Samuel Roth

Samuel Roth (1893 – July 3, 1974) was an American publisher and writer. He was the plaintiff in Roth v. United States (1957), which was a key Supreme Court ruling on freedom of sexual expression. The minority opinion, regarding redeeming social value as a criterion in obscenity prosecutions, became a template for the liberalizing First Amendment decisions of the 1960s.

According to his autobiography, Stone Walls Do Not, Roth was born in 1893 in Nustscha, in the Carpathian Mountains of Galicia. He immigrated with his family to the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1897, at the age of four. In New York he was working by age eight as an egg chandler (holding eggs up to a candle to see if they were fertilized), a newsboy by 10 and a baker by 14. At 16 he was working for the New York Globe as the Lower East Side correspondent. When the latter folded Roth became homeless, but continued writing and publishing, and even attended Columbia University for a year on scholarship. After Columbia he opened a bookstore, the Poetry Shop in the West Village and began his first magazine, Beau.

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 home town in Galicia. His “Sonnets on Sinai,” in The Menorah Journal are also notable. The speaker in the poems plans to visit Sinai in order to return the Ten Commandments to God, since so many peoples of the world have relegated them to the walls of their public buildings in order to lie to themselves about their own moral rot.

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