The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing

Rosset is now 86. Small and slight, with thinning, cropped white hair, bright blue eyes behind black-framed glasses, and wearing jeans held up with navy blue suspenders, he seems surprisingly boyish. As he slouches on a couch below a psychedelically painted wooden carving of a dragon, clutching a cup of Coke (with rum) in his right hand, it's easy to imagine him as a 12-year-old kid. That was about the age that Rosset began his career as a troublemaker. Born in Chicago in 1922, the only son of a wealthy banker, he was an unlikely but fervent radical. In school he and his best friend, Haskell Wexler (now an Academy Award-winning cinematographer), produced a paper called "Anti-Everything" and joined the American Student Union. "We mainly worked together on trying to marry the same girl," Rosset said. She chose Wexler.

Around this time, when Rosset was at Swarthmore, he came across "Tropic of Cancer" by Henry Miller, which had been banned in the United States for its graphic descriptions of sex and prostitution. (The copy Rosset bought, at the Gotham Book Mart in New York, was smuggled in.) To Rosset, though, "Tropic" was about the dissolution of a romance. The narrator "felt he wanted to die," Rosset says. "And then, being the selfish person he was, he pulled himself out of it, and said, 'I'll go on'." Inspired, Rosset jumped on a bus and headed for Mexico, chasing a bohemian lifestyle. He got as far as Florida. These were itinerant years for Rosset. He bounced from college to college and from the infantry to the Army's Signal Corps in China during the war. He produced a movie in New York and then followed another girlfriend, Joan Mitchell, to Paris, where they married. Back in New York, Mitchell,a stormy and beautiful painter, introduced him into the Greenwich Village scene. The marriage quickly fell apart—"Joan hated everyone," Rosset said admiringly—but one day a friend of hers told Rosset that a small press on Grove Street was for sale. Rosset bought it for $3,000.

Rosset cut an unlikely figure for a publisher. He was a 29-year-old senior at the New School (his fourth college), and his favorite book was banned. In those days publishing was considered a "gentleman's profession"—ascots, discretion, dynasty, martinis. Rosset wasn't interested in any of that (except the martinis). He wanted to disrupt the existing order, and he wanted to publish "Tropic of Cancer." But as late as 1953, a high court affirmed a customs ban on the book, so, for once, Rosset knew he'd have to be patient. He began publishing out-of-print books while looking for something new. Before long, he'd found Samuel Beckett.

In their early correspondence, Beckett mentioned a concern to Rosset: there were, in his works, "certain obscenities of form which may not have struck you in French as they will in English," which he thought could cause legal problems. Rosset replied, "Sometimes things like that have a way of solving themselves." He had no interest in letting challenges come to him. "Barney chose these battles," said Peter Mayer, who ran Avon and Penguin during Rosset's time at Grove. "There was nothing inadvertent in what came down." In its first year after Grove's publication, "Waiting for Godot" sold fewer than 400 copies. It has now sold some 2 million.

Censorship had been a feature of American society since the Puritans landed at Plymouth, but it wasn't until the late 19th century that a postal inspector named Anthony Comstock and his Society for the Suppression of Vice successfully lobbied to restrict what could be sent through the mail. "Serious" literature wasn't exempt, and for the most part publishers didn't test the laws. There were exceptions. Most notably, in 1933 Random House sued to import James Joyce's banned "Ulysses." Federal courts ruled in its favor, finding that though individual passages were obscene, the book as a whole lacked "the leer of the sensualist." "Tropic of Cancer" was the screed of a sensualist, though, and so Rosset knew he'd have to find a way to stretch the law.

In 1954, Rosset received a letter from a Berkeley professor, Mark Schorer, urging him to publish a banned, unexpurgated version of "Lady Chatterley's Lover." (Knopf had already published a censored version.) Rosset didn't love the book, but he thought it could be a steppingstone to "Tropic." He moved strategically—publishing an essay by Schorer in the first issue of his new Evergreen Review, and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," banned in San Francisco, in the second. Then Rosset published "Lady Chatterley's Lover." In 1960, a federal court of appeals overturned the ban of the book on the ground that the centrality of vivid depictions of sex did not itself create obscenity.