Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1947. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. He partnered with Richard Seaver to bring French literature to the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its publisher, Morgan Entrekin, merged with Grove Press in 1991. Grove later became an imprint of the publisher Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Early years
Grove Press was founded in 1947 in Greenwich Village on Grove Street. The original owners only published three books in three years and so sold it to Barney Rosset in 1951 for three thousand dollars.
Literary avant-garde
Under Rosset's leadership, Grove introduced American readers to European avant-garde literature and theatre, including French authors Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco. In 1954 Grove published Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot after it had been refused by more mainstream publishers. Since then Grove has been Beckett's U.S. publisher. Grove is also the U.S. publisher of the works of Harold Pinter; in 2006 it published a collection called The Essential Pinter, which includes Pinter's Nobel Lecture, entitled "Art, Truth & Politics". In 2006 Grove published an anniversary bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot and a special four-volume edition of Beckett's works, with commissioned introductions by Edward Albee, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and Colm Tóibín, to commemorate his centenary (April 2006). Grove was also the first American house to publish the unabridged complete works of the Marquis de Sade, translated by Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse. Grove also had an interest in Japanese literature, publishing several anthologies as well as works by Kenzaburō Ōe and others.
Grove published most of the American Beats of the 1950s (Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg) as well as poets like Frank O'Hara of the New York School and poets associated with Black Mountain and the San Francisco Renaissance such as Robert Duncan. In 1963, Grove published My Life and Loves: Five Volumes in One/Complete and Unexpurgated, with annotations, collecting Frank Harris' work in one volume for the first time.
From 1957 to 1973 Grove published Evergreen Review, a literary magazine whose contributors included Edward Albee, Bertolt Brecht, William S. Burroughs, Albert Camus, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nat Hentoff, LeRoi Jones, John Lahr, and Timothy Leary.
Grove has also from time to time published mainstream works. For example, in 1978 it published the script from the George Lucas film American Graffiti under its Black Cat paperback imprint.
In 1956, Rosset hired Fred Jordan as Grove's business manager. Jordan spent most of the next 30 years at Grove. Later an editor with the press, Jordan oversaw the company's First Amendment lawsuits.
Political works
The defining movements of the 1960s in America—the antiwar, civil rights, black power, counterculture, and student movements in the United States—along with revolutions across the globe, were debated, exposed, and discussed in Grove’s publications as was the sexual revolution. Grove’s books challenged prevailing attitudes about sex through dozens of erotic books, many by "anonymous" authors; introduced the layperson to new directions in psychology through Eric Berne’s Games People Play; and gave voice to revolutionaries around the world, including Che Guevara and Malcolm X. They published works by Frantz Fanon and Régis Debray, and numerous books opposing the Vietnam war and the draft, including information on G.I. rights.
Censorship and obscenity battles
Rejecting conventional notions of obscenity and morality, Grove gained a reputation as a controversial publisher committed to fighting censorship as it published some of the best-known banned books.
In 1959, Grove Press published an unexpurgated version of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley's Lover. The U.S. Post Office Department confiscated copies sent through the mail. Rosset sued the New York city postmaster and his Lawyer Charles Rembar won in New York, and then on federal appeal.