Literature

Fuck in literature

Writers used the word for centuries in private, in cipher and in verse that circulated in manuscript. Getting it into a printed book that anyone could buy took until 1960.

Before print cared

The medieval and early modern record is covered in the History page: the ciphered Flen flyys (c. 1475), William Dunbar's Scots poems (c. 1503), and the Bristol monk's marginal "fuckin Abbot" (1528). Shakespeare never printed it but played with it: in The Merry Wives of Windsor a Latin lesson turns on "the focative case", and Pistol in Henry V threatens to "firk" a Frenchman. The Earl of Rochester (1647–80) used it plainly in poems that circulated in manuscript, most famously "A Ramble in St James's Park": "Much wine had passed, with grave discourse / Of who fucks who, and who does worse." Robert Burns collected and wrote bawdy songs that used it, published after his death as The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1799) and kept under the counter for a century and a half.

The 20th-century trials

• Ulysses (1922): Joyce used the word, along with a great deal else, and the book was banned in Britain and America. Judge John Woolsey's 1933 US ruling that it was not obscene ("emetic rather than aphrodisiac") was the first major victory.
• Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928): D. H. Lawrence used the word thirty times, deliberately, as part of an argument that the plain words for sex were cleaner than the euphemisms. Privately printed in Florence; expurgated in Britain until Penguin's unexpurgated edition of 1960 and the Old Bailey acquittal that followed. Two hundred thousand copies sold on the first day.
• Tropic of Cancer (1934): Henry Miller, published in Paris, banned in the US until 1964.
• The Naked and the Dead (1948): Norman Mailer's publisher insisted on "fug" throughout. Tallulah Bankhead is supposed to have greeted him with "so you're the young man who can't spell fuck".
• The Catcher in the Rye (1951): Holden Caulfield finds "Fuck you" scrawled on a school wall and tries to rub it out, then finds another and realises "you can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any". The scene has kept the book on American banned-books lists for seventy years.

Poetry

Philip Larkin's "This Be The Verse" (1971) is probably the most quoted modern English poem, and it begins "They fuck you up, your mum and dad." Larkin was Hull University's librarian and the poem is now on GCSE syllabuses, which he would have found funny. Tony Harrison's "V." (1985), a long poem built around obscenities sprayed on his parents' grave in Leeds, was broadcast by Channel 4 in 1987 over demands in the Commons that it be stopped. Carol Ann Duffy, Simon Armitage and Hollie McNish have all used the word in poems set for schools, and the Poet Laureate's most famous line is now arguably the one about mum and dad.

Fiction since 1960

Once the barrier fell, the word became a tool of realism, particularly for working-class and regional voices. James Kelman's How Late It Was, How Late (1994), written in Glaswegian, uses it roughly four thousand times and won the Booker Prize; one judge, Julia Neuberger, called it "crap" and said she was disgusted, and the newspapers counted the fucks. Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting (1993) did the same for Edinburgh. Roddy Doyle (Dublin), Alan Warner, Niall Griffiths, Douglas Stuart's Booker-winning Shuggie Bain (2020) and Kevin Barry all use it as the natural texture of speech. In America, from Mailer through Roth, Vonnegut, Carver and Cormac McCarthy to George Saunders, it is simply part of the register, and in genre fiction, from Elmore Leonard to Chuck Palahniuk, it is a rhythm section.

Children's and young adult books

The word's one remaining frontier in print. Melvin Burgess's Junk (1996), Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) and most modern young-adult fiction contain it; The Curious Incident was pulled from a Florida school reading list in 2015 for that reason. In Britain the debate is largely over; in the United States the word is still one of the commonest grounds for a book challenge.