A sad announcement this week with the death of Barney Rosset, founder of Grove Press. Rosset was a publishing daredevil, printing obscene material alongside the work of Genet, Ionesco, Ginsberg, and, of course, Beckett. Never averse to a lawsuit, it is through his actions that we can read the less-loved, overfed sibling of
Waiting for Godot, Eleutheria. More than the local row that this can sometimes appear to those working on Beckett, this was a single strand of a sustained campaign that saw censorship law in the United States tempered, and writers of significance reach their audiences.
Douglas Martin writes in the
New York Times:
Mr. Rosset liked to tell the story of how he had responded to a Chicago prosecutor who suggested that he had published “Tropic of Cancer” only for the money. He whipped out a paper he had written on Miller while at Swarthmore (the grade was a B-) to demonstrate his long interest in that author. He won the case.
“I remember leaving the courtroom and somehow getting lost going home,” he told The Times in 2008. “It was snowing. But I was so happy that I thought, ‘If I fall down and die right here, it will be fine.’ ”
You can read the rest of the obituary
here.
