Radical publisher defied censors with ‘obscene’ books

Beckett, Kerouac, Lawrence part of maverick’s stable

Barney Rosset, who has died at age 89, championed works that the rest of the books industry would not touch; as a result he was once described as The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing.

Rosset’s publishing house, Grove Press, was a shoestring outfit operating from dingy offices in Greenwich Village, N.Y., when it published an obscure play called Waiting for Godot in 1954.

By the time its author Samuel Beckett won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1969, Grove had become a force that, for good or ill, had transformed the American cultural landscape.

Rosset specialized in discovering writers who had something new to say and was prepared to take on the establishment to get them into print. He believed that it was impossible to represent life in the mid-20th century honestly without using language that was considered “obscene.” To a large extent, the books he published convinced others that this was true.

Before Rosset came on the scene in the 1950s, publishing was regarded as a “gentleman’s profession” and censorship was an accepted feature. Rosset changed all that.

Through Grove and its offshoot, a provocative literary magazine called Evergreen Review founded in 1957, Rosset beat the drum for unrestricted freedom of expression, fighting numerous legal battles with the champions of anti-obscenity laws.

It was Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s semi-autobiographical account of his early life and sexual adventures in Paris, that started the ball rolling. The book had been banned in the United States for its graphic descriptions of sex and prostitution, but Rosset, who had bought a smuggled copy as a student, made it his mission to get it into print.

In 1954, rosset received a letter from a Berkeley academic, suggesting that he should publish an unexpurgated version of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had been banned for promoting “indecent and lascivious thoughts.” Rosset did not particularly like the book, but because Lawrence had the status of a literary “great,” he thought that a legal fight over Lady Chatterley might help him to chip away at the censorship laws and smooth the way for Tropic.

Rosset notified the American postal authorities that he was (illegally) sending the book in the mail. It was immediately confiscated, setting in motion a protracted wrangle that ended in 1959 with the book’s publication for the first time, a year before the British edition. The following year a federal appeal court overturned the ban on the ground that the centrality of explicit depictions of sexual intercourse did not itself create obscenity.

Rosset then went to work on Miller, who was loath to allow Rosset to publish Tropic, apparently fearing that, if the publisher succeeded in defeating the censors, the work would become so acceptable “no one will want to read it.” After buying the rights from Miller for $50,000, Rosset published the book in 1961.

Within days he found himself buried under an avalanche of more than 60 federal and state lawsuits. He was arrested and charged with selling and conspiring to sell an “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, indecent, sadistic, masochistic, and disgusting book,” but a Brooklyn grand jury decided against an indictment. Finally, in a ruling in 1964, the American Supreme Court held that Tropic had “redeeming social value” and was not, therefore, obscene. The publicity did Rosset no harm at all and Tropic became an immediate bestseller.

By the mid-1960s, Grove Press had become “the voice of the underground,” its list (with what one critic called the “annual Grove Press shocker”), avidly anticipated by any self-respecting dropout with intellectual pretensions.

As well as introducing American readers to Beckett, Harold Pinter, Eugene Ionesco and Jean Genet, Rosset published the works of Jack Kerouac, Tom Stoppard, Octavio Paz and Marguerite Duras.

He printed William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, with its graphic descriptions of homosexual sex and drug use, in 1962 (Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg were among the defence witnesses at the inevitable trial), and Hubert Selby’s controversial Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1964.

Other bestsellers included The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), Eric Berne’s Games People Play (1964) and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (1965). When Che Guevara died in 1968, Rosset travelled to Bolivia to secure his diaries, which, when they were published, prompted anti-castro militants to bomb Groves’s editorial offices.

But the good times did not last. Rosset had incurred heavy losses due to the costs of defending his books in court, yet by the end of the 1960s other publishers were hitching a ride on his coattails. He diversified – into films – and went to court to overturn a ban on the Swedish soft-porn film I Am Curious (Yellow) (1967), to which he had bought the American rights.

The film made millions, encouraging Rosset to invest in smart new offices and buy other foreign films, most of which flopped at the box office.

At the same time, Rosset came under fire from a new breed of radical feminists for the titillating novels which had always featured prominently on Grove’s list, not all of which could claim the literary merits of Tropic. In 1969, Life magazine published a profile of Rosset under the title, Old Smut Peddler.

The following year, a group of female staff barricaded themselves into Grove’s executive offices, accusing Rosset of earning millions “off the basic theme of humiliating, degrading and dehumanizing women.”

When Rosset had them forcibly removed by the police, he lost the support of many of his radical admirers.

In the early 1980s, with Grove in serious trouble, Rosset reluctantly accepted an offer from Lord Weidenfeld, backed by the oil heiress Ann Getty, to buy and refinance the imprint. Rosset believed he would remain in charge, but in 1985 he was informed that he had been sacked.

Barnet Lee Rosset was born in Chicago on May 28, 1922, the only son of a wealthy Jewish banker and an Irish Catholic mother.

Radically-minded from an early age, Rosset and his best friend at school, the future cinematographer Haskell Wexler, produced a paper called Anti-everything and joined the left-wing American Student Union.

He studied intermittently at four colleges, including Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, and the University of California, Los Angeles, eventually earning a degree from New York’s New School for Social Research in 1952. It was at Swarthmore that he came across Tropic of Cancer.