The Connection.

Later reprint of Gelber's hyper-realistic play about drug addicts, first published by the Grove Press in 1960, inscribed by the theatre's founder Judith Malina to the owner of the Press: "For Barney Rosset with loving gratitude for your pioneering work for art & freedom. With love, Judith."

Malina's inscription further notes that it was inscribed "On the occasion of Rosset's visit to the revival of The Connection in 2009 at the Living Theatre on Clinton Street."

The Connection was first performed by the New York-based radical theatre company The Living Theatre, which had been founded in 1947 by Judith Malina (1926-2015) and her husband Julian Beck (1925-1985). In 2009, the company revived Gelber's play to commemorate its 50th anniversary.

Barney Rosset (1922-2012), owner of the Grove Press and editor of the Evergreen Review, was essential in publishing material that challenged the cultural status quo in US of the 1950s and 1960s. "Writers came to Grove because it championed their work in an often hostile environment. In the fifties, repressive obscenity laws made it illegal to publish D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. Rosset deliberately set out to overturn these laws, publishing and defending these books, and others, in court. Over the years, Grove took on hundreds of lawsuits, in the process expanding the range of public discourse" ("Barney Rosset, The Art of Publishing", in The Paris Review, No. 145, 1997).