The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses Read Online Free Page A

the more infamous moments, and I am indebted to their important work. Joseph Kelly, for example, includes an illuminating chapter on the
Ulysses
trials in
Our Joyce
. Paul Vanderham’s
James Joyce and Censorship
is the only full-length study of the subject, though Vanderham’s book is an argument rather than a history—the events surrounding
Ulysses
, and the people shaping those events, are secondary to Vanderham’s theory about Joyce’s late revisions of the text and the critical strategies that followed. Several scholarly articles and book chapters examine the role of the
Ulysses
censorship within Joyce’s career, the history of obscenity and the development of modernism, but the remarkable story about the book itself has always come to us in sidelong glances.
    Four important biographies cover portions of Joyce’s censorship saga from differing perspectives. Jane Lidderdale and Mary Nicholson wrote the definitive biography of Harriet Weaver,
Dear Miss Weaver
, which chronicles Weaver’s involvement in Joyce’s censorship troubles in London. Noël Riley Fitch’s
Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation
recounts Beach’s arduous task of publishing
Ulysses
and her efforts to deal with its exacting author. B. L. Reid’s biography of John Quinn,
The Man from New York
, documents Joyce’s legal troubles in New York as well as Quinn’s struggle to find a publisher for Joyce’s book. Detailed as these biographies are, they necessarily offer limited insight into the story of Joyce’s book. Quinn and Beach, for example, had little or nothing to do with the second trial, and Weaver had little to do with the first. The elaborate publication history gets lost even in Richard Ellmann’s celebrated biography,
James Joyce
, which discusses the trials only in passing—Ellmann devotes two pages to the New York trial and only one page to the federal trial.
    The disputes surrounding
Ulysses
encapsulated the dual rise of print culture and modern governmental power. They involved the history of censorship law, the pervasive fears of radicals, and the turbulent mixture of the smugglers, the vice societies, the artists and the cultures of some remarkable modern cities: Dublin, Trieste, London, Paris, Zurich and New York. If we want to see how a culture changes, we must examine how localities reimagine themselves through the creation and reception of their most enduring works. The biography of
Ulysses
gives us insight into the lives of all books, into the roots of our contemporary culture, into modernism and its most talked-about novelist.
    There are at least eight Joyce biographies of varying seriousness. The first was published in 1924, when Joyce was only forty-two years old, and the most recent in 2012. One of the hallmarks of Joyce’s genius was his ability to fold his hardships into elaborate designs, and yet nine decades of biographies have failed to capture the degree to which adversity (and persecution) inspired Joyce—it was probably not a coincidence that the idea for
Ulysses
came to him immediately after he received Grant Richards’s rejection letter for
Dubliners
. Joyce wrote
Ulysses
through a world war, financial uncertainty, the threat of censorship and a serious, recurrent illness. A life in pain shaped the novel that Joyce called “the epic of the human body,” and the nature of that pain has never been fully explored.
    This book is the result of years of research involving hundreds of books, articles and newspaper accounts. It incorporates unpublished material in twenty-five archives housed in seventeen different institutions from London to New York to Milwaukee. The archives contain troves of manuscripts, legal documents, unpublished memoirs, official reports and countless letters. Several Woolsey family documents, photographs and home movies reveal a portrait of Judge Woolsey that we have never before seen, and his library in Petersham, Massachusetts, remains nearly unchanged since 1933.
    The biography