Barnet Lee "Barney" Rosset, Jr. (May 28, 1922 – February 21, 2012) was a pioneering American book and magazine publisher. An avant-garde taste maker, he purchased Grove Press in 1951, and founded Evergreen Review in 1957, both of which gave him platforms for curating world-class and, in several cases, Nobel prize-winning work by authors including Samuel Beckett (1969), Pablo Neruda (1971), Octavio Paz (1990), Kenzaburō Ōe (1994) and Harold Pinter (2005).

A voracious reader and a resourceful editor, Rosset was the first to publish Beat poets Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a who's who of playwrights including Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, political biographies like Alex Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, erotic literature like the Story of O, groundbreaking gay fiction by Jean Genet, and banned classics such as Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Rosset's insistence on publishing "banned" books permanently redefined American obscenity law. "To do Lady Chatterley's Lover before Tropic of Cancer would be more acceptable because D.H. Lawrence was a famous writer and revered at many levels," Rosset said in 2009, explaining his tactical reasoning after the fact. "Lady Chatterley would be more feasible to make a battle plan for, and we did exactly that," starting with an uncensored version of Lady Chatterley's Lover, thirty years after its initial U.K. publication. After his first victory, Rosset moved on to the second, waging another legal battle to publish Miller's Tropic of Cancer. In 1964, the Supreme Court affirmed Rosset's right to publish Miller's book. France later inducted him as a Commandeur dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres to honor his contributions to American and world literature; the Norman Mailer Prize was given to him for his work as a "Distinguished Publisher" and the National Coalition Against Censorship recognized him for his contributions to free speech.

In 1951, Rosset purchased Grove Press from editor Robert Phelps. As a publisher, Rosset's taste was sophisticated, multicultural, experimental and literary. As a brand, Grove focused on avant-garde literature, radical politics and erotica. In an interview with Tin House publisher Win McCormack, Rosset described what spurred him to publish Beckett:

In 1959, Rosset published D.H. Lawrence's 1928 novel Lady Chatterley's Lover, which the United States had banned in 1929, on the grounds of obscenity. After the book was released, the U.S. Post Office began confiscating copies sent through the mail, which led Grove Press to take legal action — and win. Emboldened, Rosset subsequently decided to publish Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which was first published in France in 1934, and immediately banned by the U.S. Customs Service from being imported into the U.S., again, on grounds of obscenity. So in 1961, Rosset published it. "[L]awsuits were immediately filed against him and booksellers that chose to carry the controversial novel. The trial eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ruled in Rosset's favor."

In an interview with the Brooklyn Rail, Rosset described the courtroom experience:

Launched in 1957, Evergreen Review also pushed the limits of censorship, impacting the culture at large by inspiring younger Americans to embrace the counterculture. Grove Press published Beat Generation writers, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, John Rechy, Hubert Selby, Jr. and Jack Kerouac. Rosset also purchased the American distribution rights to the Swedish film I Am Curious (Yellow), which had also briefly been banned in Boston, and later found not to be obscene in a Second Circuit Ruling. The Review shuttered in 1984, only to relaunch in 1998 online and under Rosset's management.

One thing I like about this new form of communication [online] is that you can have an article about, say, the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago like any magazine, but you can also listen to the kind of music they were playing at the time. We can go into new realms of discourse.... They say there's still not enough memory for things like sound and visuals on the Internet, and it costs too much to put a magazine on-line. But that's all going to change fast. To get some idea of how fast, all you have to do is go to Bangkok and see all the poor people selling melons on the streets; and they all have cellular phones.