Dirty Books: Erotic Fiction and the Avant-Garde in Mid-Century Paris and New York

From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The books were written by young, impecunious writers, poets, and artists, many anonymously. Most of these pornographers wrote to survive, but some also relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided - men writing as women, and women writing as men - and some (Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller) went on to become influential figures in modernist literature.

Dirty books tells the stories of these authors and their remarkable publishers: Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press and his son Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, whose catalogue and repertoire anticipated that of the more famous US publisher Grove Press. It offers a humorous and vivid snapshot of a fascinating moment in pornographic and literary history, uncovering a hidden, earlier history of the sexual revolution, when the profits made from erotica helped launch the careers of literary cult figures.

Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 08/15/2023
Pages: 312
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 7.90h x 5.10w x 1.30d
ISBN: 9781526159243

About the Author
Nina Attwood is the author of The Prostitute's Body: Rewriting Prostitution in Victorian England (2011). Barry Reay is the author or co-author New York Hustlers: Masculinity and Sex in Modern America (2010), and Sex before Sexuality: A Premodern History (2011).