Barney Rosset, maverick independent publisher and legendary founder of Grove Press, will receive the Association of American Publishers Curtis Benjamin Award for Creative Publishing.
Rosset can add the Benjamin Award to honors he has received from PEN, the NBCC and the Small Press Center for his efforts to challenge American censorship in the 1950s and 1960s.
Rosset founded Grove Press in 1951. He went on to publish such works as D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer at a time when even such acknowledged literary classics were legally banned in the U.S. In 1959, with virtually no support from fellow publishers, he won the right to publish Lady Chatterley's Lover after an extended legal battle that nearly bankrupted Grove Press. Following that victory, he mounted a series of lawsuits in defense of booksellers charged as pornographers for selling the Grove edition of Miller's Tropic of Cancer. In 1962, he won the right to publish William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch after yet another round of expensive litigation.
After selling Grove Press in 1986, he founded Blue Moon Books. He continues to publish books under his Foxrock Books imprint. Rosset also founded the Evergreen Review in 1957 and has published such authors as Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles, Jean Genet, Malcolm X and Jorge Luis Borges.
