In 1964, Grove Press published Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn, a collection of short stories with many of the same unifying, novelistic elements as Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and James Joyce's Dubliners. Although both of those books had been published to some controversy – and although Winesburg, Ohio had been controversial in part because of its treatment of sexual issues – the controversy that Selby's book occasioned stands out as a singular event in the history of publishing.
Most of the restrictions on content that had caused D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Joyce's Ulysses to be banned several decades earlier had been diluted to ineffectuality b…
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Citation: Kich, Martin. "Hubert Selby Jr.". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 07 March 2003 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=4002, accessed 21 November 2024.]