NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE LIFE TIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD TO BARNEY ROSSET

I have never met the man we honor tonight. But, like so many of you, I feel I know him. And I know him in the best way possible: Through the intimate encounter with the authors he discovered, nurtured, and brilliantly published over the past fifty years: Samuel Beckett, Jorge Luis Borges, Jean Genet, Eugene Ionesco, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Marguerite Duras, William Burroughs, Harold Pinter, Che Guevara, Tom Stoppard, Malcolm X, Frantz Fanon, Donald Keene on Japanese literature, Eric Bentley's translations of Bertolt Brecht.

There is little doubt that when the history of twentieth-century publishing is written, his contribution looms large. Indeed, his literary and political proclivities both reflected and helped to define an historical era.

Nor should it be forgotten that his mischievous disposition was of a kind to confound and deny puritans and philistines of every stripe. Against all odds, and with daring and courage and tenacity, steadfastly opposed censorship and yahoos of every stripe. His libertarian--and indeed libertine--attitude toward sex was as refreshing as it was rare, even as it was discomforting, for some. It was subversive in an immediate postwar period given to the Cold War mores of a country and a citizenry still constrained by silence and hypocrisy. He fought and won legal and literary battles that enlarged the arena of free expression and publication.

And, to speak personally for a moment, I can say that I shall forever be grateful to him for enriching what might well have been an otherwise impoverished adolescence. I vividly remember discovering at age fourteen in a San Francisco bookstore that stupendous avalanche of Victorian erotica, "My Secret Life," in which I was delightfully exposed to a series of sexual escapades, which in their number and sheer physical complexity, staggered the imagination.

What counted most for this buccaneering publisher was less the number of dollars in the bank, than the numberof stars on his forehead. Possessed of unruly curiosities, profound respect for underdogs, a moral preference favoring have-nots over haves, he performed over five decades a kind of miracle: publishing new voices, scandalous voices, repressed voices. A taboo-breaker, fervent and even fevered in his passions and literary instincts, and utterly loyal to his writers, he acted as midwife to the birth of books that would, taken together, stand as a rebuke to the stodginess of received opinion, and a permanent challenge to the orthodoxies of the cultural and political establishment. He provided an engaged and engaging home to misfits of genius, and emboldened a generation of readers to turn themselves inside out and see the world with new eyes.

He was blessed with no gift for publishing strategy but, what was more important, a sensibility: naughty, rebellious, blasphemous, heretical. Moreover, like all good publishers he had an instinct for gifted editors and co-conspirators: Don Allen, Richard Seaver, Fred Jordan, Harry Braverman, Gilbert Sorrentino, Nat Sobel, Kent Carroll, Morrie Goldfisher, Jules Geller, Marilyn Meeker, and Roy Kuhlman, his incomparable designer.

Mere facts don't do justice to the man and his accomplishments. Especially in a corporate age which prizes docility over defiance, he stood for what has always been exemplary in publishing.

For the founding of Grove Press in 1951, the creation of Evergreen Review, among other inspired entrepreneurial efforts, that have immeasurably enriched the republic of letters, the National Book Critics Circle counts it a high honor and privilege to bestow, with gratitude and heartfelt thanks, the Ivan Sandroff Award for Lifetime Achievement to Barney Rosset.