1. Barney Rosset, interview with author, 5 October 2009. Though no book has been written about Grove, S. E. Gontarski’s published lecture, Modernism, Censorship, and the Politics of Publishing: The Grove Press Legacy (Chapel Hill, NC: Hanes Foundation, 2000), provides an excellent, if abbreviated, account that gives due credit to Rosset’s background. A somewhat different, if equally informative, version can be found in his introduction to The Grove Press Reader: 1951–2000 (New York: Grove Press, 2001). Gontarski also coedited and wrote the introduction for the fall 1990 edition of the Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted to Grove, which includes interviews with Rosset as well as a selection of editors and authors who worked with him (“Dionysus in Publishing: Barney Rosset, Grove Press, and the Making of a Countercanon,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10, no. 3 [Fall 1990]: 7–18). A number of articles profiled Rosset and Grove in the 1950s and 1960s, providing useful snapshots of both the company and the times: see “Advance Guard Advance,” Newsweek, 3 March 1953, 94–98; Fred Warshofsky, “Grove Press: Little Giant of Publishing,” Paperback Trade News, March 1962, 10–17; Gerald Jonas, “The Story of Grove,” New York Times Sunday Magazine, 21 January 1968, 28–29, 47–48, 52–53, 59; John Updike, “Grove Is My Press, and Avant My Garde,” New Yorker, 4 November 1967, 223–38; Albert Goldman, “The Old Smut Peddler,” Life, 29 August 1969, 49–53; and Martin Mayer, “How to Publish ‘Dirty Books’ for Fun and Profit,” Saturday Evening Post, 29 January 1969, 33–35, 72–75. John Gruen has an informative section on the company in its early years (The Party’s Over Now: Reminiscences of the Fifties—New York’s Artists, Writers, Musicians, and Their Friends [Wainscot, NY: Pushcart Press, 1989], 40–49); and Al Silverman has a useful chapter on Grove (The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Book Publishers, Their Editors and Authors [New York: St. Martin’s, 2008], 41–68). Also useful is Richard Seaver’s posthumously published memoir, The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). In addition, a film has been made about Grove: Neil Ortenberg and Daniel O’Connor, Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press (Arthouse Films, 2008). There is one dissertation devoted to Grove’s censorship battles: Brian McCord, An American Avant-Garde: Grove Press, 1951–1986 (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2002). Also useful is the chapter on Grove in Henry S. Somerville’s doctoral dissertation, Commerce and Culture in the Career of the Permanent Innovative Press: New Directions, Grove Press, and George Braziller Inc. (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI, 2009). Finally, Rosset conducted a series of interviews with Jules Geller with the intention of coauthoring a book to be called “Magnificent Maverick.” The transcriptions from these interviews are housed in the Barney Rosset Papers recently acquired by Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. They will hereafter be referred to as Rosset interview transcript.
2. Check of Records: Francis W. Parker High School, February 1944, BRP. In a startling sign of the casual anti-Semitism of the day, Smith also added, “In spite of the depth of his emotions and the fact that he has Jewish blood, he never obtrudes himself or his ways on his comrades and has none of the self-centered preoccupation with his own viewpoints that sometimes marks boys of Jewish extraction, who, like himself, have no physical characteristics to distinguish them.”
3. Barney Rosset, “Henry Miller vs. ‘Our Way of Life,’” Nexus: International Henry Miller Journal 2, no. 1 (2005): 1.
4. Ibid., 2, 4.
5. Ibid., 6.
6. Loren Glass, “Redeeming Value: Obscenity and Anglo-American Modernism,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 341–61.
7. Steven Brower and John Gall, “Grove Press at the Vanguard,” Print, March/April 1994, 61.
8. Barney Rosset Jr. to Barney Rosset Sr., 9 April 1951, BRP.
9. Rosset interview transcript, 44, BRP.
10. Ibid., 7.
11. Herbert Gold, “A Friend to Writers, Whatever the Cost,” San Francisco Chronicle, 3 April 2012, F1.
12. “Military Intelligence?,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 60.
13. In truth, US Army Intelligence had considerable difficulty characterizing Rosset. In one document he obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, his characteristics are listed as “boyish, unusual resources, keen and habitual analyst, impetuous, courageous, popular, melancholy, intelligent, well poised, well mannered, loyal, mild and quiet, retiring, sober, levelheaded, liberal, idealist.” FOIA request, file no. LA-5880: IX-o/2-17756, BRP.
14. Fred Jordan, interview with author, 23 October 2010.
15. Jeanette Seaver, interview with author, 21 October 2010.
16. Herman Graf, interview with author, 25 October 2010.
17. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich, eds., Max Weber: Economy and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1113.
18. Warshofsky, “Grove Press,” 1.
19. Gontarski, “Modernism, Censorship,” 29.
20. James English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 13.
21. John Sutherland, in his contribution to an issue of Critical Inquiry devoted to the sociology of literature, asserts that the history of publishing is a “hole at the centre of literary sociology” and cites Robert Darnton, along with McGann and D. F. McKenzie, as scholars endeavoring to fill that hole (“Publishing History: A Hole at the Centre of Literary Sociology,” Critical Inquiry 14, no. 3 [Spring 1988]: 574). Sutherland deprecates case studies as inherently unrepresentative and gloomily prophesies that “most future publishing history will be drudging, unexciting labour” (579), but I argue that he overstates his claims. In the case of the United States, John Tebbel’s magisterial four-volume History of Book Publishing in the United States (New York: Bowker, 1972–81) has established itself as an authoritative reference work, providing the more quantitative and statistical overviews within which case histories like my own can comfortably position themselves without having to claim representativeness. Indeed, as this study reveals, Grove was in many ways the exception to most rules of the publishing business, which is part of what makes it so interesting.
22. Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?,” in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (New York: Routledge, 2002), 11.
23. “The Cult of the Colophon,” Publishers Weekly, 6 August 1927, 384. Most modernist theories of the brand focus on industries whose products are uniform. Thus, W. F. Haug, in his landmark Critique of Commodity Aesthetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), offers Chiquita bananas and Melitta coffee filters as examples of how “the trans-regional brand-names of large companies impose themselves on the public’s experience and virtually assume the status of natural phenomena” (25). Naomi Klein, whose highly influential study, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2000), famously argues that, in our contemporary corporate world, “the product always takes a back seat to the real product, the brand” (21), still illustrates much of her argument with companies that mass-produce uniform commodities such as shoes and coffee. While Grove’s acquisition of a countercultural constituency anticipates the “lifestyle marketing” increasingly characteristic of contemporary culture’s brand-saturated public culture, it is also worth emphasizing that its effort to establish a colophonic identity recognizable by a discrete group of readers also hearkens back to the modernist publishing industry. For a sample of recent scholarship on branding and promotional culture, see Melissa Aronczyk and Devon Powers, eds., Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives on Promotional Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2010).
24. “Cult of the Colophon,” 384.
25. Ibid., 389.
26. Jason Epstein, “A Criticism of Commercial Publishing,” Daedalus 92, no. 1 (Winter 1963): 64.
27. Pascale Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, trans. M. B. DeBevoise (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 87. Important engagements with Casanova’s book include Christopher Prendergrast, “Negotiating World Literature,” New Left Review 8 (March–April 2001): 100–121; Alexander Beecroft, “World Literature without a Hyphen: Towards a Typology of Literary Systems,” New Left Review 54 (November–December 2008): 87–100; Jerome McGann, “Pseudodoxia Academica,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 645–56; Frances Ferguson, “Planetary Literary History: The Place of the Text,” New Literary History 39, no. 3 (Summer 2008): 657–84; and Aamir R. Mufti, “Orientalism and the Institution of World Literatures,” Critical Inquiry 36, no. 3 (Spring 2010): 458–93.
28. Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art: Abstract Expressionism, Freedom, and the Cold War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5.
29. Ibid., 143.
30. The two most significant studies of the avant-garde are Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); and Peter Burger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984). Poggioli’s theory is the more general one, asserting that “the avant-garde is a law of nature for contemporary and modern art” (225), while Burger’s Marxist approach is far more precise, seeing avant-garde movements as historically specific efforts “to negate those determinations that are essential in autonomous art” (53). Poggioli’s more catholic definition is far closer to that endorsed by the editors at Grove; indeed, he concludes by offering Grove authors Alain Robbe-Grillet, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco as contemporary avatars of the avant-garde.
31. Barney Rosset, interview with author, 23 October 2010.
32. Tebbel, History of Book Publishing, vol. 4, The Great Change, 1940–1980, 105–282. See also Charles Madison, Book Publishing in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1966), 403–557; André Schiffrin, The Business of Books (New York: Verso, 2000); and John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 100–187.
33. See Tebbel, History of Book Publishing, vol. 3, The Golden Age between Two Wars, 1920–1940. See also Jay Satterfield, “The World’s Best Books”: Taste, Culture, and the Modern Library (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002); and Catherine Turner, Marketing Modernism between the Two World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003).
34. Kenneth Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1980), xii. See also Thomas L. Bonn, Heavy Traffic and High Culture: New American Library as Literary Gatekeeper in the Paperback Revolution (New York: Meridian, 1989); Tebbel, History of Book Publishing, 4:347–412; and Madison, Book Publishing in America, 547–57.
35. For Epstein’s account of his career and his relationship with Rosset, see Jason Epstein, Book Business: Publishing Past Present and Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
36. David Dempsey, “Quality (Culture) Plus Quantity (Readers) Pays Off,” New York Times, 3 June 1956, 18.
37. Samuel Beckett to Barney Rosset, 6 April 1957, BRP. Extract from Samuel Beckett’s letter to Barney Rosset of 6 April 1957 reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of Samuel Beckett c/o Rosica Colin Limited, London. © The Estate of Samuel Beckett. Beckett’s relationships with his publishers, and with the literary marketplace more generally, have been the subject of two recent books: Stephen John Dilks, Samuel Beckett and the Literary Marketplace (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2011); and Mark Nixon, ed., Publishing Samuel Beckett (London: British Library, 2011).
38. Barney Rosset, “Remembering Samuel Beckett,” Conjunctions 53 (Fall 2009): 10.
39. Barney Rosset to Samuel Beckett, 18 June 1953, quoted in Rosset, “Remembering Samuel Beckett,” 10.
40. Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 25.
41. For Seaver’s account of his initial meeting with Rosset, see ibid., 200–207.
42. Richard Seaver, “Samuel Beckett: An Introduction,” Merlin 2 (Autumn 1952): 73.
43. Alexander Trocchi, “Editorial,” Merlin 2 (Autumn 1952): 55.
44. Richard Seaver, “Introduction,” in Alexander Trocchi, Cain’s Book (New York: Grove Press, 1992), xii.
45. Richard Seaver, “Revolt and Revolution,” Merlin 3 (Winter 1952–53): 172, 184.
46. For a history of the Olympia Press, see John de St. Jorre, Venus Bound: The Erotic Voyage of the Olympia Press and Its Writers (New York: Random House, 1994); and James Campbell, Exiled in Paris: Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett and Others on the Left Bank (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 36–80, 122–80. See also Maurice Girodias’s rambling autobiography, The Frog Prince (New York: Crown, 1980); and Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 179–94.
47. Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 286.
48. On the complex relations between modernism and obscenity, see Adam Parkes, Modernism and the Theater of Censorship (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Allison Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture, and the Aesthetics of Obscenity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Florence Dore, The Novel and the Obscene: Sexual Subjects in American Modernism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005). The prominent role of Jews in this history is frequently noted but rarely analyzed. Two exceptions to this significant oversight are Jay Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920–1940 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); and Josh Lambert, Unclean Lips: Obscenity, Jews, and American Literature (New York: New York University Press, forthcoming).
49. Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 249.
50. S. E. Gontarski, “Don Allen: Grove’s First Editor,” Review of Contemporary Fiction 10, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 133.
51. Donald Allen to Barney Rosset, 10 July 1956, GPR.
52. Kenneth Rexroth, “San Francisco Letter,” Evergreen Review 1, no. 2 (1957): 11–12.
53. Donald Allen to Barney Rosset, 14 July 1957, GPR.
54. “Cody’s Salutes Evergreen Books,” Daily Californian, 14 April 1958, 9.
55. Barney Rosset, interview with author, 5 October 2009.
56. Evergreen Review news release, n.d., 1, GPR.
57. On the rise of paperback bookstores in the postwar United States, see Laura Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 42–44.
58. Grove Press spring 1958 catalog, 1, GPR.
59. “An Experiment in Book Publishing That Worked!,” display ad, New York Times Book Review, 19 October 1958, 29.
60. Raymond Walters Jr., “Market Report: Trends of a Year,” New York Times, 14 January 1962, 22.
61. Barney Rosset, “Paperbacks: Does Good Taste Cost More?,” speech presented at “The Popular Arts in American Culture,” University of California, Berkeley extension, Summer 1962, 2–3, GPR.
62. Rosset interview transcript, 6.
63. Gontarski, “Don Allen,” 133.
64. Jacques Barzun, “Three Men and a Book,” foreword to A Company of Readers: Uncollected Writings of W. H. Auden, Jacques Barzun, and Lionel Trilling from the Readers’ Subscription and Mid-Century Book Clubs, ed. Arthur Krystal (New York: Free Press, 2001), x.
65. Marshall Best, “In Books, They Call It Revolution,” Daedalus (Winter 1963): 36. Tebbel affirms that “book clubs by 1960 were an important part of the publishing scene,” adding that, in 1958, “90 percent of adult books distributed in America had gone through book clubs or paperback outlets” (History of Book Publishing, 4:363–64).
66. Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University (New York: Norton, 2010), 64.
67. Ibid., 66.
68. Ibid., 73.
69. Digest of Education Statistics, “Earned Degrees in English Language and Literature,” http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d96/d96t281.asp.
70. Digest of Education Statistics, “Earned Degrees in Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures,” http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d96/d96t282.asp.
71. Stephen Schryer, Fantasies of the New Class: Ideologies of Professionalism in Post–World War II American Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 1–28.
72. Davis, Two-Bit Culture, 2–3.
73. Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (New York: Verso, 2002), 164, 209.
74. Ibid., 210.
75. Philip Beidler, Scriptures for a Generation: What We Were Reading in the ’60s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1994), 7. My main reservation about Beidler’s fascinating study is that he doesn’t include enough Grove Press titles.
76. “Your Black Cat ‘Kit,’” GPR.
77. Warshofsky, “Grove Press,” 13.
1. Thornton Wilder, “Goethe and World Literature,” Perspectives USA (1952): 134.
2. David Damrosch, What Is World Literature? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 5.
3. Ibid., 4.
4. Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 47.
5. Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 56.
6. UNESCO, Basic Texts (Paris: UNESCO, 2004), 7.
7. Luther Evans, The United States and UNESCO (Dobbs Ferry, NY: Oceana Publications, 1971), 1.
8. William Preston, Edward Herman, and Herbert Schiller, Hope and Folly: The United States and UNESCO, 1945–1985 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 70.
9. Robert Escarpit, The Book Revolution (London: Harrap, 1966), 9.
10. Christopher E. M. Pearson, Designing UNESCO: Art, Architecture and International Politics at Mid-Century (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), xv.
11. Ibid., xiv.
12. Evans, United States and UNESCO, 39.
13. Ibid., 115.
14. Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (New York: Routledge, 2008), 177.
