I'm Just Going to Feed Adolphe

Abstract

Nine years after the Supreme Court silently permitted Doubleday and Company to stand convicted and fined by New York State for publishing Edmund Wilson's Memoirs of Hecate County, and thereby effectively suppressed that novel throughout the nation for being "obscene,"' the Court took up the case of a publisher named Samuel Roth, who had been sentenced to prison for selling "obscene" literature of another kind. Although the Court would affirm Sam Roth's conviction, the opinion written by Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. was the Supreme Court's first move to liberate literature and art from governmental censorship. Roth and his wife, Pauline, made their living by publishing risqud literature, usually reprinted and frequently pirated, which they advertised and sold mainly through the mails. Sam Roth was one of a number of publishers after World War II who devoted themselves to serving the demonstrable interest of Americans in sexual images and ideas, and sexually oriented publications. To Roth, this was "a healthy, normal interest -vigorous and creative." Others -and notably moral and religious vigilante groups, bureaucrats in the federal postal and customs services, police, federal and state prosecutors, trial and appellate judges, and the chief justice of the United States -had a different view. United States Second Circuit Chief Judge Charles Clark called Roth "an old hand at publishing and surreptitiously mailing to those induced to order them such lurid pictures and materials as he can find profitable." To Earl Warren, the Supreme Court's new chief justice, Roth and his ilk were just "plainly engaged in the commercial exploitation of the morbid and shameful craving" that some Americans had "for materials with prurient effect." In Thy Neighbor's Wife, published in 1980, Gay Talese outlined the lives and publishing styles of Roth and others of the breed, including George Von Rosen, Marvin Miller, Al Goldstein, Ralph Ginzburg, and William Hamling. Their enterprise in exciting male fantasies about the sexual nature of women would not be recognized by the Supreme Court as having implications for freedom of the press until waves from the sexual revolution washed up against the high bench, during the late 1960's. Warren's biographers are agreed that from the day he joined