Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo‐American Modernism

Abstract

Waging what he characterized as “‘a very cold, deliberate attack on censorship,’” Barney Rosset, owner of Grove Press and the Evergreen Review, decided in 1959 that he would issue an unexpurgated, commercial edition of D. H. Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Since its private publication in Italy in 1928, Lady Chatterley had been deemed legally obscene in both England and America, but Rosset knew that the cultural and legal climate had changed, particularly with the Supreme Court’s 1957 decision in Roth v. United States, the first case in which the highest court considered whether obscenity constitutes an exception to First Amendmentprotection for freedom of speech and the press. Roth would be the initial articulation of what lawyer Edward de Grazia would later call the “‘Brennan doctrine,’” a developing definition of obscenity formulated by Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. thatwould exemptworks of literary value frombeing found legally obscene (G, p. xii). Furthermore, the Brennandoctrinewould affirm that “experts,” such as literary critics, authors, journalists and publishers, could testify as to the redeeming value of texts charged with obscenity. Citing Roth, the U.S. Court of Appeals in 1960 freed Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and it became Grove’s first best seller. During a period of conglomeration and consolidation of the industry, Grove Press was the most successful independent publisher of the sixties, going public in 1967 and reaching $14 million in net sales by 1969. Over the course of the decade Rosset would publish many of the key texts—includingHenryMiller’sTro-