Nick Gillespie on the Life and Legacy of Grove Press Publisher Barney Rosset

If you grew up interested in literature—and a world bigger than the one into which you were born—you owe a debt to Barney Rosset. Rosset, who ran the Grove Press for 35 years, died on February 21 at age 89, thus ending the career of a man whose first publication was a mimeographed high school 'zine called The Anti-Everything and who later introduced American readers to William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch, Allen Ginsberg's Howl, Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. From our May issue, Nick Gillespie explains how Rosset made us smarter, sexier, and more free.