Photo: Michael Falco for The New York Times.
UPDATE: Ken Jordan’s extended and fascinating interview with Rosset, conducted in the mid-1990s, can be found on The Paris Review‘s Web site here.
It is hard, if not impossible, to overestimate the role that Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset, who died on Tuesday at the age of 89, played in revolutionizing both the American theatre and the American literary consciousness. From the time he bought the small company in 1951 to the time he sold it to Ann Getty and George Weidenfeld in 1985, Rosset championed and published — at great personal cost — magazines, plays, and books that exploded the comfortable ease of the American literary scene. His publication of the unexpurgated Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Tropic of Cancer, and Naked Lunch led to dozens of obscenity trials, almost all of which Rosset won, but just as importantly, the Grove Press drama backlist reads like a curriculum of experimental and international theatre of the second half of the twentieth century. Grove Press published extensive lists of almost every significant European playwright of the era, from Arrabal and Artaud to Charles Wood, with Beckett, Brecht, Havel, Ionesco, Pinter, and countless others in between. Nor did Grove Press neglect radical politics; both The Autobiography of Malcolm X and books by Che Guevara were issued by the house.
The book cover as madeleine: The cover of the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch that I bought in the 1970s.
I first came across Grove Press as a teenager in the mid-1970s, when I was living in Hazleton, PA, and had dreams of becoming a playwright. My home away from home was the City Book Store, which was run by two veterans of the 1960s radical campus wars, and it was there that the idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable cover designs of the Grove Press books became a part of my Proustian memory. The owners kept a long list of Grove Press titles in stock, and it was rare that they did not instantly have an effect on my thinking and my life, from Henry Miller and William Burroughs to Pinter, Brecht, and of course Beckett. I suppose I have Rosset to thank for planting the seeds of my later writing and thinking, and I know that I’m not alone in this. The Swiftian brilliance of Naked Lunch; the lascivious celebrations of Tropic of Cancer; the nightmarish but titillating underworlds of the Marquis de Sade; and of course the darker corners of Endgame, The Homecoming, and Mother Courage all were revealed through Rosset’s courageous and uncompromising dedication to freedom of expression and cosmopolitan, internationalist perspectives. Heady stuff for a 14-year-old, and heady stuff now — but they changed me, hinting at the brilliant possibilities that could be explored in both life and art, if only I had the courage of those Grove Press writers I read. (The same could be said for books from James Laughlin’s New Directions and, to a lesser extent, Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, the other crusading publishers of the era.)
The 2007 documentary Obscene is a portrait of Rosset and his career at Grove Press, and is a very good overview of his influence and place in American publishing history. Douglas Martin’s obituary for The New York Times is here.
Many of those unique, memorable Grove Press covers were designed by Roy Kuhlman. A gallery of a few of these is below (click on the image to rotate through the slideshow); more information on Kuhlman can be found here.
