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Obscene: A Portrait of Barney Rosset and Grove Press

Although it is likely youve never heard of Barney Rosset, he is one of the most influential cultural figures of the 20th century. Through his imprint Grove Press and his magazine Evergreen Review, Rosset fought tooth and nail (often before state and federal supreme courts) for the American right to read the works of Samuel Beckett Henry Miller, Jean Genet, Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Harold Pinter, D H Lawrence, Alain RobbeGrillet, Amiri Baraka and many other enemies of morality. Grove was a valve for pressurized cultural energies, says the now octogenarian and still feisty Rosset, a breach in the dam of American Puritanism. Obscene traces the important history and impact of Grooves free speech fights from Ginsburgs Howl to The Autobiography of Malcolm X to the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow) while creating a fascinating portrait of the volatile, eccentric Rosset whose unyielding restless energy and questionable business sense upended both this countrys censorship law and his own life.

Sponsored by ACLU of Washington