15. Paul Blackburn, “The International Word,” Nation, 21 April 1962, 357. Grove, of course, was not alone in this postwar “sack of world literature,” arguably inaugurated by New American Library’s important series New World Writing, first issued in 1952. Nevertheless, it rapidly established a reputation for providing the most avant-garde examples of international writing.
16. Ibid., 358.
17. “Evergreen Books for World Literature and Humanities,” n.d., GPR.
18. News release, “Khushwant Singh Wins Grove Press India Contest Award,” 15 March 1955, GPR.
19. The judges were Wallace Fowlie, Alfred Kazin, Mulk Raj Anand, and V. K. Krishna Menon. Rosset later discovered, from documents obtained through the FOIA, that the political sympathies of the Indian judges brought the prize to the attention of the Department of State.
20. Khushwant Singh to Barney Rosset, 3 February 1955, GPR.
21. Barney Rosset to Luther Evans, 8 February 1955, GPR.
22. Singh to Rosset.
23. Barney Rosset to Richard Howard, 8 January 1959, GPR.
24. Richard Howard to Barney Rosset, 29 January 1959, GPR.
25. Ibid., n.d., GPR.
26. Barney Rosset to Samuel Beckett, 31 August 1955, GPR.
27. Leo Bersani, “No Exit for Beckett,” Partisan Review 33 (1966): 262.
28. Martin Esslin, “Introduction,” in Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Martin Esslin (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965), 4.
29. Bersani, “No Exit for Beckett,” 262.
30. Esslin, “Introduction,” 10–12.
31. Karl Ragnar Gierow, presentation speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature, 1969, http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1969/press.html.
32. Samuel Beckett, “Three Dialogues on Painting,” in Esslin, Samuel Beckett, 21. Grove published the dialogues in 1958 with lavish illustrations, including twelve color plates, under the title Bram Van Velde in its short-lived Evergreen Gallery series.
33. Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 205.
34. Barney Rosset to Samuel Beckett, 18 June 1953, GPR.
35. Samuel Beckett to Barney Rosset, 25 June 1953, in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, vol. 2, 1941–1956, ed. George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn, and Lois More Overbeck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 385.
36. Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 252.
37. Paul Auster, “Editor’s Note,” in Samuel Beckett: The Grove Centenary Edition (New York: Grove Press, 2006), 1:viii.
38. Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 8.
39. Georges Borchardt to Judith Schmidt, 23 April 1957, GPR.
40. Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, 24.
41. Roland Barthes, “Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet,” in Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 13.
42. “Robbe-Grillet,” Talk of the Town, New Yorker, 9 January 1965, 24.
43. Barney Rosset to Georges Borchardt, 17 April 1964, GPR.
44. Alex Szogyi, “The Art of the Philosopher and Thief,” New York Times, 29 September 1963, 303.
45. Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane Lewin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 269.
46. Bernard Frechtman to Barney Rosset, 14 January 1953, GPR.
47. Ibid., 13 November 1956, GPR.
48. Donald Allen to Donald Keene, 9 February 1953, GPR.
49. Donald Keene to Donald Allen, 17 February 1953, GPR.
50. Quoted in Donald Keene to Donald Allen, 11 March 1953, GPR.
51. Donald Keene, Chronicles of My Life: An American in the Heart of Japan (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 31.
52. Donald Keene, ed., Modern Japanese Literature (New York: Grove Press, 1956), 8.
53. Ibid., 13.
54. Ibid., 28.
56. Glen Baxter, Review of Anthology of Japanese Literature, ed. Donald Keene, Literature East and West: The Newsletter of the Conference on Oriental-Western Literary Relations of the Modern Language Association of America 3, no. 4 (Spring 1957): 60.
57. J. L. Cranmer-Byng, “The Wisdom of the East Series,” promotional pamphlet, GPR.
58. D. T. Suzuki, “Aspects of Japanese Culture,” Evergreen Review 2, no. 6 (Autumn 1958): 40.
59. Ibid., 41.
60. Ibid.
61. Frank O’Hara, “Franz Kline Talking,” Evergreen Review 2, no. 6 (Autumn 1958): 58.
62. Ibid., 61.
63. Gary Snyder, “Cold Mountain Poems,” Evergreen Review 2, no. 6 (Autumn 1958): 69.
64. Ibid.
65. “Kenzaburo Oe,” Publishers Weekly, 3 June 1968, 55.
66. Kenzaburo Oe, A Personal Matter (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 2–3.
67. Kenzaburo Oe, answers to Grove Press publicity questionnaire, GPR.
68. Oe, A Personal Matter, 214.
69. Kenzaburo Oe, “How I Am a Japanese Writer,” n.d., 2, GPR.
70. Barney Rosset to Amos Tutuola, 13 June 1953, GPR.
71. Selden Rodman, “Tutuola’s World,” New York Times Book Review, 20 September 1953, 5.
72. Janheinz Jahn, Muntu: The New African Culture, trans. Marjorie Grene (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 11.
73. Ibid., 154.
74. Ibid., 25.
75. Janheinz Jahn, Neo-African Literature: A History of Black Writing, trans. Oliver Coburn and Ursula Lehrburger (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 16.
76. Octavio Paz, The Labyrinth of Solitude, trans. Lysander Kemp (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 194. Both titles sold modestly well in Evergreen editions, with Muntu selling around fifteen thousand copies and Labyrinth of Solitude almost thirty thousand.
77. Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, 184.
78. Octavio Paz to Barney Rosset, 9 January 1961, GPR. The spelling is Octavio Paz’s.
79. Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude, 172–73.
80. José David Saldivar, The Dialectics of Our America: Genealogy, Cultural Critique, and Literary History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 20.
81. Press release, Formentor Prize, n.d., DAP.
82. Ibid.
83. Barney Rosset to Alfred Kazin, 16 December 1960, DAP.
84. Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 313.
85. Quoted in Edmund Wilson, “The Vogue of the Marquis de Sade,” New Yorker, 18 October 1952), 163. According to Seaver, it had an analogous effect on Grove’s global reputation; as he says, the meeting “had hoisted us overnight to a level of international importance” (Tender Hour of Twilight, 314).
86. Anthony Kerrigan, translator’s introduction to Ficciones, by Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 9.
87. Ibid.
88. Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths, ed. Donald Yates and James Irby (New York: New Directions, 1964), 180, 184.
89. Borges, Ficciones, 15.
90. Jason Wilson, Jorge Luis Borges (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 13.
91. Ben Belitt to Donald Allen, 13 May 1952, GPR.
92. Ben Belitt, Adam’s Dream: A Preface to Translation (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 23.
93. Ibid., 79.
94. Emir Rodríguez Monegal, ed., The Borzoi Anthology of Latin American Literature, vol. 2, The Twentieth Century—from Borges and Paz to Guimaraes Rosa and Donoso (New York: Knopf, 1977), 611.
95. Ben Belitt, translator’s foreword to Selected Poems of Pablo Neruda (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 32–33.
96. Belitt, Adam’s Dream, 10.
97. The 1966 PEN conference, the first in the United States in forty years, was also attended by Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa and was itself a benchmark in the cultural and diplomatic relations between the United States and Latin America. According to Deborah Cohn, “The conference serves as both a model and a touchstone for hemispheric American studies” (“PEN and the Sword: U.S.–Latin American Cultural Diplomacy and the 1966 PEN Club Congress,” Hemispheric American Studies [2008]: 220).
98. Belitt, Adam’s Dream, 48.
99. Ben Belitt to Barney Rosset, 6 April 1955, GPR.
100. “Contributors,” in “The Eye of Mexico,” special issue, Evergreen Review 2, no. 8 (Winter 1959): 8.
