Includes bibliographical references (pages 207-214) and index.

The clash between James Joyce's Ulysses and the law of obscenity in the United States is probably the most important, least understood episode in the perennial struggle between law and literature. Joyce's novel was adjudged obscene in one trial in 1921, but exonerated in another a dozen years later. Hassett's comparison of the two sheds new light on these epoch-transforming events and their implications for the struggle to overcome censorship of prescient works of the imagination.
The Ulysses trial are one of those subjects where a page of history is worth a volume of logic. History here is biography: the colourful lives and words of courageous proponents of Joyce's right to be heard, personalities who enabled the most innovative work of literature of the twentieth century. W. B. Yeats's father, John Butler Yeats, realized that the objection to Joyce was that his 'terrible veracity, naked and unashamed' interfered with the public's desire to live comfortably and thus superficially. Margaret Anderson, the first person to bring the magisterial prose to Ulysses to the public in her Little Review, risked criminal conviction because she considered Joyce's novel the most beautiful thing she and her partner Jane Heap would ever have the opportunity to publish, and uttered the eerily prophetic vow, 'we'll print it if it's the last effort of our lives.'
Their lawyer John Quinn ignored the eloquent defences they and John Butler Yeats handed him, but powerful arguments based on the societal importance of truth and beauty eventually prevailed in the second trial, and Ulysses achieved judicial release to its reading public in 1934.