Lady Chatterley's Lover: D.H. LAWRENCE.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald

he English novelist D.H. Lawrence published Lady Chatterley's Lover privately in 1928. The book was declared obscene in the United States in 1929, and agents from the Post Office and the U.S. Customs Service began seizing any copies they encountered. That same year, the Boston bookseller James A. DeLacey was fined and jailed for four months under Massachusetts' obscenity statutes for selling five copies.

The federal government left book banning largely to the states until the passage of the Comstock laws in 1873. Named after their chief proponent--Anthony Comstock, the founder of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice--the laws barred mailing any "obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, paper, print, or other publication of an indecent character."

Up through the 1950s, federal agents kept confiscating books they deemed obscene. But in 1959, U.S. District Judge Frederick van Pelt Bryan ruled that Lady Chatterley's Lover deserved First Amendment protection, and he dealt the censors a major blow in the process.

To reach his decision, Bryan deployed the obscenity test outlined by the Supreme Court in 1957's Roth v. United States: "whether to the average person, applying contemporary community standards, the dominant theme of the material taken as a whole appeals to prurient interest."

Lawrence's book describes an affair between an upper-class woman and a working-class man. With this story, Bryan wrote...