We are pleased to announce that the papers of Barney Rosset (1922-2012), maverick and iconoclast American publisher, have been processed and are now open for research.

The collection covers his personal and professional endeavors as a radical publisher, intellectual, and overall man of letters.  It consists of writings, letters, photographs, interviews, films, catalogs, publishing files related to both Grove Press and Evergreen Review, and extensive biographical information on Rosset. The finding aid for the collection is available here: http://findingaids.cul.columbia.edu/ead/nnc-rb/ldpd_7953908/summary.

Barney Rosset was the owner, publisher, and editor of Grove Press (from 1951 to 1986) and Evergreen Review.  Acquiring Grove in 1951 while he was still an undergraduate at the New School, Rosset turned the small New York publishing house into one of the most innovative and daring outlets of avant-garde literature, enjoying a heyday of national impact from 1959, when Rosset published the first unexpurgated edition of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and well into the 1980s. Through Rosset’s efforts, in 1964 the Supreme Court granted Grove the right to publish Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, which was a landmark case for free speech under the first amendment in the United States.

Under his supervision, Grove published many key figures of twentieth-century literature and intellectual history on both sides of the Atlantic and the Pacific, notably Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Henry Miller, Pablo Neruda, Octavio Paz, Albert Camus, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Egene Ionesco, Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Alex Haley’s Autobiography of Malcolm X, Jorge Luis Borges, Margerite Duras, Jean Genet, David Mamet, Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, John Rechy, Khushwant Singh, Will Self, Sherman Alexie, Kenzaburo Oe, Winterson, Yoshimoto.