Banned in Boston

Charles McGrath has a piece today on Barney Rosset, who died this week at age 89, and who was responsible for the fact that no one except your pruny great-aunt Minnie uses the word "smutty" anymore.   In 1951, Rosset bought Grove Press; the house had exactly three titles.  He went to Paris to sign Samuel Beckett and bought Waiting for Godot for a hundred bucks.  He published the Beats, a gaggle of Nobel winners (before they were winners) from Pinter to Paz.  He published the Autobiography of Malcolm X, largely because other publishers had turned it down.  He went to court to fight obscenity charges and won three times:  for Lady Chatterly's Lover in 1959, Tropic of Cancer in 1961 and Naked Lunch, finally un-banned in Boston in 1966.   

"...when genuine passion
moves you, say what you've
got to say, and say it hot."
   --D. H. Lawrence

His personal heroes were John Dillinger and Henry Miller.  He owned massive swaths of land in the East Hamptons but sold them to keep Grove Press afloat, which struggled under the weight of legal bills.  When he sold the company to oil heiress Ann Getty in the 80s he thought he was getting an infusion of capital but instead he got the boot, and from the looks of the walkup flat that is his home in the 2008 bio-doc, Obscene, he died many miles from the lap of luxury to which he was born.

Let us hope today he is not resting in peace but is instead cooking up mischief in some parallel universe.

Here is a link to McGrath's piece, which also links to a 2008 interview.  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/24/books/barney-rosset-loved-breaking-publishings-rules.html?hpw