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When Richard Aldington published his first novel, ironically titled Death of a Hero, in September 1929, he had his English publisher Chatto & Windus include a note on how his manuscript had differed from the printed text. In it he said:
To my astonishment, my publisher informed me that certain words, phrases, sentences, and even passages, are at present taboo in England. I have recorded nothing which I have not observed in human life, said nothing I do not believe to be true. I had not the slightest intention of appealing to any one's salacious instincts.... But I am bound to accept the opinion of those who are better acquainted with popular feelings than I am. At my request the publishers are removing what they believe would be considered objectionable, and are placing asterisks to show where omissions have been made.... In my opinion it is better for the book to appear mutilated than for me to say what I don't believe. (vii)
Thus self-righteously, Aldington took his stand against censorship and made his points with asterisks. He was having similar but less severe censorship problems with his American publisher, Covici-Friede.
Aldington was not alone in grappling with the suppression of language in 1929, a year that exceeded all other postwar years for published war fiction.1 On both sides of the Atlantic, three other authors of the most successful and memorable war novels of 1929 had their texts expurgated: Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, and Frederick Manning's The Middle Parts of Fortune (better known by the title of the expurgated edition, Her Privates We). The altered texts were just the latest in a growing number of serious works of fiction that tested and protested the limits of acceptable language in the Anglo-American literary communities patrolled by repressive vice societies citing outdated obscenity laws. The noisy clash between iconoclastic early modernist writers and moralistically protectionist censors had been going on noticeably since 1915, when in England, 1,000 copies of D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow were seized and destroyed under the provisions of the Obscene Publications Act (1875), known as Lord Campbell's Act, and the same year in America, when Theodore Dreiser's The Genius ran afoul of...