Barney

February 20, 2017
Early in this biography of Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset (1922–2012), Rosenthal (Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler) details the contents of a paper entitled “Henry Miller vs ‘Our Way of Life,’ ” written by Rosset as a freshman at Swarthmore after reading Tropic of Cancer. It’s the same paper Rosset quoted in court nearly two decades later in 1962 when he was accused of publishing the banned book solely to make money from smut. This was a remarkable moment in the biography of a man determined to end “Comstockery,” but it comes nearly 100 pages after the reader learns about the essay, in one of the many moments when Rosenthal seems stuck in minutiae. The book effectively describes Rosset’s successful legal battles against censorship, and Rosenthal illustrates his subject’s publishing philosophy with his decision to publish Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs to American audiences, and his lack of business acumen with his sale of the company’s Manhattan headquarters for pennies on the dollar. Rosenthal also delves into Rosset’s personal life and his passion for Victorian erotica, which helped sustain Grove, but the book works best when it focuses on 20th-century censorship.

January 1, 2017
How a tiny startup press rocked the publishing world."[Barney] Rosset [1922-2012] was unquestionably the most daring and arguably the most significant American book publisher of the twentieth century." So argues Rosenthal (Humanities/Columbia Univ.; Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, 2006, etc.) in this short yet bright and entertaining biography. Born into a well-off Chicago family, Barney (as Rosenthal calls him) went to the finest progressive schools, where his penchant for radical beliefs emerged. After stints at colleges and the Army--where be worked in combat photography and film--the aimless young man took his love of books and some money from his father and purchased Grove Press, a small publisher with a three-book backlist. He had found his vocation. As the company's sole employee, he quickly added to the list by picking up copyright-free classics like The Monk and The Golden Bowl. His reprint strategy soon became a steady source of income. In 1953, he married Loly, the fledging press' sales manager, the second of his five wives, numerous girlfriends, and call girls. He could often be "scathing" and difficult to work with, and he picked the manuscripts he liked, regardless of their sales potential. In 1953, he bought the rights to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot for $150. Rosset would become his sole American publisher. In 1959, he added a bright young editor/translator to the staff, Richard Seaver. Together, they tapped into Europe's rich and complex world of literature and began picking up authors like Robbe-Grillet, Genet, and Ionesco, effectively introducing the "avant-garde into literary America's consciousness." Rosset had financial success in 1957 with his controversial Evergreen Review. He then took on the establishment with his costly battle to publish D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and then took on an even costlier battle to publish Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and won again. Illuminating, insightful, and informative--a piquant portrait of a renegade publisher.

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