Rosset by Barney Rosset review – a publisher’s fight against censorship

This memoir of the American publisher of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Tropic of Cancer is full of landmark literary moments“Some people think my chief claim to fame is having published the first book to be sold over the counter in this country with the word fuck printed on its pages in all its naked glory.” That country would be the US, the book in question the first publicly available unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, the year 1959, and the publisher Grove Press, owned and run by the author of this posthumously published memoir, Barney Rosset.This landmark event in anglophone literary history was the beginning of Rosset’s move to the frontlines of the mid-20th century battle against censorship. As he insists, however, there was much more to his career than that singular event – not least other great assaults on puritan literary sensibility, such as the publication of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer in 1961 and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch in 1962, and the distribution of the film I Am Curious (Yellow) in 1969. He can also point to his lifelong friendship with artists such as Samuel Beckett, Joan Mitchell and Kenzaburō Ōe, and the platform Grove provided for the leading names of modern drama, the upstarts of the beat generation, and such radical political works as The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Continue reading... Continue reading at 'The Guardian'

[ The Guardian | 2016-12-21 00:00:00 UTC ]

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