Today James Joyce's "Ulysses" is known as one of the greatest novels ever written, the alpha and omega of literary modernism. This was not, however, the opinion of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, which declared the work obscene.
Starting in 1918, Joyce's "chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle" (the author's own description) was serialized in "The Little Review" quarterly magazine. In 1920, the Post Office seized copies of the magazine, which contained the 13th chapter, Nausicaa, in which the protagonist, Leopold Bloom is tempted by a young woman on Dublin's Sandymount strand. The seizure effectively banned the book from the United States until 1934, when the ban was overturned in federal court.
