Barney Rosset, the passionate publisher of Grove Press and an ardent defender of free speech, died Tuesday after a double-heart-valve replacement. He was 89. During his long career, Rosset published and fought censorship battles over such controversial books as D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch. With his imprint Grove Press, Rosset championed Samuel Beckett here in America, and published Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. According to the Times obituary:
Mr. Rosset called Grove “a breach in the dam of American Puritanism.” Beyond being sued scores of times, he received death threats. Grove’s office in Greenwich Village was bombed. In 2008 the National Book Foundation honored him as “a tenacious champion for writers who were struggling to be read in America.”
Other mentions were less lofty. Life magazine in 1969 titled an article about him “The Old Smut Peddler.” That same year a cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post showed him climbing out of a sewer. Mr. Rosset was hardly the only publisher to take risks, lasso avant-garde authors or print titillating material. But few so completely relied on seat-of-the-pants judgment. Colleagues said he had “a whim of steel.”
“He does everything by impulse and then figures out afterward whether he’s made a smart move or was just kidding,” Life said. Simply put, Mr. Rosset liked what he liked. In an interview with Newsweek in 2008, he said he printed erotica because it “excited me.”
Rosset was the son of a wealthy, conservative banker in Chicago, but he attended a school that was so liberal he said "teachers arranged for students to sleep with one another." In an interview with the AP in 1998, Rosset said, "I’m half-Jewish and half-Irish, and my mother and grandfather spoke Gaelic. From an early age my feelings made the I.R.A. look pretty conservative. I grew up hating fascism, hating racism."
In addition to literature, Rosset also had a lifelong involvement with film, and during WWII served in a photographic unit in China. The New Yorker's Richard Brody recalls how Rosset "bought a small theatre near his Greenwich Village office and turned it into the Evergreen Theatre" where he showed films and distributed Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend. He also distributed Frederick Wiseman’s acclaimed documentary about the abuse of patients at Bridgewater State Hospital, Titicut Follies. Brody writes:
His legacy, both in literature and in the cinema, is profound and enduring. His example and his exertions prove that freedom is indissociable—that there’s no such thing as political freedom in the absence of free artistic expression; that freedom involving matters of sex is as central to a just society as the right to ideological expression. Rosset both advanced and embodied, sincerely and bravely, the crucial modern recognition that the personal is political.
