Barney Rosset (born Barnet Lee Rosset, Jr., 1922), is the former owner of the publishing house
Grove Press, and publisher and Editor-in-Chief of the magazine
Evergreen Review. He led a successful legal battle to publish the uncensored version of
D. H. Lawrence's novel
Lady Chatterley's Lover, and later was the American publisher of
Henry Miller's controversial novel
Tropic of Cancer. The right to publish and distribute Miller's novel in the United States was affirmed by the
Supreme Court of the United States in 1964, in a landmark ruling for free speech and the
First Amendment.
Early life
Rosset was born and raised in Chicago, and attended the progressive
Francis Parker School, where he was best friends was renowned cinematographer
Haskell Wexler. He went on to study at
Swarthmore College,
UCLA, and the
New School for Social Research. During
World War II, he served in the
Army Signal Corps as an officer in a photographic company stationed in
China. Rosset married American
Abstract Expressionist painter
Joan Mitchell in 1949. The couple later divorced. Mitchell was instrumental in Rosset's acquisition of Grove Press. He owned an
East Hampton Long Island quonset hut, previously used as a studio by painter
Robert Motherwell.
Grove Press and Evergreen Review writers
Rosset introduced American readers to numerous significant writers, including
Samuel Beckett,
Jean Genet,
Eugène Ionesco,
Tom Stoppard,
Harold Pinter and
Kenzaburo Oe. Interviewed by
Tin House publisher
Win McCormack, Rosset talked about publishing Beckett:
