When I first went to visit the Grove Press archives at Syracuse University over a decade ago I didn’t intend to write a history of the company. Rather, I was researching a book on literature and obscenity. At the time, very little had been written about the mid-size independent publishing house that had revolutionized the literary landscape of the postwar era. A few articles and book chapters on censorship, a handful of interviews, mostly with maverick owner Barney Rosset, and a pamphlet by S. E. Gontarski entitled Modernism, Censorship, and the Politics of Publishing: The Grove Press Legacy were all that I could find. The more time I spent in the archives the more I realized how much of the story remained to be told. Thus began a lengthy literary adventure that took me to archives across the country, as well as into the living rooms of surviving veterans of Rosset’s volatile time at the helm of the company. When the book was published in 2013 by Stanford University Press under the title Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde, I felt confident that I had produced the definitive history of one of the most important American publishers of the postwar era.
Since then, two books have come out that also tell this story: Barney Rosset’s long-awaited autobiography—Rosset: My Life in Publishing and How I Fought Censorship (OR Books, 2017)—and Michael Rosenthal’s biography of Rosset—Barney: Grove Press and Barney Rosset, America’s Maverick Publisher and His Battle Against Censorship (Arcade, 2017). As their titles clearly indicate, both books center on Barney as the moving force behind the company and the battle against censorship as his signal achievement. Barney Rosset was a fascinating man and both of these books provide interesting and informative versions of his highly eventful life. And there can be little doubt that his passionate embrace of the First Amendment was behind Grove’s successful campaign against censorship in the sixties. But publishing is a team sport and if Barney was captain and quarterback, he benefited from the skills and instincts of a number of colleagues to execute his plays and, not infrequently, balance out his errors in judgment. Furthermore, publishing books that offended some people and defied the prevailing obscenity standards of the day wasn’t the only thing that Grove did exceedingly well. The company pushed the envelope in a variety of other avant-garde and radical directions, which are the organizational focus of my book. Rebel Publisher tells this larger story of how a publishing house was able to survive and flourish under a political regime and economic system that it opposed.