On this day in history 50 years ago the US Supreme Court reversed a Florida decision finding “Tropic of Cancer” obscene by a 5-4 margin.

Indeed, its ramifications have had a profound influence on our freedom to read and nowadays it’s difficult to understand just how important this decision was at the time.

Our pal James Dekker wrote a great essay on this landmark ruling and its reverberations throughout both Miller’s professional life and society as a whole.

“No Disney ending awaited a tired and beleaguered Henry Miller on June 22, 1964, the day the Supreme Court reversed a Florida decision finding Tropic of Cancer obscene.

While the 5-4 ruling in Grove Press, Inc. v. Gerstein allowed Miller’s most famous work (originally published in France by Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press) to grace the shelves of bookstores in San Diego, Boston, and Chicago—just three of the more than sixty cities that banned Tropic of Cancer—the controversy over his writing was far from over…”

(read the whole thing here)

Enjoy – and raise a glass to 50 years of freedom to read!