/lit/ - Literature

>>10490490
That new book about Trump's first year in the White House will probably get a big "READ THE BOOK THE WHITE HOUSE TRIED TO BAN!" label on the paperback considering they're trying to stop it's release.

Anyways here's the article I was talking about:
https://www.nomadicpress.org/interviews/paularabinowitz

>That book [Women's Barracks] is alternatively understood to be an autobiography or a novel, depending upon whose story you believe. [Tereska Torrès] had been in the Free French Army. It was shaped by Meyer Levin, her husband, who had been a war correspondent. He was also the author of Compulsion, which is the novel about the Leopold and Loeb case that became the Hitchcock movie Rope. He said, "Hey, this thing could really sell.” So he helped shape it into this story, and it had this incredibly famous cover by Barye Phillips of these women in an army barracks taking off their uniforms. They are in various states of undress, and in the foreground there is a kind of butchylooking woman. She has got shortcut hair, and is wearing her cap still, and her uniform, and she is smoking, and she is eying these women. This book sold pretty well, because people are always interested in the war. It came out in 1950, and people are still fascinated by the Second World War, and it had this salacious cover. But its sales really took off because it became the object of the House Select Committee on Current Pornographic Materials that was convened by Ezekiel Gathings of Arkansas. They were using this volume as exemplary of the sort of, as they called it, “current pornographic materials” that were flooding the market. So as a result of this publicity, you know, there is nothing like saying that something is pornographic to make sure that it gets well sold. To the point where by the 1960s, the tag line for Memoirs of Hecate County, Edmund Wilson's novella from the ‘40s which has a whole section entirely in French, was blazoned with “Not for sale in the state of New York.” That was a way to sell the book. Anyway, as a result of this congressional hearing, and all of this fanfare that went on, it sold in the millions of copies. So a good thing is always something that everyone wants to imitate, and so all these other publishers [did that].