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 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 the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow).

He married his high school sweetheart, 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. According to John Nathan, Rosset was married to Cristina Rosset sometime in the 1960s. He was a "Greenwich Village man" meaning that he rarely went north of 14th_Street_(Manhattan). He owned a home on West Houston Street and owned the Black Circle Bar and Theatre, which played adult movies. Rosset owned a quonset hut in East Hampton Long Island previously used as a studio by painter Robert Motherwell. The Rosset's went to parties in the Springs, New York East Hampton area with many other famous artists. In 2007, he married Astrid Myers, managing editor of the online archival edition of Evergreen Review (www.evergreenreview.com). According to Nathan, Rosset and Myers lived "impecuniously" in a walkup close to Union Square around 1994.

External links

• 1984 audio interview with Barney Rosset at Wired for Books.org by Don Swaim
• Barney Rosset's blog
• Feature Documentary Film "Obscene" is biopic of Barney Rosset
• [http://www.evergreenreview.com The online journal featuring the beat classics as well as debuts of contemporaty writers including Giannina Braschi and Dennis Nurkse.

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"