Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr. was the 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.
During World War II, he served in the Army Signal Corps as an officer in a photographic company stationed in Kunming, China. In 2002, Rosset exhibited a collection of his War Photographs from his time in China in a New York Gallery. The exhibit included graphic photos of wounded and dead Chiang Kai-shek soldiers. Rosset's initial ambition was to be a filmmaker like his childhood friend Haskell Wexler. Rosset produced a documentary called Strange Victory about racism in a post World War II America. The film was a failure. After divorcing his first wife, painter Joan Mitchell, Rosset took courses at the New School for Social Research and worked for Monthly Review Press magazine. A friend of Joan Mitchell's told Rosset about Grove Press and that the original founders wanted to sell. Rosset purchased Grove Press for three thousand dollars.
Personal life
Rosset married five times. Rosset married American Abstract Expressionist painter Joan Mitchell in France in 1949. The couple settled in Greenwich Village but then later divorced. Mitchell was instrumental in Rosset's acquisition of Grove Press. Rosset's second wife was Loly Eckert, a sales manager at Grove Press. They had a son named Peter Rosset. He owned an East Hampton, Long Islandquonset hut, previously used as a studio by painter Robert Motherwell. His final marriage was to Astrid Meyers. Rosset had three more children after Peter, son Beckett and two daughters—Tansey and Chantal.
Grove Press and ''Evergreen Review'' writers
Rosset introduced American readers to numerous significant writers, including Samuel Beckett, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Kenzaburō Ōe, Harold Pinter, Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Khushwant Singh, Jean Genet, John Rechy, Kathy Acker, Eugène Ionesco and Tom Stoppard. Interviewed by Tin House publisher Win McCormack, Rosset talked about publishing Beckett: In an interview with the Brooklyn Rail, Rosset spoke about the Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn being taken to court for obscenity charges: Launched in 1957, Evergreen Review pushed the limits of censorship, inspiring hundreds of thousands of younger Americans to embrace the counterculture. Grove Press published Beat Generation writers, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Rechy, Hubert Selby, Jr. and Jack Kerouac. Rosset also purchased the American distribution rights to the Swedish film I Am Curious . The online Evergreen Review features Beat classics as well as debuts of contemporary writers. In 2007, Rosset married Astrid Myers, then-managing editor of the online Evergreen Review. In 2008, Rosset completed writing his autobiography (now published as Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship. He died in 2012 after a double heart valve replacement.
