page_title: Obscenity trial of Ulysses in The Little Review
section_title: Background
hierarchical_section_title: Obscenity trial of Ulysses in The Little Review / Background
caption_attribution_description: English: Margaret Anderson, American writer and magazine editor
context_page_description: The obscenity trial over the publication of James Joyce's Ulysses in The Little Review, an American literary magazine, occurred in 1921 and effectively banned publication of Joyce's novel in the United States. After The Little Review published the "Nausicaa" episode of Ulysses in the April 1920 issue of the magazine, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice instigated obscenity charges against Little Review editors Margaret Caroline Anderson and Jane Heap. The editors were found guilty under laws associated with the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it illegal to circulate materials deemed obscene in the U.S. mail. Anderson and Heap incurred a $100 fine, and were forced to cease publishing Ulysses in The Little Review.
context_section_description: The U.S. Post Office confiscated the October 1917 issue of The Little Review due to the publication of Wyndham Lewis' story "Cantleman's Springmate", which focuses on a young, disillusioned soldier who, while awaiting deployment to the front lines of World War I, seduces a young girl and afterwards ignores her letters informing him of her pregnancy. The story was seized due to its perceived sexual lewdness and anti-war sentiments which were thought to violate the Comstock laws prohibiting "obscene, lewd, or lascivious" material from being mailed. John Quinn, a successful lawyer and patron of the arts who was benefactor to both The Little Review and Ezra Pound, the magazine's foreign editor at the time, believed the magazine to have been suppressed due to editors Anderson and Heap's support of anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman and anti-war statements they published in New York newspapers. Their support of radical political figures had already led to their eviction from their New York studio office.
  Following this suppression, it was difficult for Anderson and Heap to find a New York printer willing to print episodes of Ulysses. When they found a printer, The Little Review began its serialization of Ulysses, publishing the first episode from the work in March, 1918. Following this first publication of Ulysses, three issues of The Little Review were seized and burnt by the U.S. Post Office on the grounds that its prose was deemed 'obscene'. The January 1919 issue which contained the "Lestrygonians" episode of Ulysses was the first that was seized; the May 1919, which contained "Scylla and Charybdis," was second; and the January 1920 issue, which contained the "Cyclops" episode, was third.
  In 1920, a New York attorney whose daughter had received an unsolicited copy of The Little Review issue brought it to the attention of John S. Sumner, secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. Sumner lodged a complaint that September, and on October 4 Anderson and Heap were arrested and charged with obscenity for publishing "Nausicaa" in the April 1920 issue of The Little Review.  This episode was an account of protagonist Leopold Bloom fantasizing about a young girl named Gerty MacDowell who leans back to expose herself to Bloom. The scene culminates in Bloom's orgasm, which legal historian Edward de Grazia, in Girls Lean Back Everywhere, argues would have likely escaped the average reader's notice due to Joyce's metaphorical language.
caption: Margaret Anderson, one of the defendants (1953 photo)
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