Page 1 of 3

Catastrophic young love—a trauma shared by some of his favorite writers—may have freed Barney Rosset to become a publishing legend.

In bestowing on Barney Rosset the honorific of Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1999, the French Ministry of Culture said: "You brought writers considered marginal into the mainstream. We are still reaping the fruits of your relentless efforts and achievements, and such is your legacy that the American public is indebted to you for many of the most interesting books it reads."

The recipient of this accolade was raised in Chicago, Illinois, where his left-leaning political views were shaped in part by attendance at the progressive Francis Parker School. His later education was at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and the New School for Social Research in New York. He served in the Army Signal Corps during World War ll, as an officer in a photographic company stationed in China.

In 1951 Rosset purchased a small publishing company called Grove Press and proceeded to turn it into what was arguably during its heyday the most influential alternative book press in the history of American publishing. Grove and Grove's magazine, the Evergreen Review, launched in 1957, published, among others writers, most of the French avant-garde of the era, including Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet, and Eugene Ionesco; most of the American Beats of the fifties, including Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg; and most of the key radical political thinkers of the 1960's, including Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon and Regis Debray. He published Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot after it had been scorned by more mainstream publishers—and sold two million copies of it in the bargain. He made a specialty of Japanese literature, and introduced the future Nobel Prize winner Kenzaburo Oe to an American public. He published the first unexpurgated edition of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover and the first edition of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in America, partly in order to deliberately provoke the censors. Through his legal victories in the resulting obscenity cases, as well as in one brought on by I Am Curious Yellow, a sexually explicit Swedish documentary film he distributed, he was probably more responsible than any other single individual for ending the censorship of literature and film in the United States.

Grove Press was sold in 1985; its backlist is now part of Grove/Atlantic Press. This interview was conducted in the East Village loft where Rosset lives and operates, with his companion Astrid Myers, Evergreen Review, Inc., a nonprofit company that manages the Evergreen Review Web site, and the publishing company Foxrock. The long room is dominated by a pool table at its center and a myriad of surrounding bookshelves crammed with Grove publications, files, and memorabilia.



Win McCormack: Barney, what Tin House would like to discuss is your uncanny ability to spot the great writers of your era.

Let me read you something you once said: "You might not know what's going to fly into your web, but you put it where you think there might be flies. If you leave your web out long enough, you might have the option to pick only those flies that please you, and eventually you can discern a pattern or similarity in the flies that you choose, and finally you accidentally learn to choose wisely."

What was the web that you put out, and where did you put it? And who were the first to fly into it?

Barney Rosset: I don't think you can go at it quite that way. I had done a lot of reading prior to Grove Press, in high school, in college, in the army, and I had developed my own taste, for good or for bad. For example, Henry Miller's work had entered my life in 1940, in full force. There were also people like Hemingway and Malraux, and others, whom I had read and admired.

If you have a small publishing company, or a large one for that matter, many people whom you admire are published by somebody else—for example, Hemingway, or Faulkner, or Malraux. So already you're circumscribed to a degree. Your web can't catch them, they're caught. So if you, let's say, find that somebody like Miller, whom you liked, is available, you start doing something about it.

WM: When you started Grove Press, Henry James was one of the first authors you published.

BR: He certainly was, the very first.

WM: How did that happen?

BR: That happened through my first wife, Joan Mitchell, later a very famous artist. Joan's mother was the editor of Poetry magazine. She was the editor of it for many, many years and a poet herself. Joan was a very astute person, with a very good taste for writing, just as good as for painting. She was the one who really directly got me into Grove. John Balcomb and Robert Phelps had started Grove Press and Grove Street. They published three books, and quit. They really had quit. They had wanted to do The Monk, a gothic novel by Matthew G. Lewis. They had it almost ready. I loved The Monk. That was the first book we physically published. It had been published several times with changes, so we did a variorum edition, and I went to Princeton and got John Berryman, a very well-known poet at that time, to do an introduction.

The Golden Bowl was a novel by Henry James that Joan particularly liked, and she asked me to do that. I went to Princeton again and got R. P. Blackmur, who was at that time the leading writer on James, to do an introduction. It wasn't accidental that we did James, it was a direct result of being pushed by Joan. Then I went right on, did six or seven more of him.

Click to continue