Samuel Roth

Background

According to his autobiography, Stone Walls Do Not, Roth was born in 1893 in Nustscha, in the Carpathian Mountains of Galicia. He immigrated with his family to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1897, at the age of four. In New York he was working by age eight as an egg chandler (holding eggs up to a candle to see if they were fertilized), a newsboy by 10 and a baker by 14. At 16 he was working for the New York Globe as the Lower East Side correspondent. When the latter folded Roth became homeless, but continued writing and publishing, and even attended Columbia University for a year on scholarship. After Columbia he opened a bookstore, the Poetry Shop in the West Village and began his first magazine, Beau.

Career as a man of letters and publisher

Roth's early poetry was praised by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Louis Untermeyer, Maurice Samuel, and Ezra Pound, among others. It appeared in several respected magazines, such as The Maccabean and The Hebrew Standard, and in anthologies. His sequence of 18 sonnets, "Nustscha" (composed c. 1915-18) is an elegy to his home town in Galicia. His “Sonnets on Sinai,” in The Menorah Journal are also notable. The speaker in the poems plans to visit Sinai in order to return the Ten Commandments to God, since so many peoples of the world have relegated them to the walls of their public buildings in order to lie to themselves about their own moral rot.

After World War I he founded a bookshop, and traveled to London in 1921 to interview European writers, hoping to sell his essays to magazines. During this time, he wrote two well-reviewed books on the state of the “two worlds” of Europe and America, and the situation of the Jews on both continents. Europe: A Book for America (Boni and Liveright, 1919) is a long prophetic poem predicting the decay of Europe and the promise of America. Now and Forever (McBride, 1925) is an imaginary “conversation” between Roth and the great British writer Israel Zangwill on the merits of Diaspora and Zionism for the Jewish people. Zangwill praised Roth for his “poetry and pugnacity.”

In the mid-1920s, with money earned by establishing a school for teaching immigrants English, Roth founded four literary magazines, including Beau, a forerunner of Esquire and perhaps the first American “men’s magazine.” The most important products in his short-lived magazine empire were the quarterly Two Worlds and Two Worlds Monthly. He chose to publish, in at least some cases without permission, some of the sexually explicit contemporary authors, including (in Two Worlds Monthly), segments of James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce won an injunction to stop Roth from printing these expurgated installments. Joyce's publisher Sylvia Beach, at the writer's urging, engineered an international protest in 1927 against Roth, although the nature of copyright law at the time made the charge of piracy debatable. Due to the well-organized protest of 167 authors against him, Roth became an international literary pariah, and Random House won its case to "de-censor" Ulysses in 1934. Roth soon after published pirated editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover, most probably the first American to do so. After a raid on his Fifth Avenue warehouse by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1929, Roth spent over a year in prison on Welfare Island, and in Philadelphia, for distributing pornography.

Roth had an unerring sense of literary merit, but since he had no money or status, and because of the international protest, he was ignored by established writers, and outbid by wealthier, better connected publishers (Alfred A. Knopf, Thomas Seltzer, Bennett Cerf, Horace Liveright). He did not ask permission of some of the best writers he published not only in his underground publications but in his trade imprint, William Faro, Inc. The reputation of "that pirate Roth" spread to all corners of the literary establishment.

Roth’s instinct for discovering political corruption was first rate. Due to the nature of his popular audience, he appealed to sensationalism. He understood the energy that made Broadway, Washington, and Hollywood glamour irresistible, but his readership demanded romantic clichés and prurient gossip. So Roth sensationalized his exposes and his advertising copy. He did well with his Faro imprint in the early 1930s. His expurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover was a big seller, as were reprints of classic erotica (especially Mirbeau’s Diary of a Chambermaid), from which books explicit sex was excised. Another interesting William Faro novel was A Scarlet Pansy (Robert Scully, 1932), an early, sympathetic account of a flamboyant homosexual. In 1931, Roth published an expose of Herbert Hoover (The Strange Career of Mr. Hoover Under Two Flags) which sold extremely well.

