An “illuminating, insightful“ biography of the man many regard as “the most important American book publisher of the twentieth century” (Kirkus Reviews).
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, forever changing the nature of writing and publishing in this country. He brought to the reading public the European avant-garde, including playwrights Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, radical political and literary voices such as Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and Jack Kerouac, steamy Victorian erotica, and previously-banned writers such as D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs. His almost mystical belief in the sanctity of the First Amendment demarcates the before and after of American publishing.
Drawing on the Rosset papers at Columbia University and personal interviews with former Grove Press staff members, friends, and wives, Barney tells the fascinating story of this feisty, abrasive, visionary, and principled cultural revolutionary—hailed as a modern “Huckleberry Finn” by to Nobel Prize–winning novelist Kenzaburo Oe—who altered the reading habits of a nation.
