The US’s first literary obscenity trial dated back to 1821, when John Cleland’s 1779 novel Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, about the life of a sex worker, was banned. Since the 19th Century, US obscenity law had been modelled on that in Britain, which itself was founded on the 1868 Regina v Hicklin case, centred on an anti-Catholic pamphlet. The Hicklin Test decreed “the test of obscenity is whether the tendency… is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences”. Oscar Wilde, Ernest Hemingway, Henry Miller and DH Lawrence all had books in part or fully banned in the US as a result.
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