Barney Rosset

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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 is perhaps best known as the American publisher of the controversial and sexually charged novel Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller.

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.

Rosset introduced Americans to writers such as Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Eugène Ionesco, Tom Stoppard, Harold Pinter, and Kenzaburo Oe. In the 1960s and 70s, his magazine "The Evergreen Review," which both in images and words pushed the limits of censorship, inspired hundreds of thousands of younger Americans to embrace the Counter Culture. Grove Press published many of the writers of the Beat generation, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Hubert Selby, Jr. and Jack Kerouac as well as the Tropics of Miller. Rosset also purchased the American distribution rights to I Am Curious (Yellow).

He married American Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell in 1949 in Paris. They divorced in 1952. Rosset was awarded the French title Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1999. In 2007, he married Astrid Myers, managing editor of the online archival edition of Evergreen Review (www.evergreenreview.com).

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[edit] References

  • 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"
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