Barney Rosset

Barnet Lee Rosset, Jr., more commonly known as Barney Rosset (born 1922), is the Chicago-born American entrepreneur and former owner of the publishing house Grove Press. Rosset published the magazine "Evergreen Review", and he also was the American publisher of Henry Miller's controversial novel "Tropic of Cancer". The right to publish and distribute Miller's novel in the United States was affirmed by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1964, in a landmark ruling for free speech and the First Amendment. Rosset had earlier led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of D. H. Lawrence's novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover".

Early life

Rosset grew up in Chicago, attended the progressive Francis Parker School, Swarthmore College and the New School for Social Research. During World War II, he served in the Army Signal Corps as an officer in a photographic company stationed in China. Rosset married his high school sweetheart, American Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell in 1949 in Paris. Although she was instrumental in the first books published by Rosset when he purchased Grove Press in 1951, the couple divorced in 1952.

According to John Nathan, Rosset was married to Cristina Rosset sometime in the 1960s. He owned a home on West Houston Street and the Black Circle Bar and Theatre, which played adult movies. He also owned an East Hampton Long Island quonset hut, previously used as a studio by painter Robert Motherwell.

The online "Evergreen Review" features Beat classics as well as debuts of contemporary writers, including Giannina Braschi and Dennis Nurkse. [ [http://www.evergreenreview.com "Evergreen Review" online] ] In 2007, Rossett married Astrid Myers, managing editor of the online "Evergreen Review". Rosset and Myers live in a fourth-floor walk-up near Union Square. In 2008, Rosset completed writing his autobiography.

Grove Press and "Evergreen Review" writers

Rosset introduced American readers to numerous significant writers, including Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter and Kenzaburo Oe. Interviewed by Tin House publisher Win McCormack, Rosset talked about publishing Beckett::I had actually read a little bit of Beckett in "Transition Magazine" and a couple of other places. I was going to the New School. My New School life and the beginnings of Grove crossed over. At the New School I had professors like Wallace Fowlie, Alfred Kazin, Stanley Kunitz and others, who were very, very important to me. I was doing a great deal of reading and writing papers for them, and one day I read in "The New York Times" about a play called "Waiting for Godot" that was going on in Paris. It was a small clip, but it made me very interested. I got hold of it and read it in the French edition. It had something to say to me. Oddly enough, it had a sense of desolation, like Miller, though in its language, its lack of verbiage, it was the opposite of Miller. Still, the sense of a very contemporary lost soul was compelling. I got Wallace Fowlie to read it. His specialty was French literature. His judgment meant a lot to me even though he was so different from me. He was a convert to Catholicism, he was gay, and incredibly intelligent. He read the play and told me that he thought - and this before anybody had really heard about it much - that it would be one of the most important works of the 20th Century. And Sylvia Beach got involved in it somehow. She was a friend and admirer of Beckett. "Waiting for Godot" just hit something in me. I got what Beckett writing was available and published it. He flew into the web and got trapped. He had been turned down by Simon and Schuster, I found out, much earlier, on an earlier novel. [ [http://www.evergreenreview.com/104/contents.htm McCormack, Win. "Literary Fly Catcher": Barney Rosset.] ]

Launched in 1957, "Evergreen Review" pushed the limits of censorship, inspiring hundreds of thousands of younger Americans to embrace the counterculture. Grove Press published Beat Generation writers, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Hubert Selby, Jr. and Jack Kerouac. Rosset also purchased the American distribution rights to the Swedish film "I Am Curious (Yellow)".

Film

"Obscene", a documentary feature about Rosset by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor, was released September 26, 2008. [ [http://www.obscenethefilm.com "Obscene"] ] [http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/24/movies/24obsc.html?th&emc=th McGrath, Charles. "Publisher Who Fought Puritanism, and Won," "The New York Times", September 23, 2008.] ] The film was a selection of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. Featured in the film are Amiri Baraka, Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, Jim Carroll, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Al Goldstein, Erica Jong, Ray Manzarek, Michael McClure, Henry Miller, John Rechy, Ed Sanders, John Sayles, Gore Vidal, John Waters and Malcolm X.

Awards

Rosset was awarded the French title Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1999. On November 19, 2008, Rosset receives a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in honor of his contributions to American publishing,

References

Further reading

*Briggs, Joe Bob: "Profoundly Erotic: Sexy Movies that Changed History" ISBN 0-7893-1314-6
*Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol. X, no. 3, fall 1990 "Grove Press Issue"

Listen to

* [http://wiredforbooks.org/barneyrosset/ Don Swaim's 1984 interview with Barney Rosset at Wired for Books.org]

External links

* [http://evergreenreviewblog.blogspot.com Barney Rosset's blog]
* [http://www.nationalbook.org/literarian.html Recipient of 2008 Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community from the National Book Foundation]