Henry Miller
Admittedly, I didn’t know who Barney Rosset was until I’d heard he died earlier this week. But after reading his obituary in the Los Angeles Times on Tuesday, I wish I could have had the chance to thank him while he was alive for his courage to publish writers deemed too far outside the “mainstream” and his unwavering defense of free speech.
Mr. Rosset was the founder of Grove Press, which not only introduced American readers to Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Eugene Ionesco, but also championed the writings of William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Marguerite Duras, and Malcolm X.
Rosset also successfully fought against American censorship laws to publish pure, unedited versions of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. The former was found not to violate U.S. anti-pornography laws, while the latter was judged to not be obscene because it had “redeeming social value.” Both books went on to become classics.
While certainly pleased with the ultimate outcome of his court challenges, Rosset was not a fan of the “socially redeeming” argument, and I admire and wholeheartedly agree with what he told NPR back in 1991: “My grounds has always been that anything should be–can be–published. I think that if you have freedom of speech, you have freedom of speech.”
Thank you Barney Rosset for standing behind your principles and fighting for literature that not only provokes and protests against the status quo, but also enriches our lives.
