The Carpetbaggers - Artifact of The Sexual Revolution

Artifact of The Sexual Revolution

The Carpetbaggers was published at the onset of the sexual revolution. 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."

The Carpetbaggers never landed in court, but it did vigorously (and profitably) exploit 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, Robbins writes: "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. Paradoxically, the words "pubic patch" are omitted in some recent editions published in the United Kingdom. The Carpetbaggers was also perhaps the first New York Times bestseller to include scenes of fellatio.

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 fewer than seven books by Henry Miller.