Countries have been banning books for as long as we can remember. Most of the books that were banned contained controversial content that some particular group found offensive. According to the American Library Association, the top three reasons for banning books are offensive language, inappropriate material, and sexually explicit content. One book that has been banned is James Joyce’s Ulysses. The Irish author’s work faced challenges due to its content and some scandalous subject matter. James Joyce was born on February 2, 1882 in Dublin, Ireland. He was the eldest of ten children (Atherton). He was sent to the boarding school, Clongowes Wood College, at age six. “But his father was not the man to stay affluent for long; he drank, neglected …show more content…
But it was soon banned in the United States and England for containing inappropriate content. “In the UK, there was Obscene Publications Act, which defined as obscene any publication whose tendency was ‘to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to immoral influences and into those hands a publication of this sort may fall’” (Thirlwell). Governments wanted to protect children and young people from reading these books and putting inappropriate ideas in their heads. In fact, the U.S. Postal Service was required to burn copies of Ulysses that were sent to the country. “In other words, as Birmingham writes: ‘The Post Office was in a position to ban the circulation of several of the novel’s chapters for being both obscene and anarchistic. In fact, the government’s reaction to Ulysses reveals how much nineteenth-century ideas about obscenity shaped twentieth-century ideas about radicalism’” (Thirlwell). This was a book they didn’t want to have any traces in the country. But they had a hard time controlling that. The book was smuggled in the United States and Britain many times. People wanted to read this book that had others in an uproar. “Ulysses sparked a revolution because it left out nothing: for the single day it chronicles Leopold Bloom’s wanderings around Dublin, we hear (among a thousand other things) about his daydreams, his erections, his newspaper, and the quality of his bowel movements” (Corrigan). The book doesn’t leave anything out. As much as the government wanted to keep the book banned, eventually somebody finally challenged this decision. In 1934, Random House wages a legal battle, that lasted four years, to publish Ulysses in the United States. It wins the case and four years later the book is published in England (“James Joyce’s Ulysses”). People in both countries were finally able to enjoy the book that had people