning of a sustained effort through legal action to censor literature considered obscene. The tensions thus produced are with us still. A crisis once again seems brewing as a result of the Burger Court’s 1973Miller v. California decision. At least 2of the 50 states have already passed new antiobscenity legislation based on Miller,and more than 250 such bills are pending in other state legisla­tures.

The trauma to our national psyche caused by the obscenity issue is the sub­ject of this new, thorough, and dispas­sionate study. Dean Lewis’s investiga­tions include all works of imaginative literature—novels, short stories, poetry, and plays—known to have been the subject of obscenity litigation in the United States, for which court records exist, up to and including the Carnal Knowledge (Jenkins v. Georgia)case in 1974,and encompass more than fifty major works of imaginative literature charged with being obscene.

General readers concerned with civil rights, constitutional scholars, lawyers, judges, booksellers, publishers, writers, and librarians will find here much to ponder about the state and status of our literature—“almost the most prodigious asset of a country, and perhaps its most precious possession,” Mark Twain once wrote.

About the Author

Felice Flanery Lewis is Dean of Conolly College, The Brooklyn Center, Long Island University. She received her Ph.D. degree from New York Univer­sity.

Praise For…

“This is without any doubt the defini­tive book about censorship and without question it is a book that should (will) be referred to for many years to come.”

—West Coast Review of Books

“Lewis has written an indispensable reference for anyone concerned with a fascinating element in American cul­tural history—our exaggerated fears and hopes concerning the effects of lit­erature on private character and public morality… [Her] study is an impor­tant contribution toward the history of the topic and a good and lucid book.

      The quotations she cites from Mil­ler, Joyce, and Wilson would have earned her a generation ago an aisle seat on Comstock’s train.”—Chronicle of Higher Education

“Dean Lewis’s bold new study is possibly the ultimate book on censorship. Her unblushing, and exhaustive, examina­tion of artistic creation in conjunction with the law and the social climate in the United States brilliantly illuminates critical first-freedom issues.”—Morris L. Ernst, New York Attorney

“This is an engrossing chronicle of the continuing confrontation between the artist, claiming complete freedom to express himself, and the state asserting a power and duty, taken over from the church, to safeguard what it judges to be the public morality. We are fortunate that, as Felice Lewis relates so vividly, we have in this country a constitution which sets limits upon the state’s as­serted power and a judicial system that, in recognizing the power, recognizes toothe right of authors to say what they think and feel, and, perhaps even more important, the right of the people to read it.”—Leo Pfeffer, Constitutional Lawyer and Scholar

“Here is a book on the never-ending fight between literature and the law that is as stimulating as the lively books with which it deals. Mrs. Lewis has the cour­age and insight of the outspoken masters. She writes of the law with the authority that few writers or lawyers possess.”—Elmer Gertz, Author, Lawyer, and Professor at The John Marshall Law School