Publisher Barney Rosset dies at 89

Barney Rosset was a publisher, not an author, and struggled for decades to write the story of his brave and wild life. But few over the past 60 years had so profound an impact on the way we read today.

The fiery publisher Rosset, who introduced the country to countless political and avant-garde writers and risked prison and financial ruin to release such underground classics as "Tropic of Cancer" and "Lady Chatterley's Lover," has died. He was 89.

Rosset died at a Manhattan hospital Tuesday night, said Kelly Bowen, publicity manager for Algonquin Books, which is to publish Rosset's autobiography. Rosset had recently had heart surgery.

"Barney was a great, great American publisher," said Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove/Atlantic Books, who called Rosset an inspiration and a publisher powerfully motivated by his feelings of social responsibility. "He was extraordinary. I would say that if there's a Publishing Hall of Fame, he definitely is going in it."

As publisher of Grove Press, Rosset was a First Amendment crusader who helped overthrow 20th century censorship laws in the United States and profoundly expanded the American reading experience.

Rosset had an FBI file that lasted for decades and he would seek out fellow rebels for much of his life.

Between Grove and the magazine Evergreen Review, which lasted from 1957 to 1973, Rosset published Samuel Beckett, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Jean-Paul Sartre, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence and William Burroughs.

He was equally daring as a film distributor, his credits including the groundbreaking erotic film "I Am Curious (Yellow)," and art-house releases by Jean-Luc Godard, Marguerite Duras and others.

Rosset himself was the subject of a movie, "Obscene," a 2008 documentary that included commentary from John Waters, Gore Vidal and Amiri Baraka.

The same year, he received honorary citations from the National Coalition Against Censorship and from the National Book Foundation, which sponsors the National Book Awards.

His autobiography was tentatively titled "The Subject Was Left-Handed" and Algonquin's publisher Elisabeth Scharlatt said she hopes to release it within the year.

"While working on this book, Barney took great pleasure in digging up his rebellious ancestors and his rebellious roots, from a bad-boy great-grandfather to his very progressive elementary school that he was sent to in Chicago," she said in an interview. "I think that in looking at how he got where he got with his own rebellious attitudes, he could see that he was maybe even preordained in some way."

His longtime editor-in-chief at Grove, Richard Seaver, would remember him as "often irascible, a control freak, prone to panic attacks," with a "sadistic element" that shadowed his "innate generosity."

Rosset, interviewed by The Associated Press in 1998, called himself an "amoeba with a brain," ever slipping into enemy territory.