Word: roth
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...until 1727 was it made punishable under English common law; not until 1 957 did the U.S. Supreme Court hold that it was not covered by the First Amendment guarantees of free speech and press. But even in that decision (Roth v. U.S.), which upheld a federal obscenity statute, the court was clearly unclear about the "dim and uncertain" line between obscenity and protected expression. Painfully, the court decreed three tests...
Moreover, Redfield argued that the books cannot be tested according to the Roth decision as appealing to the "average person's" prurient interest. "They appeal to the elderly, the impotent and the perverse. Must one be judged by what offends others?" Indeed, can books that actually bore the average person be adjudged obscene because they rouse the prurient interest of what Justice Abe Fortas delicately called "special groups...
Needed Laughter. Justices Black and Douglas would solve the problem by declaring that the First Amendment is no more embarrassed by the publication of prurient pornography than by pink politics. Both activities are fully protected, the two dissenters argued in Roth. While they recognize state power to regulate public morals, they would draw the line when state prohibitions go beyond overt behavior, such as public nudity, and enter the realm of ideas. In their view, obscenity lies in that realm and is thus protected by the national Constitution...
...DORIS?" says a character in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. "She's the one who's always reading War and Peace. That's how I know it's summer, when Doris is reading War and Peace." Whether or not Doris ever suffers through all 365 chapters of Tolstoy's masterpiece, she is plainly a member in good standing of the summer self-improvement league, that earnest, ever growing army of readers who would sooner put a cherry in a martini than leave for vacation without at least one Great Book...
...books. At the wall's foundation are the Pickwick Papers, Moby Dick, Paradise Lost, Plato's Dialogues, Henry James, Boswell's Johnson, and countless other classics. At eye level are Paul Tillich and Samuel Eliot Morison, Barbara Tuchman and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, O'Hara, Mailer, Roth, Updike and Gunter Grass. "The multitude of books," as Voltaire observed, "is making us ignorant." Voltaire should be alive today...