Barney Rosset

The book publisher who championed the works of beat poets and Samuel Beckett, and who defied censors with the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer, died Tuesday at age 89. Fresh Air remembers Rosset with excerpts from a 1991 interview.

This interview was originally broadcast on Apr. 9, 1991.

Barney Rosset published such controversial works as "Tropic of Cancer" and "Last Exit to Brooklyn," as well as Victorian literature considered by some to be pornographic Several years ago he was forced out of Grove and started his own publishing house, Blue Moon.