Wednesday, June 19, 2013

Strange Victories: Grove Press, 1951-1985
Syracuse University Library Special Collections Research Center

Price: Free
Bird Library, 6th Floor
Syracuse University, Syracuse

Strange Victories: Grove Press, 1951-1985 is the first major exhibition on the notorious American publisher Grove Press. Founded by Barney Rosset in 1951, Grove Press became one of the 20th-century's great avant-garde publishing houses. What began as a small independent publisher on Grove Street in New York City's Greenwich Village grew into a multimillion dollar publishing company that has been credited with introducing important authors from around the world to American readers during the postwar period.

Taking its cue from the 1948 film Strange Victory, which Rosset produced in collaboration with left-wing documentary filmmaker Leo Hurwitz after WWII, the exhibition traces the history and evolution of Grove Press, from its role at the center of national censorship trials over the first American editions of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer, to its publication of politically-engaged works including The Wretched of the Earth, Red Star over China, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X, to its scandalous and very profitable Victorian Library. Each book published by Grove, the exhibition reveals, was in its own way, a "strange victory." For while Grove altered the American literary landscape and its relationship to social mores, equality, and freedom of expression, Grove also aggressively deployed savvy marketing strategies, became embroiled in labor union battles, floundered in its own success, and offended the sensibilities of not only "squares," but feminists, Marxists, academics, and many others. Strange Victories tells the complicated story of Grove's many literary and political achievements, whose profound influence on American culture endures today.