1957

clipped from www.todayinliterature.com Howl Heard in Court On this day in 1957, U.S. Customs agents seized 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg's Howl on the grounds of obscenity. Ginsberg and his lawyers were not hopeful when they learned that the trial judge was a Sunday school teacher who had recently sentenced five shoplifters to a screening of The Ten Commandments, but the ruling was unequivocally for the poem.