In a letter arguing the mailability of The Little Review to the Solicitor General, Quinn had maintained that Ulysses was comprehensible only to a literary elite, and was of high artistic merit. He included a circular praising the literary merit of Joyce's critically acclaimed Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The Solicitor General summarily rejected Quinn's arguments:

This exchange was the beginning of the legal battles which would halt the Ulysses serialization and lead to the suppression of the text in the U.S.