101. James Schuyler, review of Anthology of Mexican Poetry, ed. Octavio Paz, in “The Eye of Mexico,” 221.
102. Ibid.
103. S. E. Gontarski, ed., On Beckett: Essays and Criticism (New York: Grove Press, 1986), 4.
104. Octavio Paz, “Todos Santos, Dia de Muertas,” in “The Eye of Mexico,” 37.
105. Donald Allen, ed., preface to The New American Poetry (New York: Grove Press, 1960), xi.
106. Ibid., xii.
107. Rosset interview transcript, 63.
1. For an excellent performance history of this play, see David Bradby, Beckett: Waiting for Godot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
2. W. B. Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 15.
3. Ibid., 8.
4. Antonin Artaud, The Theater and Its Double, trans. Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), 73, 76.
5. Ibid., 60.
6. James Harding, ed., Contours of the Theatrical Avant-Garde: Performance and Textuality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 4.
7. Julie Stone Peters, Theatre of the Book 1480–1880: Print, Text and Performance in Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 311.
8. Wallace Fowlie, Dionysus in Paris: A Guide to Contemporary French Theater (New York: Meridian Books, 1960), 18.
9. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (New York: Vintage, 1961), 403.
10. Barney Rosset to Samuel Beckett, 18 June 1953, GPR.
11. Barney Rosset to Alexander Trocchi, 18 June 1953, GPR.
12. Barney Rosset to Jerome Lindon, 11 November 1953, GPR.
13. John Lahr, “The Fall and Rise of Beckett’s Bum: Bert Lahr in Godot,” Evergreen Review 13, no. 70 (September 1969): 30.
14. Barney Rosset to Samuel Beckett, 6 January 1956, GPR.
15. Samuel Beckett to Barney Rosset, 2 February 1956, in Craig et al., Letters of Samuel Beckett, 602.
16. Michael Myerberg to Samuel Beckett, 8 June 1956, GPR.
17. Barney Rosset to Dramatists Play Service, 1 November 1956, GPR.
18. Sommerville, Commerce and Culture, 294.
19. Samuel Beckett to Barney and Loly Rosset, 14 December 1953, in Craig et al., Letters of Samuel Beckett, 431.
20. “Read It before You See It,” display ad, New York Times, 4 February 1958.
21. Vivien Mercier, “How to Read Endgame,” Readers’ Subscription catalog, GPR. See also Jack Frisch, “Endgame: A Play as Poem,” Drama Survey 3 (Fall 1963): 257–63.
22. Judith Schmidt, boilerplate letter (Samuel Beckett), GPR.
23. Jules Geller to Donald Allen, 10 October 1967, DAP.
24. Ruby Cohn, ed., Casebook on “Waiting for Godot” (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 7.
25. Barney Rosset to Claude Gallimard, 19 May 1958, GPR.
26. Ibid., 25 May 1962, GPR.
27. Richard Coe, Eugene Ionesco (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 43.
28. Grove promotional flyer, The Bald Soprano, n.d., GPR.
29. Grove press release, The Bald Soprano, n.d., GPR.
30. Fred Jordan to Marshall McLuhan, 10 February 1967, GPR.
31. “Four Plays,” display ad, New York Times, 21 January 1958, 27.
32. Eugène Ionesco, Notes and Counternotes, trans. Donald Watson (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 9.
33. Ibid., 210.
34. Quoted in Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1993), 349.
35. Bernard Frechtman to Barney Rosset, 3 March 1952, GPR.
36. Barney Rosset to Bernard Frechtman, 11 July 1952, GPR.
37. Jean-Paul Sartre, Introduction to The Maids (New York: Grove Press, 1954), 17.
38. Judith Schmidt, boilerplate letter (Jean Genet), 15 January 1959, GPR.
39. Ibid., 19 January 1960, GPR.
40. Sartre, Introduction to The Maids, 18.
41. Barney Rosset to Bernard Frechtman, 25 November 1959, GPR.
42. Bernard Frechtman to Barney Rosset, 27 November 1959, GPR.
43. Richard Seaver to Bernard Frechtman, 2 December 1959, GPR.
44. Jean Genet, The Blacks, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 18.
45. Ibid., 35.
46. Norman Mailer, The Presidential Papers (New York: Bantam Books, 1964), 202.
47. Lorraine Hansberry, “Genet, Mailer, and the New Paternalism,” Village Voice, 1 June 1961, 12.
48. Ibid., 15.
49. Genet, The Blacks, 4.
50. Jerry Tallmer, “Theater: The Blacks,” Village Voice, 11 May 1961, 11.
51. Ibid., 12.
52. Ibid.
53. Harold Pinter, “Writing for the Theatre,” introduction to Complete Works: Volume 1 (New York: Grove Press, 1976), 9.
54. Ibid., 9.
55. Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama, 80.
56. Esslin, Theatre of the Absurd, 261.
57. Martin Esslin, The Peopled Wound: The Work of Harold Pinter (New York: Anchor Books, 1970), vii.
58. Pinter, “Writing for the Theatre,” 10.
59. Varun Begley, Harold Pinter and the Twilight of Modernism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 6.
60. Harold Pinter, The Birthday Party & The Room (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 9.
61. Ibid., 104–105.
62. Kenneth Tynan, preface to The Connection, by Jack Gelber (New York: Grove Press, 1960), 8.
63. Donald Allen to Barney Rosset, 2 June 1958, GPR.
64. “Seven Plays,” display ad, New York Times Book Review, 2 April 1961, 19.
65. Eric Bentley, ed., introduction to Seven Plays by Bertolt Brecht (New York: Grove Press, 1961), xxxii.
66. Esslin, Brecht: The Man and His Work, 103.
67. Bentley, introduction to Seven Plays, xxxii.
68. Ibid., xiii.
69. Ibid., xxxiii.
70. Bentley, acknowledgments to Seven Plays, vii.
71. Grove published the following Brecht plays as mass-market paperbacks: The Threepenny Opera (1964); The Mother (1965); The Jewish Wife and Other Short Plays (1965); The Visions of Simone Machard (1965); The Jungle of Cities and Other Plays (1966); Mother Courage and Her Children (1966); Galileo (1966); The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1966); and The Good Woman of Setzuan (1966). Fred Jordan was responsible for the rapidity with which these plays were issued. Doubting Bentley’s abilities as a translator, he told me he requested a tight time line that would force Bentley to find others to perform the task. And these were the titles that sold. Although Seven Plays sold only about ten thousand copies in hardcover over the course of the 1960s, the Black Cat versions of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Good Woman of Setzuan, and Galileo sold more than twenty thousand copies each in 1966–67 alone.
72. Bentley, introduction to Seven Plays, xxxi.
73. Bertolt Brecht, “On the Experimental Theater,” trans. Carl Richard Mueller, Tulane Drama Review 6, no. 1 (September 1961): 6.
74. Erwin Piscator, “Introduction to The Deputy,” in The Storm over “The Deputy,” ed. Eric Bentley (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 14.
75. Bentley, foreword to Storm over “The Deputy,” 8.
76. Ibid.
77. Grove tended to issue the work of its German-language dramas on this “epic” scale. Friedrich Durrenmatt’s Four Plays, which includes his lengthy preface, “Problems of the Theater,” is 350 pages long.
78. “The Deputy,” display ad, New York Times, 12 March 1964, 33, GPR.
79. Rolf Hochhuth, The Deputy, trans. Richard Winston and Clara Winston (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 14.
80. Barbara Garson, MacBird! (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 3.
81. Ibid., 8.
82. Ibid., 99.
83. Ibid., 41–42.
84. Ibid., 85.
85. Ibid., 93.
86. “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” press release, n.d., GPR.
87. “A Study Guide for the Play—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard,” 11, GPR.
