The Carpetbaggers

The Carpetbaggers is the title of a 1961 bestselling novel by Harold Robbins, which was adapted into a 1964 movie of the same title.

Artifact of the sexual revolution

Published during the sexual revolution, The Carpetbaggers demonstrates Robbins's skill at judging the exact boundaries of permissibility. Only two years earlier, the U.S. Postmaster General had banned D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover from the mails as obscene. In 1960, publisher Grove Press won the Supreme Court case contesting the ban, but even in 1961 booksellers all over the country were sued for selling Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Parker quotes a professor of English as saying "The Carpetbaggers could have sent any retailer handling it to prison before 1960."

Related Topics:
Sexual revolution - U.S. Postmaster General - D. H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover - 1960 - Grove Press - 1961 - Henry Miller - Tropic of Cancer

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The Carpetbaggers never landed in court. It did not extend the boundaries of what was acceptable. But it vigorously (and profitably) exploited the territory that Grove Press had opened up. On the second page of the novel, as aviator Jonas Cord approaches the landing strip of his father's explosives factory, we read: "The black roof of the plant lay on the white sand like a girl on the white sheets of a bed, the dark pubic patch of her whispering its invitation into the dimness of the night." In 1961, this was explosive indeed. The book contains language in comparison to which Lawrence's talk of "bottoms" and "threading in the hair at the root of his belly" seems practically prudish. The Carpetbaggers was probably the first New York Times bestseller to include scenes of fellatio.

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While it may have been just within bounds in the United States, in 1963 it was still one of 188 books prohibited from import into Australia, along with Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Grace Metalious's Peyton Place, and no less than seven books by Henry Miller.

Related Topics:
1963 - Vladimir Nabokov - D. H. Lawrence - Lady Chatterley's Lover - Peyton Place - Henry Miller

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