United States v. One Book Called Ulysses

A 1933 federal court decision that rejected the seizure of James Joyce’s Ulysses as obscene and cleared the way for its lawful publication in the United States.

John M. Woolsey: A United States district judge who ruled in 1933 that James Joyce’s Ulysses was not obscene. His opinion supplied the ruling’s close-reading method and held that the book’s effect should be judged as a whole.
Ulysses (novel): A 1922 novel by James Joyce that follows Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus through Dublin on June 16, 1904. The novel was the book seized and the work Woolsey evaluated in full.
Random House: An American publishing company founded in 1927 by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. After the ruling, Random House published the first authorized American edition of Ulysses in 1934.
Regina v. Hicklin: An 1868 English court decision defining obscenity through a work’s tendency to corrupt susceptible readers. Woolsey declined to apply Hicklin’s passage-focused test to Ulysses as a whole.
Obscenity: A legal category for material that courts deem sexually explicit and unprotected by applicable law. The case turned on whether Ulysses met the obscenity standard then applied to imported books.
James Joyce: An Irish novelist and poet whose works include Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. The case concerned the publication and importation of his novel.
Bennett Cerf: An American publisher and co-founder of Random House. He arranged the importation and publication strategy that brought Ulysses before the court.
United States v. Bennett: A 1879 United States federal case applying a broad obscenity standard to imported printed material. Its restrictive approach belongs to the legal tradition the Ulysses ruling helped loosen.
Whole-book test: An approach that evaluates a work’s overall character rather than isolating passages. Woolsey rejected judging the novel by extracting its sexual passages from the complete work.
Little Review: An American literary magazine that serialized parts of Ulysses from 1918 to 1920. Its editors’ obscenity prosecution helped prevent Ulysses from being published in the United States.

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