The novel takes a harsh, uncompromising look at lower class Brooklyn in the 1950s written in spare, stripped-down prose.

Poet Allen Ginsberg said that it will "explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America and still be eagerly read in a hundred years.

"[5] The rights for the British edition were acquired by Marion Boyars and John Calder and the novel ended up in the hands of the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Sir Cyril Black, the then-Conservative Member of Parliament for Wimbledon, initiated a private prosecution of the novel before Marlborough Street Magistrates' Court, under judge Leo Gradwell.

[6] Expert witnesses spoke, "unprecedentedly,"[7] for the prosecution: they included the publishers Sir Basil Blackwell and Robert Maxwell.

[7] On the defense side were the scholars Al Alvarez II, and Professor Frank Kermode, who had previously compared the work to Charles Dickens.

Judge Graham Rogers directed that the women "might be embarrassed at having to read a book which dealt with homosexuality, prostitution, drug-taking and sexual perversion.

In 1968, an appeal issued by lawyer and writer John Mortimer resulted in a judgment by Justice Geoffrey Lane that reversed the ruling.