Samuel Roth, Infamous Modernist

Samuel Roth is known to most literary scholars as a bold literary "pirate" for issuing unauthorized editions of modernist sensations, including Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

In the absence of an international copyright agreement and because works deemed obscene could not be copyrighted, what he did was not illegal. But it did violate the protocols of mutual fair dealing between publishers and authors. Those publications provoked an unprecedented international protest of writers, publi...