Cultural impact In 1951, Rosset purchased Grove Press from editor Robert Phelps. In an interview with
Tin House publisher
Win McCormack, Rosset described what spurred him to publish Beckett: : [O]ne day I read in
The New York Times about a play called
Waiting for Godot that was going on in Paris. It was a small clip, but it made me very interested. I got hold of it and read it in the French edition. It had something to say to me. Oddly enough, it had a sense of desolation, like Miller, though in its language, its lack of verbiage, it was the opposite of Miller. Still, the sense of a very contemporary lost soul was compelling. I got
Wallace Fowlie to read it.... He read the play and told me that he thought — and this before anybody had really heard about it much — that it would be one of the most important works of the 20th Century.
Legal impact In 1959, Rosset published
D.H. Lawrence's 1928 novel
Lady Chatterley's Lover, which the United States had banned in 1929, on the grounds of obscenity. After the book was released, the U.S. Post Office began confiscating copies sent through the mail, which led Grove Press to take legal action — and win. Emboldened, Rosset subsequently decided to publish
Henry Miller's
Tropic of Cancer, which was first published in France in 1934, and immediately banned by the U.S. Customs Service from being imported into the U.S., again, on grounds of obscenity. So in 1961, Rosset published it. "[L]awsuits were immediately filed against him and booksellers that chose to carry the controversial novel. The trial eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in Rosset's favor." ==
Evergreen Review ==