Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America's Maverick Publisher and His Battle against Censorship

By Michael Rosenthal

An “illuminating, insightful“ biography of the man many regard as “the most important American book publisher of the twentieth century” (Kirkus Reviews).
 
An impetuous outsider who delighted in confronting American hypocrisy and prudery, Barney Rosset liberated American culture from the constraints of Puritanism.
 
As the head of Grove Press, he single-handedly broke down the laws against obscenity, forever changing the nature of writing and publishing in this country. He brought to the reading public the European avant-garde, including playwrights Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, radical political and literary voices such as Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Jack Kerouac, steamy Victorian erotica, and previously-banned writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs. His almost mystical belief in the sanctity of the First Amendment demarcates the before and after of American publishing.
 
Drawing on the Rosset papers at Columbia University and personal interviews with former Grove Press staff members, friends, and wives, Barney tells the fascinating story of this feisty, abrasive, visionary, and principled cultural revolutionary—hailed as a modern “Huckleberry Finn” by to Nobel Prize–winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe—who altered the reading habits of a nation.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781628726527

Reviews for Barney

[jasonpettus · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)If there's one person from the annals of 20th-century publishing who deserves to be better remembered than he currently is, that would be Barney Rosset; "founder" of Grove Press (that is, after buying the name from a couple of incompetent academes who only managed to re-release three public domain titles in the two years they were in business), who then turned the press into the premiere destination for avant-garde and cutting-edge work in the Mid-Century Modernist years, which he financed through hundreds of reprints of old Victorian erotic novels, eventually spending millions of dollars to convince the Supreme Court to create a brand-new definition of what constitutes "obscene" artistic material, it was Rosset who quite single-handedly ushered in the era of uncensored books and movies we currently live in, just to be personally undone by the '80s by his flamboyantly sexist lifestyle and inherently bad business sense.And Michael Rosenthal's new Barney does a great job at covering it all; although a short book, it briskly covers all the highlights of this complex and fascinating man's life, not only conveying the whats and hows but delving into the issues that motivated him, the culture around him that was perfectly ready at that perfect moment for such behavior, and what both the good and bad fallout was from his sometimes volatile decisions. And make no mistake, this is far from a sugar-coating or hagiography; Rosset not only comes off here like the petulant, libidinous man-child he no doubt was in real life, but Rosenthal even places this subject at the heart of the biography itself, rightly asking whether this First Amendment crusader would've even had the temerity to simultaneously fight 21 different state district attorneys at once if he wasn't such a egomaniacal lothario. A man who was at the very center of the underground arts during the crucial decades of the '50s, '60s and '70s, who not only introduced American audiences to such European writers as Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet but also liberated Henry Miller and the Beat poets into the realm of mainstream national success, this slim but essential volume is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the countercultural era and Postmodernism better, a solidly done portrait of a brilliant, often infuriating champion of subversion in all forms.Out of 10: 9.5