Samuel Roth  

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Samuel Roth (1893 - 1974) was an American Jewish publisher and writer.

In the late 1920s, he published an unauthorized version of Ulysses by James Joyce in the United States which led to him being thrown in jail because what he published was considered to be obscene material. Joyce later secured a court injunction preventing Roth from the unauthorized use of his work.

Roth also published sections of Joyce's Work in Progress, later known as Finnegans Wake, and material by D.H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy in his Two Worlds quarterly, also without the authors' permission.

In 1934, he wrote the honest Jews Must Live explaining to the world of Gentiles the reality of Jewish practices in business. By this time, he had been to jail three times. He served another prison term from 1936 to 1939.

In 1955, he was prosecuted for sending obscene material through the mail. (in fact, containing literary erotica and nude photography). In Roth v. United States (1957), which upheld Roth's conviction, the United States Supreme Court found that although obscene material was not protected by the First Amendment, art, literature and scientific research were protected, even if they had sexual content. Roth served five more years in prison as a result of his conviction.

Mail order

After 1940, his audience was mostly a mail order one. Using a combination of literary reprints, celebrity worship, criminal exploits, and political exposes, all touted as daringly salacious, he brought the Times Square entertainment carnival to every corner of America. Since the postal inspectors periodically declared “unmailable” letters to and from the business names he used, he changed those frequently. “Dame Post Office,” as he referred to the USPS, had to set up a special unit solely for his enterprises. By the time he re-entered Lewisburg as a result of his conviction in the 1957 Roth v. United States, he had devised over 60 names for his “presses” or “book services.” During this time he did publish some very interesting books. One was My Sister and I (1953), supposedly written by Friedrich Nietzsche when he was in a mental hospital near the end of his life. Another was ghost-written by scholar of erotica, Gershon Legman: The Sexual Conduct of Men and Women (1947). My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village (1955) was probably not by Maxwell Bodenheim, whom Roth employed (at what salary is disputed)during his last, penniless years. One of Roth's strangest publications was an exploitation of Marilyn Monroe's suicide, Violations of the Child Marilyn Monroe by "Her Psychiatrist Friend" (1962).

Legman and his first wife also did a fine translation of Jarry’s Ubu Roi, published under the title King Turd in 1953. George Sylvester Viereck's Men into Beasts (1955) was an account of his years in federal prison during World War II. Viereck was apparently a German agent. He was one of the anti-Semitic writers Roth befriended (Fritz Duquesne was another), although Roth continued to be an orthodox Jew throughout his life. Milton Hindus’ fine study of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, The Crippled Giant, appeared in 1950; playwright Arthur Sainer's The Sleepwalker and the Assassin: A View of the Contemporary Theatre in 1964 (Roth continued publishing after his last stint in federal prison). Roth self-published his own works during the 1940s and 50s, including a novel about a naive, virginal Italian immigrant discovering the plight of the working class in America, Bumarap (1947). While in prison for the last time, he wrote a fictionalized version of the ministry and crucifixion of Jesus, My Friend Yeshua (1961). The narrator, clearly a version of Roth, is given the mission of reconciling the Jewish and Christian peoples in the 20th century. As bizarre as it might seem to cast himself in this role, the theme itself was a frequent one in the 19th and earlier part of the 20th century. Scholem Asch and Israel Zangwill, and the artist Maurycy Gottlieb, are notable examples.

References

• Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (2001) by Jay A. Gertzman