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American poet

Samuel Roth (1893 July 3rd, 1974) was an American publisher and writer. He was the plaintiff in the landmark 1957 case Roth v. United States, in which the United States Supreme Court redefined the constitutional test for determining which constitutes obscene material unprotected by the First Amendment. It became a template for the liberalizing First Amendment decisions in the 1960s. Roth spent nine years in jail on state and federal obscenity convictions, spending eight years in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary: From 1936 to 1939, and 1957 to 1961.

Roth was born in 1893 in Nuszcze, then Galicia, now in Ukraine. His Hebrew name was "Mshilliam" (Meshulam). The family emigrated to the Lower East Side of Manhattan when he was four in 1897. He started working at age eight as an egg chandler, at 10 as a newsboy, and at 14 as a baker. By the age of 16, he was working for the New York Globe as a Lower East Side correspondent. When the paper folded, Roth became homeless but continued writing and publishing and attended Columbia University for a year on scholarship.

Roth's early poetry was praised by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Louis Untermeyer, Maurice Samuel, and Ezra Pound, among others. It appeared in several respected magazines, such as The Maccabean and The Hebrew Standard, and in anthologies. His sequence of 18 sonnets, "Nustscha" (composed c. 1915 18) is an elegy to his hometown. His "Sonnets on Sinai" in The Menorah Journal depict the speaker of the poems planning to visit Sinai in order to return the Ten Commandments to God, after they have failed to obey God's covenant. After World War I, Roth founded a bookshop. In 1921, he traveled to London to interview European writers with the hope of selling his essays to magazines. During this time, he wrote two books on the state of the "two worlds" (Europe and America) and the situation of Jews on both continents. Europe: A Book for America (Boni & Liveright, 1919) is a lengthy, prophetic poem on the decay of Europe and the promise of America. Now and Forever (McBride, 1925) is an imaginary "conversation" between Roth and British writer Israel Zangwill on the merits of Diaspora and Zionism for the Jewish people. Zangwill praised Roth for his "poetry and pugnacity." In the mid 1920s, with money earned by establishing a school for teaching immigrants English, Roth founded four literary magazines. These included Beau, a forerunner of Esquire and perhaps the first American "men's magazine.” The most important products in his short lived magazine empire were the quarterly Two Worlds and Two Worlds Monthly. He chose to publish (in some cases, without permission) some sexually explicit, contemporary authors, including (in Two Worlds Monthly), segments of James Joyce's Ulysses. Joyce won an injunction to stop Roth from printing these expurgated installments. Joyce's publisher Sylvia Beach, at the writer's urging, engineered an international protest in 1927 against Roth, although the nature of copyright law at the time made the charge of piracy debatable. Due to the well organized protest of 167 authors against him, Roth became an international literary pariah, and Random House won its case to "de censor" Ulysses in 1934. Roth soon after published pirated editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover, most likely the first American to do so. After a raid on his Fifth Avenue warehouse by the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice in 1929, Roth spent over a year in prison on Welfare Island, and in Philadelphia, for distributing material deemed obscene. Written under the pressures of bankruptcy, he published Jews Must Live, described by some critics as an example of Jewish self hatred.