In the early 1950s Barney Rosset bought the failing Grove Press and began his lifelong battle against censorship in America. Over the next decade he published such banned books as D.H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, and William Burrough's Naked Lunch. With the publication of Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer in 1962, Rosset successfully fought the legal battles that eventually led to the end of censorship for literary works in this country. In 1957 Rosset began publishing the Evergreen Review, a quarterly serial publication that featured counterculture writers such as Ginsberg, Kerouac, and Burroughs, as well as continental writers not well known to the American public such as Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, and Blaise Cendrars. Grove Press and the Evergreen Review paved the legal way for much of the artistic expression that up to this time would have been subject to censorship by the U.S. Customs Department.
Shown are issues from July-August, 1962, featuring an article about Judge Samuel B. Epstein's decision to allow the publication of Tropic of Cancer and the June 1965 issue that reports on the Boston trial of Naked Lunch.