"A rich account of 1920s-1950s New York City, starring an eclectic mix of icons like James Joyce, Margaret Sanger, and Alfred Kinsey-all led by an unsung hero of free expression and reproductive rights: Morris L. Ernst. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States was experiencing an awakening. Victorian-era morality was being challenged by the introduction of sexual modernism and women's rights into popular culture, the arts, and science....

"A great story—how modernism brought down the regime of censorship—told as a great story. Kevin Birmingham's imaginative scholarship brings Joyce and his world to life. There is a fresh detail on nearly every page."—Louis Menand, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club
For more than a decade, the book that literary critics now consider the most important novel in the English language was illegal to own,...

The arrest of a bookstore owner for selling a copy of a long-banned and notorious work of pornography incites a battle between free speech advocates and the California government.

Fifty years after the event, here is the first full account of an audacious publishing decision that with the help of booksellers and readers around the country, forced the end of literary censorship in Australia. For more than seventy years, a succession of politicians, judges, and government officials in Australia worked in the shadows to enforce one of the most pervasive and conservative regimes of censorship in the world. The goal was simple:...