A letter from Barney Rosset to his parents:

May 6, 1945

Dear Mother and Dad:

It seems that some people doubt whether or not the Chinese soldiers will fight so they urgently wanted pictorial proof. Myself and two of my sergeants went out to get it, and if our film shows what we saw then the whole world can know that the Chinese soldiers will fight

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Lt. Barney Rosset, Army Signal Corps
Self Portrait

In 1944-45, Barney Rosset was an officer in the U.S. Army Signal Corps Photographic Service, based in China. He had enlisted in the army in Chicago in 1942 at the age of twenty. The photographs in this show, taken by the then Lieut. Rosset, have never been publicly shown before.

Rosset's outfit, the 164th Signal Photo Corp, was responsible for covering the photographic history of China, Burma, and India (known as the C.B.I.), and was headquartered in New Delhi, India. At best, personnel had to be spread very thinly over that vast area. Rosset, through luck and his own perseverance, ended up the photo officer at an actual confrontation point between Chinese and Japanese units. Most of these photos were taken in the early summer of 1945 when the Japanese, under pressure from the U.S. forces in the Pacific, had begun a begrudging and slow retreat.

After the war, in 1951, Rosset purchased the small, dead-ended Grove Press, which was brought to his attention by his then-wife, the painter Joan Mitchell. Grove's public fame came initially through its battles against government censorship. Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which Rosset first read in 1940 as a freshman at Swarthmore College, became a matter of central importance in his life; in his mind its publication in this country was imperative.

Grove's publication of D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1959 and Tropic of Cancer two years later were the first and most conspicuous examples of Rosset's determination not only to publish these books but to carry through unprecedented legal battles until they were won. Less noticed then, but equally important, were other authors Grove published during the same years--Samuel Beckett, William Burroughs, Marguerite Duras, and Jean Genet, among many others. These writers, mainly unknown when Grove and its magazine, Evergreen Review, first published them, went on to become central figures in the literature of the twentieth century. Under Rosset, Grove Press developed into one of the most influential publishing companies of its day.