Barney Rosset
American publisher; founder and proprietor of Grove Press (acquired 1951) and founding editor of Evergreen Review (1957–1973). Through Grove and the Evergreen Review, Rosset published or championed Mailer (Truth and Being and three other Mailer Evergreen Review appearances), William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1962), Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, and Henry Miller — and led the obscenity-trial defenses of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1959) and Tropic of Cancer (1961-1964) that legalized these books in the United States. Mailer testifies on Rosset's behalf in the 1965 Boston Naked Lunch trial.
Barney Rosset acquired the small Grove Press of New York in 1951 and turned it, across the 1950s and 1960s, into one of the most consequential American publishers of postwar literary, political, and counterculture writing. He founded Evergreen Review in 1957 as Grove’s quarterly literary journal; he led the Grove defenses against U.S. obscenity prosecutions of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (cleared 1959) and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer (cleared by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1964); he published William Burroughs‘s Naked Lunch in its first American edition in 1962; he was the primary American publisher of Jean Genet, Samuel Beckett, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara.
For Mailer, Rosset’s Evergreen Review was the venue for the first appearance of “Truth and Being; Nothing and Time” (62.13, September–October 1962) and for “The Boston Trial of Naked Lunch” (65.5, June 1965) — Mailer’s witness testimony in the Boston obscenity case for Naked Lunch in early 1965 (per the published Days, p. 355). Rosset’s later anthology Evergreen Review Reader: A Ten Year Anthology, 1962–1967 (Grove, 1980) reprints Mailer’s “Truth and Being.”
Stub; to be expanded as the Rosset–Mailer relationship recurs through later years.
Related pages
- Evergreen Review | Truth and Being; Nothing and Time: A Broken Fragment from a Long Novel | William S. Burroughs
- In and Out of Books (14 March 1965) (65.5)