Samuel Roth (1894-1974) was an American publisher, whose story moved from a shtetl in Galicia to the Lower East Side of New York, then, briefly, to England during which time he laid groundwork for both a literary career, and then to a career as a publisher of modernist sexually explicit texts and popular literature. Roth spent over nine years in federal and municipal prisons for publishing pornography, and his 1957 conviction (The Roth Case), although upheld by the Supreme Court, opened the way for liberalization of the Comstock Statutes. As a result of his unauthorized (but not pirated) publi ... More

Samuel Roth (1894-1974) was an American publisher, whose story moved from a shtetl in Galicia to the Lower East Side of New York, then, briefly, to England during which time he laid groundwork for both a literary career, and then to a career as a publisher of modernist sexually explicit texts and popular literature. Roth spent over nine years in federal and municipal prisons for publishing pornography, and his 1957 conviction (The Roth Case), although upheld by the Supreme Court, opened the way for liberalization of the Comstock Statutes. As a result of his unauthorized (but not pirated) publications of Ulysses, he was ostracized from the profession of letters by an International Protest signed by over 160 writers. A short time later, he served time at the New York City “Workhouse” for selling obscene books, including his book-length Ulysses and equally unauthorized unexpurgated editions of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Having established legitimate publishing houses over the period of 1940-55, he published such modernist projects as an early gay classic, a well-observed novel of the exploitation of an African American Harlem-based artist, Milton Hindus’s pioneering study of Céline, and several examples of the Southern Gothic novel. His influence on Jewish American writing extended from his acclaimed early poetry through the ultimate expression of self-hatred in an anti-Semitic diatribe to a final novel about the last ministry of Yeshea (Jesus) and his own God-given mission to reconcile the Jewish and Christian faiths.