Obituary: Barney Rosset / Book publisher who fought obscenity laws
Share with others:
Barney Rosset, the maverick publisher who chafed at puritanism and whose relentless challenges of obscenity laws helped overthrow the final vestiges of literary censorship in the United States, died Tuesday at a hospital in New York City. He was 89.
The death was confirmed by his son Peter Rosset, who said his father had been undergoing a double heart valve replacement procedure.
Mr. Rosset was most identified with his work at Grove Press, the New York City-based book publishing company he bought in the early 1950s. For the next several decades, he helped introduce a variety of European authors to American audiences, including Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter and Jean-Paul Sartre.
More often, he used his company to distribute critically acclaimed but sexually explicit books by D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs and engaged in a series of groundbreaking legal battles that changed the way the government interpreted the First Amendment.
In 1959, the federal Post Office Department, the primary government enforcer of obscenity statutes at the time, seized 24 cartons of Grove's unexpurgated edition of "Lady Chatterley's Lover," Lawrence's 1928 novel about an aristocrat's wife who has an affair with a gamekeeper.
"We decided the best thing to do was send the book through the mail so it would be seized by the post office," Mr. Rosset told the Paris Review in 1997. "We thought this would be the best way to defend the book. The post office is a federal government agency, and if they arrest you, you go to the federal court. That way you don't have to defend the book in some small town."
Several months after the confiscation, a federal judge overturned the ban on the book by confirming its "literary merit" and disputing the postmaster general's finding that it was obscene. An appeals court upheld the decision, agreeing that the novel's depictions of sex were not prurient because of their importance to the plot.
First Published February 23, 2012 12:00 am
