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The great publisher Barney Rosset has passed away. Rosset bought Grove Press in the 1950s, championing the work of countless writers, including: Henry Miller, Samuel Beckett, Jack Kerouac, Malcolm X, Pablo Neruda, Kenzaburo Oe, Kathy Acker, and David Mamet.
In the 1960s, he launched the provocative magazine, Evergreen Review. In a highly recommended interview at The Paris Review, Rosset shared his first encounter with Miller’s work as a college freshman at Swarthmore:
I read Tropic of Cancer, which I bought at Steloff’s Gotham Book Mart on Forty-seventh Street. Who told me about it, I don’t know, but I liked it enormously and I wrote my freshman English paper about both it and The Air Conditioned Nightmare … After I read Tropic of Cancer, I left—decided to go to Mexico. Because the book had influenced me so much, I left in the middle of the term. But I ran out of money. I never got to Mexico; I got as far as Florida and I came back. Four weeks had gone by. They had reported me missing to the United States government. My family didn’t know where I was. I came back, sort of sadly.
(Via Sarah Weinman)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Professor of English and Director of American Studies at Stanford is editor of the 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain, and of The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on His Life and Work (The Library of America), on which the comments that follow are based. She is also the author of From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and imaginative Writing in America, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices, Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture, and A Historical Guide to Mark Twain. We asked Fishkin to contribute to the blog in honor of the centennial of Twain’s death.
Ernest Hemingway said in 1935 that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” But these days, as scholars increasingly focus on transnational dimensions of American culture, perhaps it’s time to look at Twain’s impact on writing outside of America, as well. The fact that this year marks the centennial of Twain’s death, the 175th anniversary of his birth, and the 125th anniversary of the U.S. publication of his most celebrated book makes it a perfect time to widen our angle of vision.
If we set out to look for an American author most likely to achieve a world readership, we would be hard-pressed to find a less promising candidate than Mark Twain at the start of his career. The dialect and slang that filled the title story of first book, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches, struck some early foreign readers as impenetrable. And if they found the dialect and slang of Twain’s first book hard to understand, the insults he hurled at them in Innocents Abroad were, as one German writer put it, “unforgivable.” But Twain broke out of the mold with such original freshness that many Europeans who justly could have been offended were intrigued instead. Indeed, I’ve determined that the first book published anywhere on Twain was published
