http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/books/harlem-renaissance-novel-by-claude-mckay-is-discovered.html?ref=arts&pagewanted=all
Note that the great detective work by the grad student, J. C. Cloutier, includes his restraint in discussing Roth with the NY Times journalist. It is true that Roth published "work without permission," and he was a kind of "literary pariah" (and so was the man who fought Lady Chatterley's Lover through the courts in the late 1950s, Barney Rosset) . Both Roth and Rosset might well have been proud of being literary pariahs.
What J.C. Cloutier did not say--and I bet the Times would have been glad to report otherwise--is that Roth was a pirate. This is more than a formality, b/c neither Ulysses or Chatterley were copyright in this country.
My letter (unpublished) to the Times:
Your extensive article “New Novel of Harlem Renaissance Is Found” (Sept 14) demonstrated very well the historical importance of the Claude McKay novel. I have seen this typescript at Columbia, while preparing a biography of Samuel Roth (to be published next April), in whose archive the work was found. It is true that Roth published works such as _Ulysses_ and _Lady Chatterley’s Lover_ “without permission” (he asserted but could not prove Ezra Pound sanctioned the Ulysses excerpts that appeared in a Roth magazine). He did become, thanks to a Joyce-inspired International Protest aiming at getting _Ulysses_ widely distributed, a “literary pariah.” That fact drew many iconoclastic writers to him, not only McKay but E. A. Robinson, Jim Tully, Milton Hindus, and the anonymous author of an early gay novel, _A Scarlet Pansy_. Barney Rosset would have been as proud as Roth was of being called a “literary pariah.” It was Roth’s own Supreme Court case, two years earlier, that paved the way for Rosset’s First Amendment victory regarding Lady Chatterley’s Lover.