Barney Rosset, RIP: his Grove Press made us smarter, sexier, and more free.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Grove Press Inc.'s Barnet Lee Rosset, Jr. - In memoriam

IF YOU GREW UP interested in literature-and a world bigger than the one into which you were born--you owe a debt to Barney Rosset. Rosset, who ran the Grove Press for 35 years, died on February 21 at age 89, thus ending the career of a man whose first publication was a mimeographed high school 'zine called The Anti-Everything.

In 1951 Rosset acquired the fledgling Grove Press and turned it into a colorful publishing outlet during a period known for being as gray as an organization man's overcoat. Grove Press specialized in importing contemporary European writing--stuff like Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Jean Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers--at a time when such fare was more exotic and harder to find than French cuisine and Italian wines.

And often illegal. Especially in the 1950s and '60s, Rosset and Grove braved lawsuits, death threats, and angry postmasters general to sell American audiences forbidden texts such as D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, and much more. He also brought the then-scandalous 1967 Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow) to U.S. audiences.

If such works no longer cause paroxysms of puritanism and prosecutions, that is due to Rosset. But those who thought Rosset was just a smut peddler (as Life magazine once dubbed him) missed the real appeal of the Grove Press.

In a pre-Internet, pre-everything-at-your-fingertips-world, books weren't just frigates to take you lands away (as Emily Dickinson would have it); they were battleships and aircraft carriers capable of rescuing you from whatever isolated bunker you called home. I say that not as someone who grew up long ago and far away: I'm talking about New Jersey in the 1970s and '80s, just 50 miles outside of Manhattan. I could see New York across the Raritan Bay, but for most of my childhood the nearest bookstore was miles away and about as big as a one-car garage.

From the start, Grove and its various imprints (Black Cat, Evergreen, et al.) mainstreamed all sorts of foreign, forbidden, and fancy writing that just didn't show up elsewhere. Every bit as much as Julia Child, Rosset broadened and cultivated American palates, helping to create or enlarge the audiences of writers such as Beckett, Alain Robbe-Grillet, "Pauline Reage," and all the Beats.

For kids interested in Literature (with a capital L), Grove Press was a well-worn path in the bad old days before book...