Publishing experimental literature made small magazines targets for obscenity prosecution

Evidence

The previous issue of Bill Ward’s ambitious literary magazine, published during summer of 1960, included an excerpt from Hubert Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn in which Tralala, a waterfront prostitute, suffers a brutal, graphically described gang rape. An eighteen-year-old kid from Warwick, Rhode Island, purchased a copy in the Lobster Pot on Commercial Street and got Ward to sign it. His parents discovered the periodical, filed a complaint with the Provincetown police, and on July 14, nearly a year after the magazine was purchased, Ward was arrested for selling obscenity to a minor. — J. Hoberman, Everything Is Now, 209

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the shelf’s broader claim that avant-garde conditions included legal risk; obscenity prosecutions of little magazines are a recurring marker of the pre-counterculture era.