The professional vice-hunters, quiescent for a time, were out in full cry. John S. Sumner, who as executive secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice has probably read more dirty books, looked at more obscene postcards, and watched more burlesque shows than any man in the U.S., last week got the law on Book Critic Edmund Wilson's best-selling (50,000 copies), clinically sexy Memoirs of Hecate County (TIME, March 25).
Cops, armed with warrants, picked up 130 copies in Manhattan bookshops as "salacious and lascivious literature," summoned Hecate's publishers, Doubleday, Doran, to court.
Manhattan's gum-chewing, lip-smacking Daily News had the...
To continue reading:
or
Log-In
