Editing Lady Chatterley's Lover (section)

=== United States ===
[[File:Lady chatterley's lover 1959 US unexpurgated edition.jpg|thumb|One of the US "unexpurgated" editions (1959)|333x333px]]
''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' was banned for obscenity in the United States in 1929. In 1930, [[United States Senate|Senator]] [[Bronson Cutting]] proposed an amendment to the [[Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act]], which was being debated, to end the practice of having [[United States Customs Service|U.S. Customs]] censor allegedly obscene imported books. Senator [[Reed Smoot]] vigorously opposed such an amendment and threatened to read indecent passages of imported books publicly in front of the Senate. Although he never followed through, he included ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' as an example of an obscene book that must not reach domestic audiences and declared, "I've not taken ten minutes on ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'', outside of looking at its opening pages. It is most damnable! It is written by a man with a diseased mind and a soul so black that he would obscure even the darkness of hell!"<ref>[http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,738937,00.html "Decency Squabble"]  {{webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130827230559/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0%2C9171%2C738937%2C00.html |date=27 August 2013 }}, ''Time'' magazine, 31 March 1930</ref>

A [[Lady Chatterley's Lover (1955 film)|1955 French film version]], based on the novel and released by Kingsley Pictures, was the subject of attempted censorship in New York in 1959 on the grounds that it promoted adultery.<ref>{{cite news|last=Crowther |first=Bosley |url= https://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=980CE4DE143BEF3BBC4952DFB1668382649EDE |title=Controversial Movie has Première Here | newspaper= The New York Times | date=11 July 1959 |access-date=14 February 2011}}</ref> The [[US Supreme Court]] held on 29 June 1959 that the law prohibiting its showing was a violation of the [[First Amendment to the United States Constitution|First Amendment's]] protection of free speech.<ref>{{Citation | url = http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cgi-bin/getcase.pl?friend=nytimes&navby=case&court=us&vol=360&invol=684 | title = Kingsley Pictures Corp. v. Regents, 360 U.S. 684 | date=29 June 1959 | publisher = Find law}}.</ref>

The ban on ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'', ''[[Tropic of Cancer (novel)|Tropic of Cancer]]'' and ''[[Fanny Hill]]'' was fought and overturned in court with assistance by publisher [[Barney Rosset]] and lawyer [[Charles Rembar]] in 1959.<ref>{{Citation | url = https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=15811131582924106766 | title = Grove Press, Inc. v. Christenberry, 175 F. Supp. 488 (SDNY 1959) | date = 21 July 1959}}.</ref> It was then published by Rosset's [[Grove Press]], with the complete opinion by United States Court of Appeals Judge [[Frederick van Pelt Bryan]], which first established the standard of "redeeming social or literary value" as a defence against obscenity charges. Fred Kaplan of ''[[The New York Times]]'' stated the overturning of the obscenity laws "set off an explosion of [[free speech]]".<ref>{{cite news|last1=Kaplan|first1=Fred|title=The Day Obscenity Became Art|newspaper=The New York Times |date=21 July 2009 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/opinion/21kaplan.html|agency=The New York Times|access-date=17 February 2018}}</ref>

[[Susan Sontag]], in a 1961 essay in ''The Supplement'' to the ''[[Columbia Daily Spectator|Columbia Spectator]]'' that was republished in ''[[Against Interpretation]]'' (1966), dismissed ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' as a "sexually reactionary" book and suggested that the importance given to vindicating it showed that the US was "plainly at a very elementary stage of sexual maturity".<ref>{{cite book |author=Sontag, Susan |title=Against Interpretation and Other Essays |publisher=Anchor Books |location=New York |year=1990 |pages=ix, 256 |isbn=0-385-26708-8}}</ref>