Earlier this week, The National Book Foundation announced that publisher Barney Rosset will be honored with “The Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community” at the National Book Awards ceremony on November 19, 2008.
To celebrate, I caught up with Neil Ortenberg, the former publisher of Thunder Mouth Press and the executive producer of a new documentary about Rosset’s life, Obscene. Ortenberg recalled Rosset’s fight to publish banned works by Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence, marveling at the fact that brave booksellers were arrested for selling Tropic of Cancer–even after the country’s highest court had approved the book’s publication.
The literary lion also reminisced about a collision between governmental bureaucracy and hypocrisy…
“My first intersection with Barney was selling him the paperback rights to William Packard’s novel Saturday Night at San Marcos. I published it in hardcover, and received some funds for the hardcover from the NEA. Later Jesse Helms issued a top ten list of the most obscene things ever funded by the NEA and that book was on the list!”