88. Thomas O’Brien, “Hamlet and the Player,” 2, GPR.
89. Ibid.
90. Ibid.
91. Worthen, Print and the Poetics of Modern Drama, 20–21.
1. Charles Rembar, The End of Obscenity (New York: Bantam, 1968), 483. The complex and constitutive relations between literature and obscenity in the modern era have been the subject of a number of important studies. In addition to Pease, Modernism, Mass Culture; Parkes, Modernism; and Dore, The Novel and the Obscene, see also Elisabeth Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake: Books on Trial from “Madame Bovary” to “Lolita” (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006); Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002); Felice Flanery Lewis, Literature, Obscenity, and the Law (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976); and Edward de Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (New York: Random House, 1992). Somewhat surprisingly, none of these texts deal centrally with Grove Press or the period Rembar chronicles in his account. For a useful discussion of Grove’s battles in the 1960s, particularly in relation to the publishing industry, see Richard Ellis, “Disseminating Desire: Grove Press and ‘the End[s] of Obscenity,” in Perspectives on Pornography, ed. Gary Day and Clive Bloom (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), 26–43.
2. Barney Rosset, “A Few Steps from the Long March,” BRP.
3. Rosset affidavit, Grove Press, Inc. v. Robert K. Christenberry, 10 June 1959, GPR.
4. Rosset affidavit, Franklyn S. Haiman et al. v. Robert Morris, n.d., GPR.
5. Frederick F. Schauer, The Law of Obscenity (Washington, DC: Bureau of National Affairs, 1976), 277. These developments were closely paralleled in England, where passage of the Obscene Publications Act in 1959 provided statutory support for expert testimony, which in turn precipitated legal cases over many of the same texts. Indeed, there was a transatlantic circuit running from Girodias’s Olympia Press to Calder and Boyers in Britain and Grove in the United States, and out into the Anglophone world and beyond (there were also trials of Lady Chatterley’s Lover in Japan and India), making the “end of obscenity” a truly transnational phenomenon.
6. De Grazia, Girls Lean Back Everywhere, xii.
7. Ibid., 686.
8. Quoted in Boyer, Purity in Print, 227.
9. Quoted in Michael Moscato and Leslie LeBlanc, eds., The United States of America v. One Book Entitled “Ulysses” by James Joyce: Documents and Commentary: A 50-Year Retrospective (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984), 189.
10. Felice Flanery Lewis affirms that “the most significant aspect of the Ulysses opinions was the classification of that novel as a modern classic” (Literature, Obscenity, and the Law, 133).
11. Rembar notes that “censorship and copyright have closely connected origins” (The End of Obscenity, 5) but doesn’t pursue this connection. There is remarkably little legal or literary scholarship on this crucial intersection. One exception is David Saunders, who makes no mention of Ulysses (“Copyright, Obscenity, and Literary History,” English Literary History 57, no. 2 [Summer 1990]: 431–44). For a fascinating discussion of the history of the American copyright in Ulysses, see Robert Spoo, “Copyright and the Ends of Ownership: The Case for a Public-Domain Ulysses in America,” Joyce Studies Annual 10 (Summer 1999): 5–60.
12. Bennett Cerf, At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (New York: Random House, 1977), 94.
13. Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Durham, NC: Duke University of Press, 1991), 3.
14. The story of Grove’s publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover has been told many times in many places. The most thorough and reliable account, on which my own is based, can be found in Raymond T. Caffrey, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover: The Grove Press Publication of the Unexpurgated Text,” Syracuse University Library Associates Courier 20, no. 1 (1985): 49–79.
15. Ephraim London to Barney Rosset, 10 March 1954, GPR.
16. Barney Rosset to Mark Schorer, 24 March 1954, GPR.
17. Barney Rosset to Karl Menninger, 17 May 1954, GPR. Bennett Cerf refused to provide testimony, writing to Rosset on 24 June,
I would like to be helpful, but in all good conscience, I can’t think of any good reason for bringing out an unexpurgated version of lady chatterley’s lover at this late date. In my opinion, the book was always a very silly story, far below Lawrence’s usual standard, and seemingly deliberately pornographic. It’s precisely this kind of book, in fact, that provides ammunition for the people who are hollering for censorship. ulysses was a landmark in literature and we fought and won our battle over it with a good conscience, but I can’t help feeling that anybody fighting to do lady chatterley’s lover in 1954 is placing more than a little of his bet on getting some sensational publicity from the sale of a dirty book. (GPR)
18. Barney Rosset to Laurence Pollinger, 15 June 1954, GPR.
19. Laurence Pollinger to Barney Rosset, 23 June 1954, GPR.
20. Barney Rosset to Alfred Knopf, 30 August 1954, GPR.
21. Barnet Rosset, interview with author, 5 October 2009.
22. “Excerpts from Transcript for the Hearing Held 14 May 1959 at US Post Office Building, New York, New York,” 4, GPR. Extensive testimony from the trial is also available in Rembar, The End of Obscenity.
23. “Excerpts from Transcript,” 210.
24. Ibid., 212–13.
25. Ibid., 37.
26. Ibid., 39.
27. Ibid., 45.
28. Ibid., 122.
29. Quoted in Rembar, The End of Obscenity, 74.
30. Ibid., 94.
31. Departmental decision in the matter of Grove Press, Inc., 11 June 1959, 4, GPR.
32. “A Digest of Press Opinions,” 8, GPR.
33. “Excerpts from Transcripts,” 380.
34. “Signet Gram,” 24 July 1959, GPR.
35. “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Grove press release, 29 July 1959, GPR.
36. “The Regrettable Plight of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover,’” Publishers Weekly, 17 August 1959, 28.
37. Ibid.
38. Rosset interview transcript, pt. 2, 6.
39. Cited in George Wickes, ed., Henry Miller and the Critics (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1963), 26.
40. Robert Ferguson, Henry Miller: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 149.
41. Cited in Wickes, Henry Miller and the Critics, 76.
42. Ibid., 82.
43. Ibid., 119.
44. Henry Miller, Black Spring (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
45. Trial transcript, Attorney General v. A Book Named “Tropic of Cancer,” 345 Mass. 11 (1962) at 89.
46. Ibid., 88–90.
47. Ibid., 218.
48. Trial transcript, Franklyn S. Haiman v. Robert Morris, No. 61 S 19718 (21 February 1962) at 15.
49. Rosset interview transcript, 16.
50. “Opinion of the Honorable Samuel B. Epstein,” Franklyn S. Haiman v. Robert Morris at 14.
51. “Statement in Support of the Freedom to Read,” Evergreen Review 6, no. 25 (July–August), GPR. Miller had himself used the phrase “freedom to read” in his letter protesting the Norwegian ban on Sexus, “Defence of the Freedom to Read,” published in Evergreen Review 3, no. 9 (Summer 1959): 12–20. While the rights of readers had been a concern for obscenity law from its nineteenth-century beginnings, prominent usage of the phrase “freedom to read” dates from the postwar era, beginning with the official statement “The Freedom to Read,” adopted by the American Library Association and the American Book Publishers Council in May 1953.
52. “Petition for a Writ of Certiorari to the District Court of Appeal, Third District, State of Florida,” October 1963, 4, 11, GPC.
53. Jacobellis v. State of Ohio, 84 S. Ct. 1676 (1964) at 195.
54. Ihab Hassan, The Literature of Silence: Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett (New York: Knopf, 1967), 35. In his acknowledgments, Hassan specifically offers his appreciation to “the farsighted publishers New Directions and Grove Press” (xiii).
56. Ibid., 4, 17.
57. Trial transcript, Attorney General v. A Book Named “Naked Lunch,” 218 N.E. 2d 571 (1966) at 32.
58. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles (New York: Grove Press, 2001), 199. The deposition was not published in the Olympia edition and appears as an introduction to the first Grove edition.
