Lady Chatterly's Lover and Beckett: Bless Barney Rosset's heart.

Guardian:

Barney Rosset, who has died aged 89, was the most influential avant-garde publisher of the 20th century. He was also one of the boldest, in his willingness to question the laws governing censorship. His decision, as head of Grove Press, to challenge the ban on DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover in 1959 led to the novel being published legally in the US for the first time, a year before the British edition. Having won the battle, Rosset immediately set about bringing Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer to American bookbuyers. Another trial involved William Burroughs's Naked Lunch.

Among the first authors to be signed by Grove was Samuel Beckett, in 1953.

As well as supplying the publisher with novels and plays that would sell in great numbers, Beckett also provided a moral example: "I hope you realise what you are letting yourself in for," he wrote in reply to Rosset's expression of interest. His novels had proved unsaleable, his plays unperformable. All were difficult in ways "which I am not at all disposed to mitigate". The same intransigence emanated from Miller.

Rosset was born in Chicago, the son of a banker whose bequest to his errant son was to prove instrumental in the shaping of modern literature. Having graduated from the University of Chicago, Rosset served in the US Army Signal Corps. Afterwards, using $250,000 of family money, he made a feature film, Strange Victory (1948), which was a commercial flop.