Malcolm Jones

Maria BaranovaJames Joyce’s novel Ulysses got traction right out of the gate because people thought it was a dirty book. It was banned in Great Britain and the United States upon publication in 1922. Actually, U.S. officials were so eager to censor the book that they deemed it obscene a year before it was published, basing their decision on excerpts published in literary magazines.So, until 1934, when the U.S. deemed the book not obscene, and 1936, when it was at last published in Great Britain, Ulysses was a book that people were dying to read, precisely because they couldn’t.Once people did get their hands on Joyce’s novel, things changed. It was read not because it was dirty (it wasn’t; frank, yes, about previously taboo subjects like adultery, masturbation, or defecation; but not dirty) but because it was hailed as a masterpiece (it was).Read more at The Daily Beast.

Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times via Getty ImagesI keep winding up in Oxford, Mississippi, sometimes for business but always for pleasure.The first time I visited, in 1987, I was a reporter covering the debut of the commemorative William Faulkner stamp (the Postal Service likes to do these ceremonies in the subjects’ hometowns). It was a big deal, not least because the Postal Service was eating considerable crow: Surely Faulkner is the only commemorative subject who was also once fired by the Postal Service, as he was in 1924 (provoking his declaration that never again would he “be at the mercy of any s.o.b. who had two cents for a stamp”).There were lots of Faulkner scholars underfoot, and Eudora Welty gave a reading. And every surviving Faulkner relation showed up. Even Faulkner’s only child, Jill Summers, made an appearance. I was poking around Rowan Oak, Faulkner’s home, and chatting with the curator when she came in alone, went upstairs for about an hour, and then left. The curator told me it was the first time she’d been back since her father’s funeral in 1962.Read more at The Daily Beast.

Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/GettyRoger Corman never made a great movie. None of his films won awards, and they rarely got good reviews, when they were reviewed at all.Corman made movies that were fun. He made horror movies, westerns, sci fi—name a genre, especially a genre that filled out the bottom of a double bill at the drive-in, and Corman probably made a movie in it.But if Corman, who died May 9 at his home in Santa Monica, California, never made a great movie, that does not mean he was not a great filmmaker. In fact, if you add up the A-list Hollywood careers that Corman helped launch—actors, directors, producers, and writers by the dozens—careers that might never have flourished had he not encouraged them in the first place—by that metric, Corman might be one of history’s greatest moviemakers.Read more at The Daily Beast.