The first book banned in the United States for obscenity was Fanny Hill, John Cleland’s erotic novel.
Also published under the title Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the book first appeared in London in two installments, in 1748 and 1749. Cleland wrote it while confined in a London debtors’ prison. Its elaborate, euphemistic descriptions of sexual activity made it one of the most prosecuted books in literary history, even though the original text generally avoided explicit anatomical vocabulary.
The book reached the United States in the early nineteenth century. In 1821, a Massachusetts court outlawed it and convicted publisher Peter Holmes for printing a “lewd and obscene” work. This case is commonly identified as the first U.S. obscenity ban involving a book, although earlier American censorship targeted works for religious or political reasons rather than obscenity.
Fanny Hill returned to court in the twentieth century. In Memoirs v. Massachusetts, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1966 that the book did not meet the constitutional standard for obscenity. That decision helped establish that literary or social value could protect sexually explicit writing.