Samuel Roth (1893–1974) was an American publisher and writer. Described as an "all-around schemer", he was the plaintiff in Roth v. United States (1957). The case was a Supreme Court ruling on freedom of sexual expression and whose minority opinion, regarding redeeming social value as a criterion in obscenity prosecutions, 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. Background According to his autobiography Stone Walls Do Not, Samuel Roth was born in 1893 in "Nustscha" (now Nuszcze ) on the "Strippa" (Strypa) River, upriver from "Zborow" (Zboriv) near the Carpathian Mountains of Galicia (now Ukraine). His Hebrew name was "Mshilliam" (Meshulam). His parents were Yussef Leib Roth and Hudl; his siblings were "Soori" (Sarah), Yetta, and Moe. In 1897, aged four, the family emigrated to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. In New York, he started working at age eight as an egg chandler (holding eggs up to a candle to see if they were fertilized), at ten as a newsboy, and 14 as a baker. By the age of 16, he was working for the New York Globe as Lower East Side correspondent. When the latter folded, Roth became homeless but continued writing and publishing and even attended Columbia University for a year on scholarship. After Columbia, he opened a bookstore, the Poetry Shop in the West Village and began his first magazine, Beau. Career Successes (1920s) Roth's early poetry was praised by Edwin Arlington Robinson, Louis Untermeyer, Maurice Samuel, and Ezra Pound, among others. It appeared in several respected magazines, such as The Maccabean and The Hebrew Standard, and in anthologies. His sequence of 18 sonnets, "Nustscha" (composed c. 1915-18) is an elegy to his home town in Galicia. His "Sonnets on Sinai" in The Menorah Journal are also notable. The speaker in the poems plans to visit Sinai in order to return the Ten Commandments to God, since so many peoples of the world have relegated them to the walls of their public buildings in order to lie to themselves about their own moral rot. After World War I, Roth founded a bookshop. In 1921, he traveled to London to interview European writers with the hope of selling his essays to magazines. During this time,