Grove Press facts for kids
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| Parent company | Grove/Atlantic |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1951 |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Headquarters location | New York City, New York |
| Distribution | Publishers Group West |
| Publication types | Books |
| Imprints | Black Cat |
Grove Press is an American publishing imprint that was founded in 1947. Imprints include: Black Cat, Evergreen, Venus Library, and Zebra. Barney Rosset purchased the company in 1951 and turned it into an alternative book press in the United States. He partnered with Richard Seaver to bring French literature to the United States. The Atlantic Monthly Press, under the aegis of its publisher, Morgan Entrekin, merged with Grove Press in 1993. Grove later became an imprint of the publisher Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Contents
Early years
Grove Press was founded in 1947 in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, on Grove Street. The original owners only published three books in three years and so sold it to Barney Rosset in 1951 for three thousand dollars.
Literary avant-garde
Under Rosset's leadership, Grove introduced American readers to European avant-garde literature and theatre, including French authors Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Genet, and Eugène Ionesco.
In 1954, Grove published Samuel Beckett's play Waiting for Godot after it had been refused by more mainstream publishers. Since then Grove has been Beckett's U.S. publisher. Grove is also the U.S. publisher of the works of Harold Pinter; in 2006, the company published a collection called The Essential Pinter, which includes Pinter's Nobel Lecture, entitled "Art, Truth and Politics". In 2006, Grove published an anniversary bilingual edition of Waiting for Godot and a special four-volume edition of Beckett's works, with commissioned introductions by Edward Albee, J. M. Coetzee, Salman Rushdie, and Colm Tóibín, to commemorate the centenary of his birth in April 1906).
Grove published most of the American Beats of the 1950s (Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg), in addition to such poets as Frank O'Hara of the New York School and poets associated with Black Mountain and the San Francisco Renaissance, including Robert Duncan. In 1963, Grove published My Life and Loves: Five Volumes in One/Complete and Unexpurgated, with annotations, collecting Frank Harris' work in one volume for the first time.
From 1957 to 1973 Grove published Evergreen Review, a literary magazine whose contributors included Edward Albee, Bertolt Brecht, William S. Burroughs, Albert Camus, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nat Hentoff, LeRoi Jones, John Lahr, and Timothy Leary.
Grove has also from time to time published mainstream works. For example, in 1978 it published the script from the George Lucas film American Graffiti under its Black Cat paperback imprint.
In 1956, Rosset hired Fred Jordan as Grove's business manager. Jordan spent most of the next 30 years at Grove. Later an editor with the press, Jordan oversaw the company's First Amendment lawsuits.
Political works
The defining movements of the 1960s in America—the antiwar, civil rights, black power, counterculture, and student movements in the United States—along with revolutions across the globe, were debated, exposed, and discussed in Grove’s publications. Grove published works by Frantz Fanon and Régis Debray, and numerous books opposing the Vietnam War and the draft.
Film
Grove Press acquired Cinema 16 in 1966. The division was closed in 1985.
Union conflicts
In 1962, Grove had sales of $2 million, but after legal bills, lost $400,000. By 1964, however, they were profitable, and by 1967, Grove went public and built its own headquarters. In 1970, the staff of 150 began organizing a union. Rosset fired some of the organizers (and later re-hired them in arbitration). The organizers responded with a picket line and an occupation of the building. Rosset called the police, and the occupiers were arrested. His editor, Richard Seaver, talked to the pickets and convinced them to disperse. Grove distributed an anti-union information sheet, and the union vote failed, 86–34. After the vote, Grove fired half its workers.
1980s
In 1985, Rosset sold Grove Press to Ann Getty and Sir George Weidenfeld, a British publisher. Rosset was fired a year later.
Notable authors
Book series
- Evergreen Black Cat Books
- Evergreen Books
- Evergreen Profile Books
- Venus Library
- Zebra Books
Novels
- Gold by the Inch (1998)
See also
In Spanish: Grove Press para niños
