Literature & Literary Studies
January 2025
Dirty books
Erotic fiction and the avant-garde in mid-century Paris and New York
by Barry Reay, Nina Attwood
An intimate history of the pornographic publisher behind some of the greatest works of the twentieth-century avant-garde. From the 1930s to the 1970s, in New York and in Paris, daring publishers and writers were producing banned pornographic literature. The authors of the books were young, impecunious writers, poets and artists. Most of them wrote to survive, but some relished the freedom to experiment that anonymity provided - men writing as women, women writing as men - and some, such as Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller, went on to become influential figures in modernist literature. Dirty books tells the stories of these writers and their remarkable publishers: Jack Kahane of Obelisk Press and his son Maurice Girodias of Olympia Press, whose catalogue and repertoire anticipated that of the more famous US publisher Grove Press. It offers a humorous and vivid snapshot of a fascinating moment in pornographic and literary history, uncovering a hidden, earlier history of the sexual revolution, when the profits made from erotica helped launch the careers of literary cult figures.
