Dirty Books

Dirty BooksCondition: BRAND NEW ISBN: 9781526159243 Year: 2023 Publisher: Manchester University Press Description: From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided men

Condition: BRAND NEW
ISBN: 9781526159243
Year: 2023
Publisher: Manchester University Press


Description:


From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided — men writing as women, and women writing as men — and some (Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller) went on to become influential figures in modernist literature.

Dirty Books tells the stories of these authors and their remarkable publishers: Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press and his son Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, whose catalogue and repertoire anticipated that of the more famous US publisher Grove Press. It offers a humorous and vivid snapshot of a fascinating moment in pornographic and literary history, uncovering a hidden, earlier history of the sexual revolution, when the profits made from erotica helped launch the careers of literary cult figures.