Barney Rosset, Trailblazing Publisher, Dies at 89 Barney Rosset, the legendary owner of Grove Press who fought legal battles to publish provocative writers, including Henry Miller and Samuel Beckett, has died at 89. The Associated Press obituary is here. The Times's obituary will be up soon. Mr. Rosset's experiences and his legacy are amply documented online. His interview with The Paris Review, which was published in 1997 but "culled from over a dozen conversations held between 1993 and 1996 in Mr. Rosset's East Village loft," is a chronicle of interactions with, and opinions about, Miller, Beckett, William Burroughs, Timothy Leary, Malcolm X and just about every other notable literary figure of the 1950s and "60s. "They banned [Beckett] in the Soviet Union," Mr. Rosset told the magazine. ""Waiting for Godot" was not allowed. Neither was Henry Miller. The Soviets condemned them both. Miller would have been used as an example of decadence, being a very good analyst of how terrible and monstrous American culture was. That they liked, but they wouldn't publish him. I guess it must have been the sex. With Beckett, it must have been the hopelessness. The sex got more attention stateside than the hopelessness. The Times's Dwight Garner once pointed to a cartoon from a 1968 issue of the Book Review, in which a buxom, naked operator mans the phones at Grove's offices. Louisa Thomas's 2008 profile of Mr. Rosset covered, among other things, Grove's embattled financial life: "Rosset saw many crises. He or his company was forever going broke, being attacked, breaking the law. In his legal battles, Rosset made his most enduring impact. Before Rosset challenged federal and state obscenity laws, censorship (and self-censorship) was an accepted feature of publishing. His victories in high courts helped to change that. After spending a lot of money in court, Mr. Rosset made later business decisions that lost him the press. I think we published a lot of good books. A lot," he said. But, I ultimately goofed terribly. Loren Glass's two-part profile of Mr. Rosset from September 2011 is a thorough look at his career, and features his own colorful take on his mythology: "It took over ten minutes for Rosset to mention Grove, and when he did it was in order to dismiss everything that had been written about it. "Something you have to understand about how Grove Press came about - nothing like what seems to be written down," he said. It's really a big problem. People write about Grove - they think I came out of an egg or something."" Readers and publishers have been remembering Mr. Rosset today on Twitter: In 2008, Mr. Rosset received the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award, "presented to an individual for outstanding service to the American literary community." His acceptance speech for that award can be seen here. Mr. Rosset's autobiography, "The Subject Was Left-Handed," is forthcoming from Algonquin Books. Last year saw the posthumous publication of Richard Seaver's "The Tender Hour of Twilight." Seaver was an editor at Grove in the "60s, and Jason Epstein, a publishing veteran himself, reviewed the memoir for The Times. "Obscene," a 2008 documentary, focused on Mr. Rosset and his strong stands for freedom of speech. Jeannette Catsoulis called the movie a "warm, entertaining compendium of counterculture voices."