Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset; America’s Maverick Publisher and His Battle against Censorship

Early in this biography of Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset (1922–2012), Rosenthal (Nicholas Miraculous: The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler) details the contents of a paper entitled “Henry Miller vs ‘Our Way of Life,’ ” written by Rosset as a freshman at Swarthmore after reading Tropic of Cancer. It’s the same paper Rosset quoted in court nearly two decades later in 1962 when he was accused of publishing the banned book solely to make money from smut. This was a remarkable moment in the biography of a man determined to end “Comstockery,” but it comes nearly 100 pages after the reader learns about the essay, in one of the many moments when Rosenthal seems stuck in minutiae. The book effectively describes Rosset’s successful legal battles against censorship, and Rosenthal illustrates his subject’s publishing philosophy with his decision to publish Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs to American audiences, and his lack of business acumen with his sale of the company’s Manhattan headquarters for pennies on the dollar. Rosenthal also delves into Rosset’s personal life and his passion for Victorian erotica, which helped sustain Grove, but the book works best when it focuses on 20th-century censorship. (Mar.)