The United States vs. Ulysses

Join Folio and Kevin Birmingham for a presentation celebrating Bloomsday and the 100th Anniversary of Jame Joyce's Ulysses.

One of the greatest novels in the English language, Ulysses was banned as obscene in nearly every English-speaking country in the world. For over a decade, it was illegal to publish, sell, distribute, advertise or import James Joyce's novel. Ulysses has the rare distinction of being banned in the United State before Joyce could finish writing it. A Greenwich Village magazine called The Little Review was serializing episodes of Ulysses when the New York District Attorney and "The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice" pressed charges against the editors, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, for publishing the Nausicaa episode.  We'll discuss the peculiar way Joyce wrote the novel and some of the legal battles that ensued in this talk featuring images from Joyce's notebooks.

Kevin Birmingham is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Most Dangerous Book, which won the PEN New England Award and the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He has been named a Public Scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he received his Ph.D. in English from Harvard. His writing has appeared in Harper's, The New York Times Book Review, Slate and the Chronicle of Higher Education.