Barney Rosset: Early Life & Career > Grove Press
When Barney Rosset bought the Grove Press in 1951 the publishing house had only published three books: Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, Richard Crenshaw's The Verse in English, and The Selected Writings of Aphra Behn.
Looking for assistance in navigating his new career, Rosset enrolled in a publishing course at Columbia University where he met Donald Allen, who would become his first editor at Grove. Later executive editor Richard Seaver would bring many prose and theatrical writers of the European avant-garde to the house.
Grove Press became the publishing house not only for such groundbreaking authors as Samuel Beckett and Jean Genet, but for works U.S. publishers had avoided because of the potential for an obscenity trial, including D.H Lawrence's Lady Chatterly's Lover, Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Grove Press also published literary works of American counterculture and revolutionary movements, becoming what Rosset himself would call "the official publisher of the Beats Generation" and the only press brave enough to publish The Diary of Malcolm X after his assassination.
What united the lists of Grove's several imprints (Black Cat, Evergreen Books, Venus House) was an interest in pushing boundaries and challenging accepted thinking. Grove marketing campaigns addressed its potential readers as members of the counterculture, urging them to "Join the Underground." After several decades of running the press, after many succesful titles and several expensive if significant lawsuits, Rosset sold Grove in 1986. The backlist is now part of Grove Atlantic.