The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses

James Joyce's Ulysses transformed modern literature—but before it could change the novel forever, it had to survive years of censorship, legal battles, and determined efforts to suppress its publication. Kevin Birmingham tells the extraordinary story of the people who fought to bring Joyce's masterpiece into print and defend the freedom to read it.
Beginning with Joyce's first conception of Ulysses in 1904 and culminating in the landmark American obscenity trial of 1933, Birmingham traces the intertwined lives of writers, publishers, lawyers, booksellers, and censors whose struggles reshaped literary culture. The book reveals how questions of art, morality, commerce, and free expression became inseparable from the fate of a single novel.
Richly researched and vividly narrated, The Most Dangerous Book is both the biography of a literary masterpiece and a sweeping history of modernism, censorship, and the enduring power of literature.