Ulysses Was Banned and Burned in Three Countries
Quick answer: Ulysses by James Joyce was banned, seized and burned by authorities in the US and Britain. How a Paris bookshop and one judge saved the novel of the century.
A New York courtroom, February 1921. Two women stand convicted of publishing obscenity. Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, editors of a small magazine called The Little Review, are fined fifty dollars each and ordered to stop printing the serial that got them prosecuted. The serial is an unfinished novel by a nearly blind, nearly penniless Irishman living in Paris. Its name is Ulysses, and after the verdict no publisher in the English-speaking world will touch it.
What follows is the most famous rescue in modern literature: a bookshop owner with no publishing experience prints the book herself, customs officers and postal authorities seize and burn copies on two continents, smugglers carry it across borders under their coats, and thirteen years pass before a single American judge reads it properly and sets it free. If you have ever wondered whether difficult work can survive official contempt, this is the case study.
Seven years of writing while going blind
Joyce began Ulysses around 1914 in Trieste and finished it in Paris in 1921, seven years of work spanning a world war, two changes of country and constant money trouble. He taught English, borrowed relentlessly, and depended on patrons, above all Harriet Shaw Weaver, the English editor whose quiet financial support over many years is one of the least sung acts of service in literary history. Through the same period he endured repeated eye diseases and operations that at times left him barely able to see the page.
The novel itself was an outrageous gamble: one ordinary Dublin day, 16 June 1904, rendered through the wandering minds of its characters with a candour about bodies and thought that no previous novel in English had attempted. Serial publication began in The Little Review in New York in 1918, which is what brought the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice to the door, and the 1921 conviction ended any hope of a conventional book deal.
A bookshop becomes a publisher
Sylvia Beach ran Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookshop on the Left Bank in Paris that had become Joyce's second home. After the obscenity verdict she asked him a question that changed publishing history: would he let her bring out the book? She had never published anything. Joyce said yes. Beach engaged a printer in Dijon, Maurice Darantiere, and announced an edition of one thousand numbered copies, sold by subscription.
Joyce, meanwhile, treated the proofs as an invitation to keep composing, adding an enormous amount of new text in the margins at a stage when most authors correct commas. Darantiere's compositors, setting English by hand with little knowledge of the language, coped heroically. The finished book reached Beach on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday, and she put the first copy in his hands that morning. It is one of the tenderest scenes in the whole history of the book trade, and it happened because a bookseller decided a masterpiece mattered more than her inexperience.
Seized, burned and smuggled
Official reaction was swift and physical. In the United States, postal authorities confiscated copies, and a consignment of the Egoist Press printing, several hundred copies, is widely reported to have been burned in New York. In England, customs seized imported copies, and a shipment of 499 copies confiscated at Folkestone in 1923 was destroyed by the authorities. Australia banned the book outright. For over a decade, Ulysses was contraband across most of the English-speaking world while remaining freely available in Paris.
Readers responded the way readers always respond to burned books: they smuggled. Copies crossed the Atlantic in false covers and under clothing. In one documented scheme organised with Ernest Hemingway's help, a friend of his carried copies one by one across the border from Canada into Detroit. Every burned copy raised the book's fame, and the ban turned a difficult modernist novel into the most talked-about book in the world.
One judge reads the whole book
The turn came in 1933, and it was engineered. Random House arranged to import a copy precisely so it would be seized, creating a test case. In United States v One Book Called Ulysses, Judge John M. Woolsey did the thing censors rarely do: he read the entire novel, carefully, and then ruled on 6 December 1933 that it was not obscene, describing its method as sincere and its effect as serious rather than corrupting. The decision was upheld on appeal in 1934, and Random House published the first legal American edition that year. Britain followed with the Bodley Head edition in 1936.
It is worth being precise about why the turn happened. The text did not change. Public taste had shifted, the law had room for a braver reading, a publisher spent money on a deliberate legal strategy, and one judge was conscientious. Joyce's part was done years earlier: he had written the book and refused every suggestion to soften it.
What a working writer can take from this
The first takeaway is about allies. Ulysses survived because of Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap, who took a criminal conviction for it, Harriet Shaw Weaver, who funded its author, and Sylvia Beach, who published it. A writer's job includes being the kind of writer people fight for: generous with your own attention, serious about the work, honest about the risks. Nobody rescues a manuscript they have never been allowed to read.
The second is about verdicts. Between 1921 and 1933 the same words were criminal in New York and a masterpiece in Paris. The quality was constant; only the readers changed. Keep that asymmetry in mind on the day a rejection stings. Your task is to finish the work, keep it circulating and let it find the reader with the patience of Judge Woolsey. Sending a poem into a contest where every entry is actually read and scored, as Writory does each month, is a small, practical version of the same faith.
Reading Ulysses without fear
Do not start on page one out of duty and stall in the library chapter like generations before you. Read the opening three chapters, then jump to the funeral chapter, Hades, and the newspaper chapter that follows; the book teaches you how to read it as you go. Molly Bloom's closing monologue rewards even a first-time reader who has skipped and stumbled to reach it.
For a poet, the deepest lesson in Joyce is his ear. He composed sentence by sentence for sound, and reading a page of Ulysses aloud is closer to reading verse than prose. Pair it with his early poetry collection Chamber Music, from 1907, to see how conventional his gifts looked before he bet everything on the gamble.
What poets can take from this
- Finish the ambitious project before you worry about who will accept it; Ulysses had no publisher for most of its composition.
- Cultivate the small circle who believe in your work, and be worth their loyalty.
- When an institution says no, look for the Sylvia Beach option: the unconventional publisher, the small press, the self-made edition.
- Read your drafts aloud; Joyce's prose survived censors partly because its sound convinced serious readers of its seriousness.
- Keep a record of every rejection and seizure of your work; today's embarrassment is tomorrow's origin story.
- Judge books, and poems, only after reading the whole thing, the courtesy Woolsey paid Joyce and reviewers rarely pay anyone.
Try it yourself
Take one completely ordinary hour of your day and write a poem that follows your own drifting thought through it, associations, interruptions and all, without tidying the drift into a neat conclusion.
Questions
Why was Ulysses banned?
Serial instalments in The Little Review led to a 1921 obscenity conviction in New York over the novel's sexual frankness, and the book was subsequently banned in the United States, with copies seized and destroyed in Britain and a ban in Australia. It remained contraband in the US until a court ruling in 1933.
Who first published Ulysses?
Sylvia Beach, owner of the Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company, published the first edition of one thousand numbered copies on 2 February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday. She had never published a book before and sold the edition by subscription.
When did the ban on Ulysses end?
Judge John M. Woolsey ruled in December 1933 that the novel was not obscene, a decision upheld on appeal in 1934, allowing Random House to publish it legally in the United States. The first British edition followed from the Bodley Head in 1936.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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