This Day in Free Speech

James Joyce in 1926

February 21st

In 1921, Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap are convicted of obscenity in New York for publishing an excerpt from James Joyce's novel Ulysses in their magazine, Little Review. The excerpt described indirectly but clearly a middle-aged man's thoughts as he secretly masturbated while observing a young girl. When a lawyer claimed that the language was too veiled to be obscene, the judge scoffed. "The man went off in his pants," he said. Anderson and Heap were fined $50, but not before Anderson tried to put the prosecutors on trial, including John Sumner, who had succeeded Anthony Comstock as the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. "It was the poet, the artist, who discovered love, created the lover, made sex everything that it is beyond a function," she said. "It is the Mr. Sumners who have made obscenity."