Barney Rosset

Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr. (May 28, 1922 – February 21, 2012) was a pioneering American book and magazine publisher. An avant-garde taste maker, he founded Grove Press in 1951 and ''Evergreen Review'' in 1957, both of which gave him platforms for curating world-class and, in several cases, Nobel prize-winning work by authors including Samuel Beckett (1969), Pablo Neruda (1971), Octavio Paz (1990), Kenzaburō Ōe (1994) and Harold Pinter (2005).

A voracious reader and a resourceful editor, Rosset was the first to publish Beat poets Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a who's who of playwrights including Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, political biographies like Alex Haley's ''The Autobiography of Malcolm X'', erotic literature like the ''Story of O'', groundbreaking gay fiction by Jean Genet, and banned classics such as Henry Miller's ''Tropic of Cancer'' and D. H. Lawrence's ''Lady Chatterley's Lover''.

Rosset's insistence on publishing "banned" books permanently redefined American obscenity law. "To do ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'' before ''Tropic of Cancer'' would be more acceptable because D.H. Lawrence was a famous writer and revered at many levels," Rosset said in 2009, explaining his tactical reasoning after the fact. "''Lady Chatterley'' would be more feasible to make a battle plan for, and we did exactly that," starting with an uncensored version of ''Lady Chatterley's Lover'', thirty years after its initial U.K. publication. After his first victory, Rosset moved on to the second, waging another legal battle to publish Miller's ''Tropic of Cancer''. In 1964, the Supreme Court affirmed Rosset's right to publish Miller's book. France later inducted him as a Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres to honor his contributions to American and world literature; the Norman Mailer Prize was given to him for his work as a "Distinguished Publisher" and the National Coalition Against Censorship recognized him for his contributions to free speech. Provided by Wikipedia