Barney Rosset

Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr. (May 28, 1922 – February 21, 2012) was a pioneering American book and magazine publisher. An avant-garde taste maker, he purchased Grove Press in 1951, and founded Evergreen Review in 1957, both of which gave him platforms for curating world-class and, in several cases, Nobel prize-winning work by authors including Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda (1971), Octavio Paz (1990), Kenzaburō Ōe (1994) and Harold Pinter (2005).

A reader and an editor, Rosset was the first to publish Beat poets Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a who's who of playwrights including Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, political biographies like Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, erotic literature like the Story of O, groundbreaking gay fiction by Jean Genet, and banned classics such as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Rosset's insistence on publishing "banned" books permanently redefined American obscenity law. "To do Lady Chatterley's Lover before Tropic of Cancer would be more acceptable because D.H. Lawrence was a famous writer and revered at many levels," Rosset said in 2009, explaining his tactical reasoning after the fact. "Lady Chatterley would be more feasible to make a battle plan for, and we did exactly that," starting with an uncensored version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, thirty years after its initial U.K. publication. In an interview with Tin House publisher Win McCormack, Rosset described what spurred him to publish Beckett: ne 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.... 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.

Legal impact

In 1959, Rosset published D.H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, which the United States had banned in 1929, on the grounds of obscenity. After the book was released, the U.S. Post Office began confiscating copies sent through the mail, which led Grove Press to take legal action — and win. Emboldened, Rosset subsequently decided to publish Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which was first published in France in 1934, and immediately banned by the U.S. Customs Service from being imported into the U.S., again, on grounds of obscenity. So in 1961, Rosset published it. "awsuits were immediately filed against him and booksellers that chose to carry the controversial novel. The trial eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in Rosset's favor."

Evergreen Review

Launched in 1957, Evergreen Review also pushed the limits of censorship, impacting the culture at large by inspiring younger Americans to embrace the counterculture. The Review shuttered in 1984, only to relaunch in 1998 online and under Rosset's management.One thing I like about this new form of communication [online] is that you can have an article about, say, the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago like any magazine, but you can also listen to the kind of music they were playing at the time. We can go into new realms of discourse.... They say there's still not enough memory for things like sound and visuals on the Internet, and it costs too much to put a magazine on-line. But that's all going to change fast. To get some idea of how fast, all you have to do is go to Bangkok and see all the poor people selling melons on the streets; and they all have cellular phones.

Background Born and raised in Chicago to a well-to-do Jewish father, also named Barney, who owned a bank, and an Irish Catholic mother, Mary (née Tansey), where he was best friends with Haskell Wexler who went on to become a renowned cinematographer. According to Rosset, Robert Morss Lovett, the grandfather of Rosset's high school sweetheart, and professor of English at the University of Chicago, was also a great influence on him. His second wife, Loly Eckert, was a sales manager at Grove Press,

Awards In 1999, Rosset was awarded the French title Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. On October 21, 2008, Rosset was honored by the National Coalition Against Censorship for his work defending free expression. On November 19, 2008, Rosset received the lifetime achievement Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation in honor of his contributions to American publishing. In 2012, he was awarded the Norman Mailer Prize for "Distinguished Publisher."

Filmography

"Obscene" is a documentary feature about Rosset by Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor that was released September 26, 2008. The film was a selection of the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival. Features commentary by Amiri Baraka, Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, Jim Carroll, Elsa Dorfman, 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. Barney's Wall: A Portrait of a Game Changer is a documentary produced by FoxHog Productions and Rosset's widow Astrid Myers. It tells a story about a painting that Rosset was painting on the walls of their apartment, which his wife had to move after Rosset's death when she had to relocate.