Richard Grossman

SALISBURY — Richard Grossman, born June 26,1921, in Chicago, Ill., died on Jan. 27, 2014, at Noble Horizons. He was 92. Mr. Grossman moved to Salisbury in 1978 from New York City, where he pursued careers as a book publisher and medical educator. He attended the University of Pennsylvania (pre-med) and the College of the City of New York, but left for financial reasons during the Depression, finally finishing his bachelor’s degree at Columbia Pacific University in California in 1987. He served in World War II in the Army Signal Corps. Hiroshima turned him into a pacifist and political activist. He joined the War Resisters League and, during the Vietnam War, refused to pay a portion of his taxes, and frequented draft-card burnings while wearing his World War II medals. After the war, he moved to Canton, Ohio, and founded his own advertising agency. In 1953, through a family connection, he joined Simon and Schuster, starting as assistant to Richard Simon and rising to vice president. He founded his own firm, Grossman Publishers, in 1962, in a basement apartment in Manhattan. Grossman Publishers was well-known for its photography monographs, by Andre Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa and Leonard Freed, among others. Having his own imprint finally gave Mr. Grossman the scope to air his nonestablishment viewpoint. The firm’s runaway best-seller was Ralph Nader’s “Unsafe at Any Speed,” a devastating critique of the automobile industry. Mr. Nader has been quoted as saying that the book showed “the cruelty of the modern corporation.” “Unsafe” was rushed to publication within two months, because, according to Nader, the release date would coincide with Congressional hearings that led to the passage of federal automobile safety standards. Sales increased exponentially when the media exposed General Motors’ campaign to harass and intimidate Nader. Grossman Publishers merged with Viking Press in 1968, and continued to publish books by Mr. Nader and his associates on air and water pollution, food and drugs, pesticides and coal-mine safety, all of which helped lead to major legislation. By the late 1960s, Mr. Grossman had met and published humanistic psychologist Abraham Maslow, who became his mentor, and inspired his next major career change. “Like Abraham Maslow, I felt the human race had been shortchanged for centuries. We know about darkness, but no one explored the healthy personality. I had published the humanistic writers and understood the new therapies, but in 1974 I decided to leave publishing and learn the pragmatic stuff.”Recruited to Montefiore Hospital’s Residency Program in Social Medicine by Harold Wise, a pioneer in the field, Mr. Grossman began teaching alternative therapies (Chinese medicine, homeopathy, herbalism, etc.) to medical residents. He believed these alternative systems were complementary to Western medicine: “not either/or,” he often said, “but both/and.” In the 1990s, he served on the faculty of the family medicine department at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, and was a group leader in the Washington-based Smith Center for Healing and the Arts’s program for cancer patients. He started a psychotherapy and health counseling practice, with offices in New York and Salisbury. He wrote a number of books, including “Choosing and Changing: A Guide to Self-Reliance” and “The Other Medicines.” Most recently he published “A Year with Emerson: A Daybook” and “The Tao of Emerson.” Emerson had been his bedside reading for decades. At his death, he was writing a book on aging modeled on Ambrose Bierce’s satirical reference work, “The Devil’s Dictionary.” Grossman’s working title: “The Codger’s Dictionary.”Richard Grossman is survived by his wife, novelist Ann Arensberg; and three daughters from his first marriage, Jo Grossman of Housatonic, Mass., Nancy Nagle of East Hampton, N.Y., and Lucy Rochambeau of New York and East Hampton.