The first-ever International Writers Protest
[BEACH, Sylvia (editor).] A Protest [Statement regarding the Piracy of James Joyces Ulysses by Samuel Roth]. [Paris? after: 2 February 1927.]
8vo. ff. [2], unbound as issued; split cleanly along crease of spine, tiny chip at one corner.
A later issue. This document, print signed by 167 artists and writers such as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell to name but a few, refers to the unauthorised "appropriation and mutilation" of James Joyce's novel Ulysses by Samuel Roth in his magazine Two Worlds Monthly, from July 1926 to October 1927. As the petition states, Roth's publication was not only produced without consent but also produced "without payment to Mr. Joyce and with alterations which seriously corrupt the text".
It goes on to highlight a wider element of discussion, that of the preservation of "the security of works of intellect and the imagination without which art cannot live".
Joyce's famous Modernist novel was originally serialised in the American journal The Little Review with the unexpurgated version published in full by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company. The novel itself was banned in the United Kingdom until 1936 and the U.S. was the first English speaking country where the novel was freely available, hence Roth's legal protection.
Sylvia Beach summoned some of the generation's most prominent thinkers to come to Shakespeare and Company and sign the letter which was then circulated throughout Europe.
The legal case took two years to be won but regardless, it became the first-ever international writers’ protest, setting a precedent for many iconic movements to come.
T.S. Eliot would write "I hold [Ulysses] to be the most important expression which the present age has found; it is a book to which we are all indebted, and from which none of us can escape".
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