page_title: Boni & Liveright
section_title: Society for the Suppression of Vice
hierarchical_section_title: Boni & Liveright / Early history / Society for the Suppression of Vice
caption_attribution_description: English: Symbol of the "New York Society for the Suppression of Vice", advocating book-burning.
context_page_description: Boni & Liveright is an American trade book publisher established in 1917 in New York City by Albert Boni and Horace Liveright. Over the next sixteen years the firm, which changed its name to Horace Liveright, Inc., in 1928 and then Liveright, Inc., in 1931, published over a thousand books. Before its bankruptcy in 1933 and subsequent reorganization as Liveright Publishing Corporation, Inc., it had achieved considerable notoriety for editorial acumen, brash marketing, and challenge to contemporary obscenity and censorship laws. Their logo is of a cowled monk.
  It was the first American publishers of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, E. E. Cummings, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford, Anita Loos, and the Modern Library series. In addition to being the house of Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson throughout the 1920s, it notably published T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Isadora Duncan's My Life, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Djuna Barnes's Ryder, Ezra Pound's Personae, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, and Eugene O'Neill's plays.
context_section_description: If publishing the literary new guard brought more acclaim than cash flow to the press, sex, or the suggestion of it, created commercial opportunity for Boni & Liveright. Many of its bestselling books were considered scandalous or titillating for the period, inviting the scrutiny of figures like John Sumner and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Throughout the 1920s – decades before Barney Rosset's landmark legal battles at Grove Press – Horace Liveright frequently fought off censors and obscenity legislation. The publicity surrounding these battles only stoked the curiosity of readers further and forced the publisher to reprint otherwise unexceptionally sensational works.
  The publisher mostly got around these challenges by issuing limited editions available only by subscription (as in the case of George Moore and Waldo Frank's novels). Yet B&L could not escape the scorn of John Sumner who, as successor to Anthony Comstock at the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, regularly threatened suit against publishers of risqué or prurient material. The New York Society, alongside Boston's Watch and Ward Society (giving rise to the term "Banned in Boston"), informally enforced prevailing state laws prohibiting the distribution of inappropriate literature. What defined inappropriate would lead to some of the most notable fights between Liveright and Sumner.
  The first was over a modern translation of Petronius's Satyricon, a nearly 2,000-year-old classic that Sumner deemed offensive for a passage referring to orgies and homosexuality. The case against Boni & Liveright would drag out for several months in the courts and in the press (where Liveright passionately spoke out against censorship) but be ultimately dismissed by a grand jury in October 1922. Undeterred, Sumner returned by working with state assemblymen to propose a Clean Books Bill in the Albany legislature.
  Introduced in 1923, the bill broadly defined objectionable literature so any portion of obscene, lewd, or indecent text could serve as sufficient evidence to have a whole work banned. Liveright was nearly alone amongst New York publishers to publicly oppose the legislation, writing prominent editorials in defense of free speech and leading a contingent of authors, journalists, and lawyers to fight the bill in Albany in April 1923. His lobbying efforts were bolstered by the support of James "Jimmy" Walker, future mayor of New York but then a minority leader of the State Senate, who coached Liveright on how to lobby the legislators. On May 3, 1923, after a rousing speech by Walker belittling the bill, in which he joked "No woman was ever ruined by a book", the Clean Books Bill was defeated.
  Though the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the Watch and Ward Society would threaten the publisher several more times in the late 1920s – notably for the novels Replenishing Jessica by Maxwell Bodenheim and An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser – Liveright and his lawyers (including Arthur Garfield Hays and Clarence Darrow) often won in the court of public opinion. Only when on the verge of bankruptcy in 1930 did Liveright capitulate to Sumner and destroy the plates of "an allegedly obscene work called Josephine, the Great Lover".
caption: In the 1920s much of the modernist material published by Boni & Liveright was challenged by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice.
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