Counterculture Colophon: Grove Press, the Evergreen Review, and the Incorporation of the Avant-Garde

With this richly evocative and incisive history of Grove Press, University of Iowa English professor Glass (Authors Inc.) celebrates the achievement of Grove’s charismatic founder, Barney Rosset, whose mission to democratize the avant-garde brought European experimental literature and an expanded world canon into the American mainstream during the 1950s and 60s, and whose successful campaign to publish Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller and Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs effectively ended literary censorship in the U.S. A collective endeavor, Grove Press nonetheless reflected Rosset’s passionate left-wing convictions and aesthetic. Among the authors Russet published were Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Kenzaburo Oe, Henry Miller, Malcolm X, Franz Fanon, and the Marquis de Sade. Grove became profitable for the first time in the 1960s, its catalogue increasingly “ballasted by [vintage] pornography” and the highbrow. Rosset also published books that provided philosophic and practical insight into revolutionary thought and action, such as Che Guevara’s Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War and Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. Grove was very much an old boys’ club; many of the attitudes held by its writers and editors were misogynist and there were no female editors, a fact that damaged the press’s radical reputation. Glass characterizes the feminist takeover of Grove in 1971 as the culmination of a cultural revolution that Rosset had inaugurated but that ultimately left him behind. 42 illus. (May)