Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America's Maverick Publisher and His Battle against Censorship

(Hardback)

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An incisive, compulsively readable biography of the man the Guardian called "the most influential avant-garde publisher of the twentieth century." An impetuous outsider who delighted in confronting American hypocrisy and prudery, Barney Rosset liberated American culture from the constraints of Puritanism. As the head of Grove Press, he single-handedly broke down the laws against obscenity, changing forever the nature of writing and publishing in this country. He brought to the reading public the European avant-garde, among them Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, radical political and literary voices such as Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Jack Kerouac, steamy Victorian erotica, and banned writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs. His almost mystical belief in the sacrosanct nature of the First Amendment essentially demarcates the before and after of American publishing. Barney explores how Grove's landmark legal victories freed publishers to print what they wanted, and it traces Grove's central role in the countercultural ferment of the sixties and early seventies. Drawing on the Rosset papers at Columbia University and personal interviews with former Grove Press staff members, friends, and wives, it tells the fascinating story of this feisty, abrasive, visionary, and principled cultural revolutionary--a modern "Huckleberry Finn" according to Nobel Prize--winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe--who altered the reading habits of a nation.

Reviews

"Illuminating, insightful, and informative--a piquant portrait of a renegade publisher." --Kirkus "Barney Rosset was one of the most important American cultural figures of the twentieth century. This marvelous book brilliantly captures his and our struggles to allow all Americans to read, hear and see what the Constitution demands. He, with much turbulence, anxiety, and pain, nearly alone broke the barriers of censorship." --Martin Garbus, Esq. "Setting up shop on the corner where the mid-century avant-garde met Victorian pornography, Barney Rosset helped crack wide open the staid world of American publishing. Michael Rosenthal's smart and candid biography beautifully captures the insatiable spirit of an oft unlovely but always intrepid literary daredevil."-- Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of History, Princeton University and author of Bob Dylan in America "From the opening sentence of this marvelous, fleet, perfectly rendered portrait of Barney Rosset--the most important American book publisher of the twentieth century--to its last--in which its crusading, preposterous and triumphantly consequential subject is winsomely extolled by one writer as "a Tom Paine of the human brain"--Michael Rosenthal has created an elegant, clear-eyed, irresistibly readable account of the renegade publisher who tore himself, and the reading public, through the rusting gates of American Puritanism and censorship. Dashing, driven, self-absorbed, maddening-- married five times and four times abandoned--Rosset was an American original. He was also from start to finish happily profligate with resources personal and financial in the pursuit of expanding the purview of the First Amendment. In this book, Rosenthal has done his subject and his readers a superb service." --Ric Burns, documentary filmmaker "Barney is a good read. Michael Rosenthal sequences interesting anecdotes by the hundred, and he's good at tracing the nonstop, edge-of-frenzy, but sharp-minded publishing decisions Barney made while partying and living fun-loving life to its fullest." --Ed Sanders, Grove Press author "We're still benefiting from the freedoms that we have because of what Barney Rosset did ... and the battles he fought." --John Waters, quoted from the documentary Obscene "Barney Rosset to me represents the literary world of the latter half of the 20th century... No amount of words will be adequate to express my gratitude to Barney Rosset." --Kenzaburo Oe "Barney Rosset was not an anonymous publisher for me. When I speak about my publisher in New York I never say 'Grove Press,' I always say 'Barney Rosset.'" --Jean Genet "Barney Rosset, whose guts and wisdom made it possible for me to read Beckett and all the other writers published by Grove, the one-in-a-million Barney Rosset, America's bravest publisher." --Paul Auster

Author Bio

Michael Rosenthal was the Roberta and William Campbell Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. A Guggenheim Fellowship winner, he was also awarded Columbia College's Alexander Hamilton Medal, its highest honor. The author of Virginia Woolf, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts and the Imperatives of Empire, and Nicholas Miraculous, The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, he resides in New York City.