The syndicates: writing pornography before the sexual revolution

Abstract

ABSTRACT In New York in the late 1930s and 1940s, and in Paris in the 1950s and early 1960s, young, impecunious writers, poets, and some artists wrote English-language pornography to order, mostly anonymously. Some were, or became, famous (Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin); others less so (Gershon Legman, Iris Owens). In New York, they wrote for a broker for a mysterious oil magnate who sought pornography for his own sexual gratification, although the product would go on to be published more widely. In Paris, they were mobilized by the publisher Maurice Girodias, who produced avant-garde, modernist literature (Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, J. P. Donleavy, Lawrence Durrell, Jean Genet, Henry Miller, Vladimir Nabokov, and Alexander Trocchi) as well as unadulterated porn – dirty books. These pornographers wrote mainly to survive but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided. Men wrote as women; women wrote as men. This article examines these two moments in pornographic history, writing the sexual revolution before the sexual revolution.