12 Controversial Books Which Incurred The Wrath Of The Censors

2. Ulysses - James Joyce (1922)

Some people call it the greatest ever novel written in English, some people dismiss it as garbled, prurient trash, Joyce's Ulysses has been dividing people since its inception. The plot is simple - it follows Leopold Bloom over the course of the day in Dublin - 16th June 1904. During the day, he is cuckolded by another man, subjected to anti-semitism, pervs on women, goes to a funeral, visits a woman giving birth, goes - as we call it in Ireland - on the tear (gets drunk) and philosophises and ruminates on a number of subjects - including the death of his son Rudy. He ends up back in bed with his wife Molly. Ulysses, whether you like it or not, is one heck of a literary achievement - 265,000 pages long and incorporating a wide range of literary techniques including stream of consciousness prose, rhetorical prose, allusions, puns and to top it off, pieces of the book are written in catechism. Despite its scope, Ulysses did not go down well with the powers that be. It was never banned it its native Ireland but it was not made available to Irish readers for many years. It was also banned in the UK until the 1930s. But the place where it was most contentious was America where excerpts of the book appeared in a literary magazine. The Little Review published an excerpt where Bloom is masturbating. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice were the killjoys who launched a case of obscenity against Ulysses in 1921 and hey presto, the book was banned. A further case in 1933 when publishers Random House imported a copy, lifted the ban. Ulysses was also banned and then restricted to over 18s in Australia.