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{ vii } editors’ preface Whitney Strub’s essay on the Roth obscenity case is remarkable in many ways, first and foremost for turning what was, in his own words, a poorly executed Supreme Court attempt to define obscenity into a superb survey of obscenity law. In short, Strub succeeds where Justice William Brennan and his brethren failed. But that is only part of this book’s achievement. Today Samuel Roth lives in the shadows of First Amendment law, his publications no longer read and his case rarely studied. As Strub reminds us, Roth “never became a household name. Without his shady, half-underworld publishing career and the legal case it engendered , however, the erotic media landscape might look very different .” In part this is because Roth was not a literary giant like D. H. Lawrence, a First Amendment warrior like Daniel Ellsberg, or a media figure like Larry Flynt. But Roth’s case demonstrated how the most good-faith effort to avoid government censorship of prurient materials could end up so inchoate that even its author, years later, would concede his failure. In Roth, the Court tried to strike a balance between material that contained explicit sex but had redeeming literary or social merit and material that was simply pornographic. The problem was that the eye of the beholder was not tutored by the distinction, leaving the Court to face case after case in which the postal service or local authorities prosecuted alleged offenders. As Strub writes, “people could be—and still are—imprisoned for publishing or distributing obscene material.” Using Roth’s own private papers along with the records of the various prosecutions and the memos of the justices, Strub brings the case to life. While Roth’s ultimate motives may remain a mystery, Strub has gotten closer to them than anyone else has or is likely to do. To this he has added a richly depicted and thoroughly researched essay on obscenity itself: how it came to be a crime, how it came into the High Court, and how subsequent cases and commentaries have handled it. For the story does not stop with Roth’s case. Everyone from radical feminists to conservative moral commentators to First Amendment formalists has something to say about the subject, and Strub, viii { Editors’ Preface } who does not hide his own well-formed opinions, gives ample space to theirs. If, as he writes, “this book, then, tells the history of a failure,” the book itself is a great success. It will become the standard citation on the case and will inform every discussion of the subject. Insofar as that subject was a centerpiece of moral tub-thumping during more than one twenty-first-century presidential campaign, this book should have a wide audience. ...

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