Two Trials That Changed Publishing

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Two of the Beat Generation's defining books became defendants before they became classics. Allen Ginsberg's Howl, published in 1956, and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch, published in 1959, were each the subject of obscenity trials brought against the booksellers and publishers who had put them into circulation, on the theory that their frank language and subject matter fell outside what American law would protect as literature. Both trials ended in the books' favor, and both are remembered now less as footnotes to two authors' careers than as turning points that helped loosen the legal standard American publishing had operated under, opening room for writers after the Beats to treat sexuality, drug use and dissent without the same fear of prosecution. Kerouac's own On the Road, published in 1957 between the two trials, needed no courtroom to become the movement's most widely read book, but it shared the same audience the trials had helped protect: readers willing to meet the Beats' rejection of postwar convention on its own terms. The movement's bohemian stance, tested and vindicated in court, fed directly into the counterculture, civil rights and anti-war currents of the following decade.