Erotica Publisher Samuel Roth is Convicted of Obscenity, Heads to Supreme Court
A renegade publisher, notorious for publishing erotica, Samuel Roth was convicted on four counts of violating federal obscenity laws on this day. Roth was sentenced to five years in prison and a $4,000 fine.
The conviction led to Roth v. United States, the first important Supreme Court decision on the First Amendment and obscenity, decided on June 24, 1957, and which held that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment. Following the decision, however, First Amendment lawyers noted several weaknesses in Justice William Brennan’s opinion and over the next decade filed a series of suits that attacked those weaknesses and won decisions that greatly expanded freedom of expression for sexually-related materials.
During his long publishing career, which included several arrests, Roth published many different erotic works under the names of many different publishers.
Read about the notorious publisher: Jay A. Gertzman, Samuel Roth: Infamous Modernist (2015)
Learn more at the Erotic Heritage Museum: http://www.eroticheritagemuseum.com/
Learn more about the important Roth case: Whitney Strub, Obscenity Rules: Roth v. United States and the Long Struggle Over Sexual Expression (2013)
The “Sixties” really began in the mid-1950s and ended in the early 1970s. Read: Christopher B. Strain, The Long Sixties: America, 1955-1973 (2016)