The United States vs Ulysses

The country's on fire! The Klan on the march again. Fascists organising - in America! And books are being burned. It’s 1933, and James Joyce’s sexually explicit Ulysses has been banned in the US for a decade. But now a hungry young publisher and an ambitious lawyer have teamed up to take on the puritans. Can they convince the judge that Ulysses is not obscene? And what will happen when Ulysses gets under their skin—and Molly Bloom gets into their heads? The United States vs Ulysses is a bawdy courtroom drama telling the true story of the New York trial that liberated James Joyce’s seminal novel from American censorship and made Joyce a cultural icon. This edition was published to coincide with the North American premiere from Once Off Productions at the Irish Arts Center, New York in May 2025.

The country's on fire! The Klan on the march again. Fascists organising - in America! And books are being burned. It’s 1933, and James Joyce’s sexually explicit Ulysses has been banned in the US for a decade. But now a hungry young publisher and an ambitious lawyer have teamed up to take on the puritans. Can they convince the judge that Ulysses is not obscene? And what will happen when Ulysses gets under their skin—and Molly Bloom gets into their heads? The United States vs Ulysses is a bawdy courtroom drama telling the true story of the New York trial that liberated James Joyce’s seminal novel from American censorship and made Joyce a cultural icon. This edition was published to coincide with the North American premiere from Once Off Productions at the Irish Arts Center, New York in May 2025.