59. Frank McConnell, “William Burroughs and the Literature of Addiction,” Massachusetts Review 8, no. 4 (Autumn 1967): 668.
60. Trial transcript, Attorney General v. A Book Named “Naked Lunch” at 52–53.
61. Quoted in Michael Barry Goodman, Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs’ “Naked Lunch” (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1981), 235.
62. Attorney General v. A Book Named “Naked Lunch,” in de Grazia, Censorship Landmarks, 581.
63. “Naked Lunch,” letter to booksellers, n.d., GPR.
64. “Naked Lunch on Trial,” in William Burroughs, Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1959), xiii, xv.
65. Trial transcript, Attorney General v. A Book Named “Naked Lunch” at 203.
66. “Naked Lunch on Trial,” xxxiv.
67. Rosset interview transcript, 75.
68. “News from Evergreen Review,” GPR.
69. “The Moderns,” display ad, Evergreen Review 8, no. 32 (April–May 1964): 4.
70. In this sense, Grove’s strategy can be understood as a confluence and apogee of the two principal grounds of legal defense whose genealogy Elisabeth Ladenson provides in Dirt for Art’s Sake: the “art for art’s sake” argument that “art exists in a realm independent of conventional morality” and the “realism” argument that “the function of the work of art may legitimately include . . . the representation of all aspects of life, including the more unpleasant and sordid” (xv).
71. Although I did not borrow it from him, my use of the term “vulgar modernism” is similar to T. J. Clark’s use of it to describe abstract expressionism, which he sees as “the style of a certain petty bourgeoisie’s aspiration to aristocracy, to a totalizing cultural power. It is the art of that moment when the petty bourgeoisie thinks it can speak . . . the aristocrat’s claim to individuality. Vulgarity is the form of that aspiration” (Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999], 389). The Grove Press canon can be understood as expressing a similar aspiration on the part of a similar class fragment. The term has also been used by film critic J. Hoberman, in a somewhat different sense, to designate experimental innovations in the so-called popular arts of cinema, television, and comics (“Vulgar Modernism,” Artforum 20 [February 1982]: 71–76).
72. In Miracle of the Rose, Genet affirms that he was particularly drawn to “books with heraldic bindings, the Japanese vellum of deluxe editions, the long-grained Moroccan copies” (trans. Bernard Frechtman [New York: Grove Press, 1966], 257).
73. Michael Davidson, Guys like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 13. See also Barbara Ehrenreich, The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment (New York: Anchor Books, 1983), 52–68.
74. John Rechy to Richard Seaver, 25 January 1963, GPR.
75. Ibid., 7 March 1963, GPR. Marcel Margin, reviewing City of Night for the “homophile” magazine One (August 1962), agreed, claiming, “This book is to a far greater degree the story of degenerate heterosexuals than it is of homosexuals” (25).
76. Peter Buitenhuis, “Nightmares in the Mirror,” New York Times, 30 June 1963, 68.
77. David Carter, Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 163.
78. Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Vintage, 1993), 317.
79. Hubert Selby, Last Exit to Brooklyn (New York: Grove Press, 1964), 25.
80. Ibid., 56.
81. Ibid., 67.
82. Ibid., 122–23, 198–99.
83. United States v. Ginzburg, 338 F. 2d 12 (1964) at 465. Ginzburg had aggressively marketed his magazine Eros through a direct-mail campaign. The justices were particularly irked that he had sought mailing privileges from the postmasters of Intercourse and Blue Ball, Pennsylvania. For his account of his experience, see Castrated: My Eight Months in Prison (New York: Avant-Garde Books, 1973); see also Charles Williams, “Eros in America: Freud and the Counter Culture” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2012). Mishkin had, like Girodias, directly solicited authors to write pornographic texts, providing specific guidelines and paying in cash; he had also instructed the printer not to use his name as the publisher. Thus, it was the behavior of the defendants, more than the content of their wares, that led to their convictions being upheld.
84. William Lockhart and Robert McClure, “Censorship of Obscenity: The Developing Constitutional Standards,” Minnesota Law Review 45, no. 5 (1960): 5–121. See also Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: “Indecency,” Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001), 66–88.
85. “Join the Underground,” display ad, New York Times, 13 March 1966, 21.
86. Richard Seaver to Harry Braverman, 14 January 1966, GPR.
87. “‘Evergreen’ Digs into Underground Appeal, Finds ‘Sold Out’ Types Really Dig Its Copy,” Advertising Age, 25 July 1966.
88. “Do You Have What It Takes to Join the Underground?,” display ad, New York Times, 29 January 1967, 273.
89. Ironically, Grove’s editions of these titles have now become collectible.
90. Edmund Wilson, “The Vogue of the Marquis de Sade,” New Yorker, 18 October 1952, 176.
91. “Marquis de Sade,” press release, n.d., GPR.
92. Austryn Wainhouse to Richard Seaver, 5 March 1966, GPR.
93. Richard Seaver to Maurice Girodias, 16 September 1966, GPR.
94. Richard Seaver, “An Anniversary Unnoticed,” Evergreen Review 9, no. 36 (June 1965): 54.
95. “Sade Promotional Letter,” n.d., GPR.
96. Jean Paulhan, “The Marquis de Sade and His Accomplice,” in The Marquis de Sade: “The Complete Justine,” “Philosophy in the Bedroom,” and Other Writings, trans. Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 10.
97. Maurice Blanchot, “Sade,” in Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, 38.
98. Simone de Beauvoir, “Must We Burn Sade?,” in Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, 40.
99. Pierre Klossowski, “Nature as Destructive Principle,” in Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, 66.
100. Austryn Wainhouse, “On Translating Sade,” Evergreen Review 10, no. 42 (August 1966): 51.
101. “Foreword,” in Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, xii.
102. “Publisher’s Preface,” in Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, xxii.
103. Wilson, “Vogue of the Marquis de Sade,” 173.
104. Albert Fowler, “The Marquis de Sade in America,” Books Abroad 31, no. 4 (Autumn 1957): 355.
105. John Durham Peters, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 86.
106. Alex Szogyi, “A Full Measure of Madness,” New York Times Book Review, 25 July 1965, 4, 22.
107. Seaver, “An Anniversary Unnoticed,” 54.
108. Ladenson, Dirt for Art’s Sake, 229.
109. Ibid., 234.
110. “Publisher’s Preface,” in Seaver and Wainhouse, The Marquis de Sade, xviii.
111. John Clellon Holmes, “The Last Cause,” Evergreen Review 10, no. 44 (December 1966): 31.
112. Legman, “Introduction,” in My Secret Life, by Anonymous (New York: Grove Press, 1966), xxi.
113. Ibid., xlviii.
114. “Publisher’s Preface,” in My Secret Life, xvi.
115. Ibid., xviii.
116. J. H. Plumb, “In Queen Victoria’s Spacious Days,” New York Times, 1 January 1967, 26.
117. Goldman, “The Old Smut Peddler,” 50.
118. Rosset, nevertheless, took exception to the Life profile and wrote a letter to the editor accusing the author of “innuendo, insinuation, falsehood, libel, and malicious distortion” (Barney Rosset to the editors of Life magazine, 29 August 1969, BRP).
119. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 34.
1. Edgar Snow, “Author’s Preface to the 1944 Edition,” Red Star over China (New York: Grove Press, 1961), vi–vii.
2. “Book Reviews,” Chicago Daily Defender, 11 July 1961, 9.
3. Jahn, Muntu, 19.
4. Donald Franklin Joyce, Gatekeepers of Black Culture: Black-Owned Book Publishing in the United States, 1817–1981 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), 78–79.
