Barney rosset autobiography
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Last month saw the publication of iconoclast publisher Barney Rosset’s autobiography, Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship, from OR books, almost three decades in the making. Rosset, as publisher of Grove Press, not only brought the European avant-garde and the Beat writers to the forefront of American consciousness, he fought anti-censorship battles all the way to the Supreme Court, and won. We can all thank him for the freedoms of speech and expression we enjoy to this day. He died in at the age of
I had the great privilege of working with Barney as his art director beginning in , shortly after he left Grove Press. Over the years he asked me to help on his autobiography, and I did on and off, until working on it full force with him and his wife Astrid, for the last decade. The book Rosset envisioned was vastly different than the one garnering positive reviews from the New York Times, Kirkus and The Guardian and elsewhere. Barney was, after all, a highly visual person, and what he visualized would have perhaps been unique for a memoir: a scrapbook of photos and news clippings that would tell the story alongside the text. Unfortunately the then publisher didn’t agree and the book languished, until thankfully resurrected by John Oakes of OR books.
Barney
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Genet…Beckett…Burroughs…Miller…Ionesco, Ōe, Duras. Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard. Hubert Selby Jr. and John Rechy. The legendary film I Am Curious (Yellow). The books that assaulted the fort of propriety that was the United States in the s and ’60s, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and The Tropic of Cancer. The Evergreen Review. Victorian “erotica.” The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A bombing, a sit-in, and a near-fistfight with Norman Mailer. The common thread between these disparate elements, a number of which reshaped modern culture, was Barney Rosset.
Rosset was the antidote to the trope of the “gentleman publisher” personified by other pioneering figures of the industry such as Alfred A. Knopf, Bennett Cerf and James Laughlin. If Barney saw a crowd heading one way—he looked the other. If he knew something was forbidden, he regarded it as a plus. Unsurprisingly, financial ruin, along with the highs and lows of critical reception, marked his career. But his unswerving dedication to publishing what he wanted made him one of the most influential publishers ever.
Rosset began work on his autobiography a decade before his death in , and several publishers and a number of editors worked with him on the project. Now, at last, in his own words, we have a portrait of the man who reshaped h
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Rosset
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