Grove Press founder championed Beat poets, Samuel Beckett, erotica
(NEWSER) - Barney Rosset, founder of the envelope-pushing, censorship-defying Grove Press, died at age 89 on Tuesday after a double-heart-valve replacement, the New York Times reports. The irascible Rosset once described his press as "a breach in the dam of American Puritanism," and it lived up to that name, publishing works like DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer despite attempts to censor them. He defended the works, and other provocative offerings, in court, opening the door to sexually explicit material in US literature. More»
