John Oakes on Grove Press Publisher Barney Rosset

'Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr. (1922 – 2012) was owner of the  Grove Press publishing house and publisher and editor-in-chief at the 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.' Under Rosset  Grove introduced American readers to European avant-garde literature and theatre, publishing, among others, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco. Most importantly, in 1954, Grove started publishing Samuel Beckett

John Oakes is the co-founder and 50% owner of OR Books, and  publisher of the Evergreen Review, an online revival of the venerable counter-cultural literary magazine originally published by Grove Press under Barney Rosset whose memoir Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship OR Books published in 2017. 

I talked with John about Rosset via Zoom.