ISSUE DATE: Jan. 29, 1934
ALSO APPEARED: May 8, 1939
THE BUZZ:
Watchers of the U. S. skies last week reported no comet or other celestial portent. In Manhattan no showers of ticker-tape blossomed from Broadway office windows, no welcoming committee packed the steps of City Hall. No call to nation-wide thanksgiving was sounded by Nicholas Murray (“Nicholas Miraculous”) Butler. No overt celebration marked the day with red. Yet many a wide-awake modern-minded citizen knew he had seen literary history pass another milestone. For last week a much-enduring traveler, world-famed but long an outcast, landed safe and sound on U. S. shores. His name was Ulysses.
Strictly speaking, Ulysses did not so much disembark as come out of hiding, garbed in new and respectable garments. Ever since 1922, when the first edition of Ulysses was published in Paris, hundreds of U. S. citizens have smuggled copies through the customs or bought them from bookleggers. But this week, on the strength of Federal Judge John Munro Woolsey’s decision that Ulysses is not obscene (TIME, Dec. 18), Random House was able to publish the first edition of the book ever legally printed in any English-speaking country.
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