Samuel_Roth

Samuel Roth (1893 – July 3, 1974) was an American publisher and writer. He was the plaintiff in the landmark 1957 case Roth v. United States, in which the United States Supreme Court redefined the constitutional test for determining what constitutes obscene material unprotected by the First Amendment. It became a template for the liberalizing First Amendment decisions in the 1960s.Roth spent nine years in jail on state and federal obscenity convictions. These include eight years in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary: from 1936 to 1939, and 1957 to 1961.