5. Jahn, Muntu, 25.
6. Jahn, Neo-African Literature, 278, 282.
7. S. E. Anderson, “Neo-African Literature,” Black Scholar (January–February 1970): 76.
8. Ibid., 78.
9. Jean-Paul Sartre, “Preface,” in The Wretched of the Earth, by Frantz Fanon, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 14, 26.
10. “Wretched of the Earth,” press release, n.d., GPR.
11. “Books—Authors,” New York Times, 12 April 1965, 32.
12. “Wretched of the Earth,” display ad, New York Times Book Review, 25 April 1965, 44.
13. Lewis Nichols, “What the Negro Reads,” New York Times Book Review, 16 April 1967, 5.
14. Mel Watkins, “Black Is Marketable,” New York Times Book Review, 16 February 1969, 3.
15. Gail Baker Woods, “Merchandising Malcolm X: Melding Man and Myths for Money,” Western Journal of Black Studies 17, no. 1 (1993): 45.
16. “The Bibliography of Malcolm X,” Los Angeles Public Library, n.d., GPR.
17. “A Discussion Guide for The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” 1968, GPR. The guide lists no author, but it is fair to assume that Geller and Braverman both had a hand in its design.
18. Nat Hentoff, “Uninventing the Negro,” Evergreen Review 9, no. 38 (November 1965): 35.
19. Ibid., 68.
20. Hentoff, “Applying Black Power,” Evergreen Review 10, no. 44 (December 1966): 47.
21. Ibid., 64.
22. Julius Lester, “The Black Writer and the New Censorship,” Evergreen Review 14, no. 77 (April 1970): 19.
23. Ibid., 19, 20.
24. Earl Caldwell, “Black Bookstores Creating New Best-Seller List,” New York Times, 20 August 1969, 49.
25. Julius Lester, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 19.
26. Ibid., 92.
28. Ibid., 140.
29. Rosset interview transcript, 83.
30. Margaret Randall, “Notes from the Underground,” Evergreen Review 11, no. 49 (October 1967): 20.
31. Michael Casey, Che’s Afterlife: The Legacy of an Image (New York: Vintage, 2009), 128.
32. Michel Bosquet, “From The Last Hours of Che Guevara,” trans. Richard Seaver, Evergreen Review 11, no. 51 (February 1968): 33.
33. Fidel Castro, “El Che vive!,” Evergreen Review 11, no. 51 (February 1968): 35.
34. Ernesto Che Guevara, Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War, trans. Victoria Ortiz (New York: Monthly Review, 1968), 254.
35. Joseph Hansen, “Preface,” in Che Guevara Speaks, ed. George Lavan (New York: Grove Press, 1968), 7.
36. Julius Lester, Revolutionary Notes (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 6.
37. “The Che Guevara Sweepstakes,” Publishers Weekly, 5 August 1968.
38. The details of Liss’s trip to Bolivia are wonderfully recounted in an unpublished report, “Notes for the Bolivian Trip on a Day to Day Basis: A Diary in Search of a Diary,” BRP.
39. “Che Guevara’s Bolivian Campaign Diary,” trans. Helen Lane, Evergreen Review 11, no. 57 (August 1968): 33.
40. Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy, “Foreword,” in Revolution in the Revolution?, by Régis Debray (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 9.
41. Ibid., 7, 8.
42. Fredric Jameson, “Periodizing the Sixties,” in The Ideologies of Theory (New York: Verso, 2008), 508.
43. Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 98.
44. Jean Genet, “A Salute to 100,000 Stars,” Evergreen Review 12, no. 61 (December 1968): 51.
45. Ibid., 52, 88.
46. Jerry Rubin, “A Yippie Manifesto,” Evergreen Review 13, no. 66 (May 1969): 42.
47. Ibid., 83.
48. Tuli Kupferberg and Robert Bashlow, 1001 Ways to Beat the Draft (New York: Grove Press, 1976), 1.
49. Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (New York: Pirate Editions, 1971), iii.
50. Carl Oglesby, “The Idea of the New Left,” in The New Left Reader, ed. Carl Oglesby (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 18.
1. United States of America v. A Motion Picture Entitled “I Am Curious, Yellow” ended up being the only significant obscenity case that Grove lost, when the appeal made it to the Supreme Court in 1970. Justice William Douglas, who had published an excerpt from his recent book in the Evergreen Review, recused himself, and the vote was split 4 to 4, allowing the district court’s ban to be upheld.
2. Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 327.
3. Mark Betz, “Little Books,” in Inventing Film Studies, ed. Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 319–52. Very little has been written about Grove’s film division. The best resource I could find is an unpublished undergraduate thesis written at Harvard University by Rachel Whitaker, “Beyond Books: Film Production and Distribution at the Grove Press Publishing House” (2008).
4. “Hiroshima mon amour: A Round-Table Discussion with Eric Rohmer, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Jean Domarchi, Pierre Kast, and Jacques Rivette,” trans. Liz Heron, Criterion Collection, prod. Issa Clubb (2005), 13 (originally published in Cahiers du cinéma 97 [July 1959]).
5. Ibid., 15.
6. Ibid., 19–20.
7. Marguerite Duras, “Synopsis,” in Hiroshima mon amour, by Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais, trans. Richard Seaver (New York: Grove Press, 1961), 9.
8. Duras and Resnais, Hiroshima mon amour, 17.
9. Barthes, “Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet,” 13. Barthes’s essay was reprinted in translation in the Evergreen Review in 1958, and then again reprinted as one of three introductory essays for Grove’s Black Cat version of Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet (Jealousy and In the Labyrinth) in 1965.
10. Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1962), 8.
11. François Thomas, “The Myth of Perfect Harmony,” in Last Year at Marienbad, Criterion Collection, 36.
12. Robbe-Grillet and Resnais, Last Year at Marienbad, 18.
13. Samuel Beckett, Film: Complete Scenario / Illustrations / Production Shots (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 57.
14. Ibid., 63.
15. Rosset interview transcript, 11.
16. François Truffaut, The 400 Blows (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 6.
17. Robert Hughes, “A Note on This Edition,” in Jean-Luc Godard, Masculin Féminin (New York: Grove Press, 1969), 6.
18. Ibid., 6–7.
19. “The Starting Point of the Film,” in Godard, Masculin Féminin, 219, 221.
20. “The ‘Script,’” in Godard, Masculin Féminin, 224.
21. Philippe Labro, “Godard Directing,” in Godard, Masculin Féminin, 226–27.
22. Georges Sadoul, “Godard Does Not Pass,” in Godard, Masculin Féminin, 250.
23. Pauline Kael, Review for The New Republic, in Godard, Masculin Féminin, 282.
24. “Grove Press Script Books,” Film Quarterly 23, no. 1 (Autumn 1969): 58–59.
25. Adrian Martin, “A Young Man for All Times,” in Godard, Masculin Féminin, 3.
26. Betz, “Little Books,” 324.
27. “Suggested Courses Using Books and Films,” Grove Press college catalog (1968), 97, GPR.
28. “Why Wait for Godard?,” display ad, Evergreen Review 13 (December 1969): 73.
29. Quoted in Gontarski, introduction to Grove Press Reader, xxxvi.
30. There is some uncertainty about the amount Rosset paid for the rights. In Albert Goldman’s article quoted later, the cost is given as $25,000. Rosset told Rachel Whitaker in an interview that he paid $100,000, a figure affirmed in the interview transcripts in his archive; it is also the figure Seaver states in his memoir. The film Obscene cites an article stating it was $160,000. Whatever the cost, it represented far more than Grove usually paid in advances or rights for book publication.
31. Jon Lewis, Hollywood v. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Saved the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 192–229.
32. Goldman, “The Old Smut Peddler,” 49. In an additional sign of Rosset’s prescience, Grove attempted to release Evergreen as a “video magazine” for home consumption in this same year, but, as Rosset lamented, “there was nowhere to play it” (Rosset interview transcript, 28).