The Wall Street Crash forced Roth into bankruptcy. What followed was the most complex episode in Roth’s life, the one that brought him the most rejection. Written under the pressures of bankruptcy, and the advantage taken of that by colleagues in the underground economy of erotica publishing, he published Jews Must Live, regarded by many of his critics as an example of ethnic self-hatred.

Jail time

Because of his need for money, after 1933 Roth began distributing strictly banned pornography, receiving illustrated books and pamphlets and sometimes leaving them for trusted customers in subway lockers. The FBI tracked the works to their source and Roth spent 1936 to 1939 in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary; he also spent the years 1957 to 1961 there, due to his conviction for distributing what was considered obscene, and pandering to prurience in his advertisements. Overall, incarcerations include:

(NB: Prior to these dates were several suspended sentences and fines.)

There were several other cases where the charge was dismissed. It is important to note that on one occasion his civil rights were violated by the District Attorney's office of New York City. In 1954, police, under direction of an assistant District Attorney, raided the office of the Seven Sirens Press on Lafayette Street and Roth's apartment on the upper West Side. All books, correspondence, and furniture were removed from the office. Roth attempted to leave the apartment to make a telephone call and an altercation with a police officer occurred. After Roth promised not to sue, the case was dismissed due to vagueness of the search warrant and illegal methods of search and seizure.

Roth v. United States

Roth v. United States, 354 U.S. 476 (1957), along with its companion case Alberts v. California, was a 1957 landmark case before the United States Supreme Court, which redefined the Constitutional test for determining what constitutes obscene material unprotected by the First Amendment.

Mail order

After 1940, Roth conducted most of his business via mail order. Using a combination of literary reprints, celebrity worship, criminal exploits, and political exposes, all touted as daringly salacious, he brought the Times Square entertainment carnival to every corner of America. Since the postal inspectors periodically declared “unmailable” letters to and from the business names he used, he changed those frequently. “Dame Post Office,” as he referred to the USPS, had to set up a special unit solely for his enterprises. By the time he re-entered Lewisburg as a result of his conviction in the 1957 Roth v. United States, he had devised over 60 names for his “presses” or “book services.” During this time he did publish some very interesting books. One was My Sister and I (1953), supposedly written by Friedrich Nietzsche when he was in a mental hospital near the end of his life. Another was ghost-written by scholar of erotica, Gershon Legman: The Sexual Conduct of Men and Women (1947). My Life and Loves in Greenwich Village (1955) was probably not by Maxwell Bodenheim, whom Roth employed (at what salary is disputed) during his last, penniless years. One of Roth's strangest publications was an exploitation of Marilyn Monroe's suicide, Violations of the Child Marilyn Monroe by "Her Psychiatrist Friend" (1962).

Legman and his first wife also did a fine translation of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, published under the title King Turd in 1953. George Sylvester Viereck's Men into Beasts (1955) was an account of his years in federal prison during World War II. Viereck was apparently a German agent. He was one of the anti-Semitic writers Roth befriended (Fritz Duquesne was another), although Roth continued to be an orthodox Jew throughout his life. Milton Hindus’ fine study of Louis-Ferdinand Celine, The Crippled Giant, appeared in 1950; playwright Arthur Sainer's The Sleepwalker and the Assassin: A View of the Contemporary Theatre in 1964 (Roth continued publishing after his last stint in federal prison). Roth self-published his own works during the 1940s and 50s, including a novel about a naive, virginal Italian immigrant discovering the plight of the working class in America, Bumarap (1947). While in prison for the last time, he wrote a fictionalized version of the ministry and crucifixion of Jesus, My Friend Yeshua (1961). The narrator, clearly a version of Roth, is given the mission of reconciling the Jewish and Christian peoples in the 20th century. As bizarre as it might seem to cast himself in this role, the theme itself was a frequent one in the 19th and earlier part of the 20th century. Scholem Asch and Israel Zangwill, and the artist Maurycy Gottlieb, are notable examples.

Books

Editing

Magazines

Poems

Other