Ulysses in America

August 7: On this day in 1934, the U.S. Court of Appeals allowed James Joyce’s Ulysses into America. This enabled Random House to issue the first U.S. edition, over a decade after Sylvia Beach’s original Paris edition, and after a decade of American tourists had been nervously returning from Europe with their banned copies. As told by Random House editor Bennett Cerf, the success of the original court case hinged entirely, and humorously, upon these smuggled editions of the novel.