33. “Dear Member,” Evergreen Club mail-order offer, n.d., GPR.
34. “Dear Collector,” Evergreen Club mail-order offer, n.d., KI.
35. “Private Invitation,” Evergreen Club mail-order offer, n.d., KI.
1. “Prospectus: Grove Press, Inc.,” Van Alstyne, Noel, and Co., 25 July 1967, 3.
2. Ibid., 9.
3. “Notes from the Publisher,” Grove Press annual report, 1967, BRP.
4. Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 408.
5. “Women Have Seized the Executive Offices of Grove Press Because:,” 13 April 1970, HFA.
6. Robin Morgan’s account of the takeover can be found in Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New York: Random House, 1978), 132–33, and in her more recent autobiography, Saturday’s Child (New York: Norton, 2001), 289–96. A more comprehensive version can be found in S. E. Gontarski’s pamphlet, Modernism, Censorship, 15–19. For an earlier and highly informative discussion of the occupation in terms of developments in the publishing industry more generally, see Powers, “Pride and Prejudice,” More magazine 5, no. 1 (January 1975): 17–19, 26. For Seaver’s account, see Tender Hour of Twilight, 414–30.
7. Ellis, “Disseminating Desire,” 40.
8. Catharine MacKinnon, Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 147.
9. Jacques Pauvert to Richard Seaver, 6 December 1960, GPR (my translation).
10. Richard Seaver to Jacques Pauvert, 1 October 1964, GPR (my translation).
11. William Kristol to Richard Seaver, 25 December 1965, GPR.
12. Aury’s authorship was revealed in an article for the New Yorker (1 August 1994) by John de St. Jorre. His account can also be found in Venus Bound, 202–36. Not until the release of the documentary film Writer of O in 2005 was Aury’s real name publicly acknowledged. For Seaver’s account, see Tender Hour of Twilight, 353–65. Grove had in fact published a translation of Aury’s essays, Literary Landfalls (New York: Grove Press, 1961), as an Evergreen Original. The original French title was, significantly, Lecture pour tous, and in her foreword Aury provocatively asserts that “each one reads for himself, but also for others; all reading is for everyone” (3).
13. The admission can be found in Seaver’s New York Times obituary of 7 January 2009. St. Jorre does opine that “‘Sabine d’Estrée’ is, almost certainly, the unmistakably masculine figure of Richard Seaver” (218). Seaver’s widow, Jeanette, whose middle name is “Sabine,” told me that her husband had loved such anagrams and word games (interview with author, 23 October 2010). Such pseudonymous shenanigans were popular during this era, testifying to their transitional significance for the sexual politics of literary publishing. In addition to the sequel to Story of O, Grove also published The Image, written by Catherine Robbe-Grillet under the pseudonym Jean de Berg (with a preface by Pauline Réage), as well as Emmanuelle, written by Marayat Rollet-Andriane under the pseudonym Emmanuelle Arsan. As with Réage, the authors’ real identities were closely guarded secrets at the time of publication. Also in the 1970s, Régine Deforges, herself a controversial publisher and writer of erotica, conducted a series of interviews with “Pauline Réage,” which Seaver translated as Sabine d’Estrée and published as Confessions of O under his new Viking imprint, Seaver Books.
14. Réage, Story of O, trans. Sabine D’Estrée (New York: Grove Press, 1965), xii. “A Girl in Love” was added as front matter in the 1970s.
15. Ibid., n.p.
16. This analogy is further ballasted by the irony that the Evergreen Club’s alternate selection to The Story of O was The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
17. Jean Paulhan, “Happiness in Slavery,” in Réage, Story of O, xxv.
18. Réage, Story of O, ix.
19. “Albert Goldman in the New York Times Book Review (20 March 1966),” Evergreen Club News 1, no. 2, 5, 6.
20. Ibid., 7.
21. “Eliot Fremont-Smith in the New York Times,” Evergreen Club News 1, no. 2, 7.
22. Ibid., 9.
23. Ibid., 8.
24. Thus, it is fitting that Grove’s Sade became a key source text for the feminist engagement with pornography in the 1970s and 1980s. See, for example, Andrea Dworkin, Pornography: Men Possessing Women (New York: Plume, 1989), 70–101; and Angela Carter, The Sadean Woman and the Ideology of Pornography (New York: Pantheon, 1978).
25. Morgan, Saturday’s Child, 107.
26. Quoted in Paul Meskil, “Grove Press Seized by Gals,” New York Daily News, 14 April 1970.
27. “Women Have Seized the Executive Offices.”
28. Quoted in Mike Golden, “The Women’s Lib Takeover of Grove Press,” http:// smokesignalsmag.com/ISSUE0/Non-Fiction/womenlibtakeover.htm.
29. Julius Lester to Barney Rosset, 14 April 1970, BRP. The charges were, in fact, dropped, and Lester stayed on for another year.
30. “Women’s Lib Occupation: An Exchange of Letters,” Evergreen Review 14, no. 80 (July 1970): 16.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid., 69.
33. Ibid., 70.
34. Grove Press Election Bulletin, no. 1 (28 April 1970), HFA. Other supporters included New York mayor John Lindsay, who praised the FLM for its “constructive role in the political life of our city”; labor activist Cesar Chavez, who expressed “undying gratitude” to the FLM board for “its support of our consumer boycott”; and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, who claims that the FLM “will always be remembered with gratitude and respect by the underprivileged and oppressed people of our nation.”
35. Grove Press Election Bulletin, no. 2 (29 April 1970), HFA.
36. Committee for the Survival of Grove, “What It’s Really All About,” n.d., HFA.
37. Ibid.
38. Quoted in Powers, “Pride and Prejudice,” 19.
39. Claudia Menza, interview with author, 21 October 2010.
40. Ibid., 26 October 2010.
41. Ibid.
42. Gontarski, Modernism, Censorship, 22.
43. Quoted in Golden, “The Women’s Lib Takeover of Grove Press.”
44. Tebbel, History of Publishing, 4:727.
45. Menza, interview with author, 21 October 2010; Seaver, Tender Hour of Twilight, 424.
46. Menza, interview with author, 21 October 2010.
47. “Grove Fires Union Activists, Women’s Lib Seizes Offices,” Publishers Weekly, 20 April 1970, 38.
48. Committee for the Survival of Grove, “What It’s Really All About.”
49. Menza, interview with author, 21 October 2010. I borrow the term “countercanon” from S. E. Gontarski’s introduction to the issue of the Review of Contemporary Literature dedicated to Grove, “Dionysus in Publishing.”
50. Ellen Krieger to Judith Schmidt, 13 May 1969, GPR.
51. Judith Schmidt to Henry Miller, 14 May 1969, GPR.
52. Theodore Solotaroff to Grove Press, 23 June 1969, GPR.
53. Emily Jane Goodman to Judith Schmidt, 29 July 1969, GPR.
54. Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (New York: Avon, 1970), xii.
55. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (New York: Doubleday, 1953), 22.
56. Quoted in “Who’s Come a Long Way, Baby?,” Time, 31 August 1970, 16.
57. Millett, Sexual Politics, 303.
58. Ibid., 295.
59. Ibid., 22.
60. Ibid., 17.
61. Ibid., 343.
62. Ibid., 349.
63. Ibid., 356.
64. “Who’s Come a Long Way, Baby?,” 16.
65. Julius Lester, “Woman—the Male Fantasy,” Evergreen Review 14, no. 82 (September 1970): 71.
66. “Jean Genet and the Black Panthers,” Evergreen Review 14, no. 82 (September 1970): 36–37.
67. Kent Carroll, “Grove in the ’70s,” in Gontarski, The Grove Press Reader, 280.
68. Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (New York: Grove Press, 1984), 133, 137, 138.