Grove Press

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Grove Press
Parent company Grove/Atlantic
Founded 1951
Country of origin United States
Headquarters location New York City
Distribution Publishers Group West
Publication types Books
Imprints Black Cat
Official website www.groveatlantic.com

Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1951. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. He partnered with Richard Seaver to bring French literature to the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its publisher, Morgan Entrekin, merged with Grove Press in 1991. Grove is now an imprint of the publisher Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

Literary avant-garde

Grove published Evergreen Review, a literary magazine whose March–April 1960 edition includes work by Albert Camus, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Bertolt Brecht, and LeRoi Jones, as well as Edward Albee's first play, The Zoo Story.

Grove published French avant-garde of the era, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco; most of the American Beats of the 1950s, including Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg; as well as poets like Frank O'Hara of the New York School, and poets associated with Black Mountain and the San Francisco Renaissance such as Robert Duncan.

In 1954 Grove published Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot after it was refused by more mainstream publishers. Since then it has been Beckett's U.S. publisher. In 2006 Grove published an anniversary bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot and a special four-volume edition of Beckett's works, with commissioned introductions by Edward Albee, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and Colm Tóibín, to commemorate his centenary (April 2006).

In 1963, Grove published My Life and Loves: Five Volumes in One/Complete and Unexpurgated, with annotations, collecting Frank Harris' work in one volume for the first time.

Grove is also the U.S. publisher of the works of Harold Pinter; in 2006 it published a collection called The Essential Pinter, which includes Pinter's Nobel Lecture, entitled "Art, Truth & Politics".

Grove is also the exclusive United States publisher of the unabridged complete works of the Marquis de Sade.

In addition, Grove publishes Japanese authors, such as Kenzaburō Ōe.

Political works

In the 1960s, Grove Press published works by Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, and Régis Debray.

Court cases

The Lady Chatterley's Lover case

In 1959, Grove Press published an unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence. The U.S. Post Office Department confiscated copies sent through the mail. Rosset sued the New York city postmaster and his Lawyer Charles Rembar won in New York, and then on federal appeal.[1]

The Tropic of Cancer case

Henry Miller's 1934 novel, Tropic of Cancer, had explicit sexual passages and could not be published in the United States. In 1961, Grove Press issued a copy of the work and lawsuits were brought against dozens of individual booksellers in many states for selling it. The issue was ultimately settled by the U. S. Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Miller v. California. (The Miller of the Miller case was unrelated to Henry Miller.)

The Naked Lunch case

The William S. Burroughs novel Naked Lunch was forbidden from being published in some parts of the world for approximately ten years. The first American publisher was Grove Press. The book was banned by Boston courts in 1962 due to obscenity, but that decision was reversed in a landmark 1966 opinion by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts. This was the last major literary censorship battle in the US.

Upon publication, Grove Press added to the book supplementary material regarding the censorship battle as well as an article written by Burroughs on the topic of drug addiction. Grove would publish several editions of the novel over the next four decades, including a "Restored Text" version in 2002. Grove also published the first American paperback editions of other Burroughs works including The Soft Machine, Nova Express and The Ticket That Exploded. Grove would also publish the final collection of the author's writings, the posthumously published Last Words: The Final Journals of William S. Burroughs, and in 2008 published the American first edition of And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks, the first release of a novel that Burroughs and Jack Kerouac had collaborated on in the mid-1940s.

Union conflicts

In 1962, Grove had sales of $2 million, but after legal bills, lost $400,000. But by 1964, they were profitable, and by 1967, Grove went public and built its own headquarters. In 1970, the staff of 150 began organizing a union. Rosset fired some of the organizers (and later re-hired them in arbitration). The organizers responded with a picket line and an occupation of the building. Rosset called the police, and the occupiers left. His editor, Richard Seaver, talked to the pickets and convinced them to disperse. Grove distributed an anti-union information sheet, and the union vote failed, 86–34. After the vote, Grove fired half its workers.[2]

In film

Obscene, a documentary feature about Rosset and Grove Press by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor, was released September 26, 2008.[3][4] 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, Floyd Salas, John Sayles, Gore Vidal, John Waters, and Malcolm X.

Further reading

  • Glass, Loren. Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.

References

  1. ↑ Kaplan, Fred (July 20, 2009). "The Day Obscenity Became Art". The New York Times. 
  2. ↑ Sicha, Choire (January 9, 2012). "All the Young Dudes: A posthumous memoir goes behind the scenes at the celebrated publisher of Burroughs, Lawrence, and Malcolm X". Slate. 
  3. ↑ McGrath, Charles (September 23, 2008). "Publisher Who Fought Puritanism, and Won". The New York Times. 
  4. ↑ "Obscene: A Film By Neil Ortenberg & Daniel O'Connor". Double O Film Productions. 

External links

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