The Trials of Lenny Bruce: The Fall and Rise of an American Icon

Lenny Bruce’s words had the power to provoke laughter and debate—as well as shock and outrage. It was the force of his voice that would place him on the wrong side of the law in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York.

Lenny committed his life to telling the truth. But the truth he told infuriated those in power, and authorities in the largest, most progressive cities in the country worked relentlessly to put him in jail. To them, Lenny’s words were filthy, depraved. But to his fans—the hip, the discontented, the fringe—his words were not only sharp and hilarious, they were a light in the dark to the repressed society of the early 1960s.

Lenny’s battles were fought on stage and in the courtroom—against cops in San Francisco and L.A. who took notes at his performances, against judges in Chicago and against a prosecutor in New York with a zeal to bring the comedian down.

Lenny also fought his addiction to heroin and, at times, his own lawyers. And there were those who never stopped fighting for Lenny—people like Steve Allen, Phil Spector and William Kunstler. To better understand the power of Lenny’s performances, the authors have compiled an audio CD of the routines that got him in trouble, as well as interviews with his defenders and prosecutors, and his friends and followers, including George Carlin, Hugh Hefner and Margaret Cho.

The first carefully documented account of Lenny Bruce’s career and free speech struggles, The Trials of Lenny Bruce paints a vivid, shocking, hilarious and tragic portrait of a man too honest for his time.

The Trials of Lenny Bruce includes a one-hour audio CD narrated by Nat Hentoff that features: --Lenny Bruce performances (including ones for which he was busted) --Notorious routines, including "Religions, Inc.," "Blah Blah Blah," "Thank You Mask Man" and "Las Vegas Tits and Ass" --Interviews with George Carlin, Hugh Hefner, Margaret Cho and others

A Book Sense 76 Selection

"A work that puts it all together…Collins and Skover write with clarity and energy.…It is entertaining, often exciting—but above all it is an immensely important record of a vital chapter in our ever-evolving democracy’s eternal groping toward liberty." —Baltimore Sun

"The CD gives the text another dimension and allows for a truly different reading experience.…A fine retelling of Bruce’s career as well as one of the only books in print to detail his free-speech legal troubles." —Library Journal

Ronald K.L. Collins graduated from Loyola Law School in Los Angeles and was a judicial fellow in the United States Supreme Court. He is currently the First Amendment scholar-in-residence at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Virginia. He has written numerous scholarly articles in the Harvard, Stanford and Michigan Law Reviews, and more than 150 newspaper op-ed pieces. He edited The Death of Contract and Constitutional Government in America.

David M. Skover graduated from Yale Law School and clerked for Judge Jon O. Newman of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit. He now teaches as a law professor at Seattle University Law School. Skover has written numerous scholarly articles in the Harvard, Stanford and Michigan Law Reviews, and coauthored (with Pierre Schlag) Tactics of Legal Reasoning.

Collins and Skover were the founding coeditors of Books-on-Law, a monthly online journal dedicated to book reviews and have written for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and The Nation. Their first book together was The Death of Discourse.

Nat Hentoff writes weekly articles for The Village Voice and has written numerous articles, essays and books about politics, human rights and jazz. He has received numerous awards, including
the National Press Foundation Award for Distinguished Contributions to Journalism and the American Bar Association Certificate of Merit for Coverage of the Criminal Justice System.