Every day brings a new story. And each day contributes to the art of story telling -- in prose and poetry, in music, on the stage, on the screen, and, of course, in books.
Today is the story of December 6th.
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It is the 340th day of the year, leaving 25 days in 2021.
A U.S. District Court judge in New York City ruled that the novel Ulysses by James Joyce was not obscence and could be published in the United States.
Judge John M. Woolsey also liked the novel, calling it "a sincere and honest book."
He takes persons of the lower middle class living in Dublin in 1904 and seeks not only to describe what they did on a certain day early in June of that year as they went about the city bent on their usual occupations, but also to tell what many of them thought about the while. Joyce has attempted -- it seems to me, with astonishing success -- to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever shifting kaleidoscope impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpest, not only what is in the focus of each man's observations of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious.
Joyce published Ulysses in 1922. It is his best known work -- a novel that critics have praised and scorned since its early days. Some scholars spent their lives studying the novel, while other have dismissed it as boring and unreadable. The book tells the tale of the life of Leopold Bloom on June 16, 1904, in Dublin, Ireland. It is descriptive to the extreme.
Before publication in book form, the novel was serialized in The Little Review, a literary publication in New York. After a young girl complained about the inclusion of a scene of masterbation, prosecutors in New York charged the pubishers. They were convicted and fined, which stopped publication in the United States for a decade.
In 1932, Random House brought a test case, United States v One Book Called Ulysses, so it could publish the book.
An appellate court upheld Woolsey's decsion, saying the obscenity of a piece of writing could not be judged by a single passage, but by the work as a whole. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually upheld that holding, incorporating it into its decision in Miller v. California..
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