While Grove Press was founded on Grove Street in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1947, its true beginning came in 1951 when risk-taker Barney Rosset, Jr., purchased it and turned it into one of the most influential publishers of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.Under Rosset’s guidance, and together with editors Fred Jordan, Richard Seaver, and others, Grove Press published many of the Beats, including William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Ginsberg. Grove soon became the preeminent publisher of twentieth-century drama in America, publishing playwrights including Bertolt Brecht, Eugène Ionesco, Harold Pinter, and Tom Stoppard.In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Rosset challenged United States obscenity law by publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady...