FIVE TAKEAWAYS FROM A LIFE IN PUBLISHING

Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship

By Barney Rosset OR Books 370 pp; $40.50

Barney Rosset was t he legendary publisher of New York’s Grove Press, most famous for its battles to publish uncensored versions of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. This was before the internet, of course. Now impressionable kids can go online any moment of the day and read Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Here are your takeaways:

1 When Rosset was growing up in Chicago under the Hoover administration, John Dillinger was a hero of his – much like the Russian Communists. In fact, Rosset and some of his classmates petitioned the government to replace President Hoover with Dillinger. Rosset’s family lived close to the movie theatre where Dillinger was shot and killed by the FBI. This was not Rosset’s closest brush with the Bureau, which would investigate him thoroughly, all the way back to his school years.

2 Rosset and his first wife, the painter Joan Mitchell, first lived as newlyweds in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, which was then “a beautiful building on the outskirts of nowhere.” They found an apartment in the West Village, where Grove Press would never move more than 10 blocks, for Rosset’s entire ownership.

3 Rosset was fired by the socialist magazine The Monthly Review when he got a parking ticket while delivering inventory – and paid it – something the editor felt was “bourgeois.” His stake in Grove Press began shortly thereafter, something Rosset admits may never have happened had he stayed on at the magazine.

4 The day after Malcolm X was kil l ed, Rosset secured the rights to publish his forth coming autobiography when Doubleday backed out, concerned for the safety of its employees. “The Autobiography of Malcolm X was almost kept from publication because of Doubleday’s fears,” writes Rosset. “I never let any of that stop me.” Rosset commissioned Alex Haley ( later the author of Roots) to finalize the manuscript.

5 “There was more to Lady Chatterley to offend the censors than its four- letter words and graphic lovemaking,” Rosset writes. Simply put, the book was accessible, and this is what frightened the censors most. “They shuddered to think of all those lewd thoughts infecting the receptive souls of so many Americans, especially those impoverished by small incomes and miserable education.”