Review
One of Maine Public Radio's Best & Overlooked Books of 2017
Illuminating, insightful, and informativea piquant portrait of a renegade publisher.” Kirkus
"The book effectively describes Rosset’s successful legal battles against censorship, and Rosenthal illustrates his subject’s publishing philosophy with his decision to publish Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs to American audiences." —Publishers Weekly
"Michael Rosenthal, in taking a little-known and once-offensive publisher and turning insightful and witty attention to him, has bestowed a gift on readers everywhere."Columbia Magazine
"Barney Rosset was one of the most important American cultural figures of the twentieth century. This marvelous book brilliantly captures his and our struggles to allow all Americans to read, hear and see what the Constitution demands. He, with much turbulence, anxiety, and pain, nearly alone broke the barriers of censorship.” Martin Garbus, Esq.
"Setting up shop on the corner where the mid-century avant-garde met Victorian pornography, Barney Rosset helped crack wide open the staid world of American publishing. Michael Rosenthal's smart and candid biography beautifully captures the insatiable spirit of an oft unlovely but always intrepid literary daredevil." Sean Wilentz, George Henry Davis 1886 Professor of History, Princeton University and author of Bob Dylan in America
From the opening sentence of this marvelous, fleet, perfectly rendered portrait of Barney Rossetthe most important American book publisher of the twentieth centuryto its lastin which its crusading, preposterous and triumphantly consequential subject is winsomely extolled by one writer as a Tom Paine of the human brain”Michael Rosenthal has created an elegant, clear-eyed, irresistibly readable account of the renegade publisher who tore himself, and the reading public, through the rusting gates of American Puritanism and censorship. Dashing, driven, self-absorbed, maddening married five times and four times abandonedRosset was an American original. He was also from start to finish happily profligate with resources personal and financial in the pursuit of expanding the purview of the First Amendment. In this book, Rosenthal has done his subject and his readers a superb service.” Ric Burns, documentary filmmaker
Michael Rosenthal sequences interesting anecdotes by the hundred, and he’s good at tracing the nonstop, edge-of-frenzy, but sharp-minded publishing decisions Barney made while partying and living fun-loving life to its fullest.” Ed Sanders, Grove Press author
This slim but essential volume is a must-read for anyone wanting to understand the countercultural era and Postmodernism better, a solidly done portrait of a brilliant, often infuriating champion of subversion in all forms."” Chicago Center for Literature and Photography
“[Michael Rosenthal] is expert at zooming in on the societal elements that make Barney Rosset and Grove Press’s story important . . . [He] is also pitch-perfect at demonstrating the underbelly of Rosset and Grove’s success, as well as that of the entire 1960s.” —Woodstock Times
"Inspiring...a colorful read peppered by episodes of hilarious irony in Rosset's business dealings and his life. Rosenthal also fills some of the gaps left by Rosset's own memoir."—Book-ish
About the Author
Michael Rosenthal was the Roberta and William Campbell Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. A Guggenheim Fellowship winner, he was also awarded Columbia College's Alexander Hamilton Medal, its highest honor. The author of Virginia Woolf, The Character Factory: Baden-Powell's Boy Scouts and the Imperatives of Empire, and Nicholas Miraculous, The Amazing Career of the Redoubtable Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler, he resides in New York City.
