3. Lady Chatterley's Lover - D H Lawrence (1928)
Constance (Lady Chatterley) is married to the very posh Clifford Chatterley. He is a handsome, buff man but alas, due to injuries incurred during the war, he is paralysed from the waist down and is thus unable to satisfy his wife sexually. Constance is very frustrated by this and also her husband's neglect of her emotions. She starts a steamy affair with groundskeeper Oliver Mellors and figures out that both mind and body must be engaged in order to sustain a relationship of worth. An abridged version of the novel appeared in Britain in 1932 and a version of the text was available in America in 1928 and reissued in 1946. The fun started whenever the unabridged version of the novel appeared. In 1960, Penguin published the unexpurgated version and it was time to test the new Obscenity law in Britain. Basically, if you could prove your work had artistic merit, you could drop the F Bomb. The not guilty verdict on Lady Chatterley in Britain in 1960 was a watershed in what writers could get away with and opened up a new door of explicitness for them to explore. Australia really went to town on Lady Chatterley. Not only was the book banned, but a book about the trial was also banned. In 2009, Australia Post banned the book from being sold in their stores and outlets as its nature doesn't fit into the theme of their stores (!). In 1945 in Canada, poet and academic F R Scott appeared before The Supreme Court of Canada to defend Lady Chatterly's lover. He lost the case and the book was banned in Canada for 30 years. The book was prosecuted for obscenity and the publisher fined in Japan. It was banned in India. The ban on the unexpurgated version was finally released in America in 1959, when the US adopted a similar stance to Britain that works of art can get away with raunchiness if the have artistic value.