Rosset, Barney

BIOGHIST REQUIRED Maverick and iconoclast American publisher Barney Rosset was born in Chicago in the "year of modernism," 1922. He is chiefly remembered as the owner, publisher, and editor of Grove Press (from 1951 to 1986) and Evergreen Review. In 1940 he spent a year at Swarthmore College and then entered the US Army in 1942. In 1948, after having served as an officer in the Army Photographic Company in China until his return to New York in 1946, Rosset produced Strange Victory, a groundbreaking documentary about postwar racial discrimination in the United States. In 1949, he married the American abstract expressionist painter Joan Mitchell. They later divorced. Rosset was married four more times; his marriages to Hannelore Eckert, Cristina Agnini and Elisabeth Krug ended in divorce. Rosset was married to the former Astrid Myers at the time of this passing.

Acquiring Grove in 1951 while he was still an undergraduate at the New School, Rosset turned the small New York publishing house into one of the most innovative and daring outlet of avant-garde literature, enjoying a heyday of national impact from 1959, when Rosset published the first unexpurgated edition of D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, and well into the 1980s. Through Rosset's efforts, in 1964 the Supreme Court granted Grove the right to publish Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which was a landmark case for free speech under the first amendment in the United States. Rosset was instrumental in bringing the works of Samuel Beckett, a lifelong friend, to an American and international audience, beginning in 1952 with the English translation of Waiting for Godot and ending with Beckett's last work, Stirrings Still in 1988 (which he dedicated to Rosset), under the imprint of his new company Foxrock. Under his supervision, Grove published many other key figures of twentieth-century literature and intellectual history on both sides of the Atlantic (and the Pacific), notably William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Albert Camus, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Egene Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Alex Haley's Autobiography of Malcolm X, Jorge Luis Borges, Margerite Duras, Jean Genet, David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, John Rechy, Khushwant Singh, Will Self, Sherman Alexie, Kenzaburo Oe, Winterson, Yoshimoto.

Rosset also published the magazine Evergreen Review as an adjunct to Grove from 1957 to 1973, and also developed Grove's own film distribution for avant-garde films by directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Oshima. Through Grove's International Film Festival in New York, Rosset distributed the controversial Swedish film, I Am Curious (Yellow), then breaking all American box office records for foreign films. Other ventures include the Evergreen Theatre Inc., BlueMoon Books, and Foxrock. In 2008, a documentary feature entitled Obscene (Dir. Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O'Connor) about Barney Rosset's life and work was released. Barney Rosset passed away in 2012 at the age of 89.

From the guide to the Barney Rosset papers, 1841-2011, [Bulk Dates: 1935-2011]., (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library)