Anti-Censorship Attorney Edward de Grazia -- RIP

Edward de Grazia
(photo: The New York Times)

Attorney Edward de Grazia, whose trailblazing legal initiatives expanded free speech in the United States, died recently at age 86. The New York Times' obit offers a succinct overview of the barrister's active, profoundly influential career.

He successfully represented Grove Press in its 1964 landmark censorship case involving Henry Miller's novel Tropic of Cancer. De Grazia was also the attorney who led the fight against the U.S. Postal Service's attempt to prohibit dissemination of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch. He also won a court case that permitted public showings of the movie I Am Curious (Yellow).

It's easy to look back at these cases and imagine there was something quaint in the legal issues and moral fervor they generated. However, at the time, de Grazia's work was absolutely essential to establishing free speech in literature and motion pictures. This was serious business, with high stakes for open, creative minds. Had de Grazia lost these key cases, the cause of artistic and literary freedom would have been stunted. The consequence of de Grazia's extraordinary legal work can be found today in libraries, bookstores, museums, movie theaters, the stage, the ballet, television, radio, music, and the Internet. The politically conservative forces opposed to de Grazia's legal positions survived and have even prospered. So has the nation, which religious and political ideologues falsely asserted was simply dissipating in a morass of what they considered "pornographic works," such as those of Henry Miller and James Joyce.

De Grazia's passing is a reminder that the struggle to maintain free speech continues. It's the present generation -- people such as you and I -- that must carry the torch that Edward de Grazia so proudly and decisively held high for all Americans.

Larry McMurtry Auctions 300,000 Books

Larry McMurtry (photo from LA Times)

Larry McMurtry has led a charmed life, as authors' professional lives go. He's produced commercially successful books for over a generation. A number of works have achieved critical recognition, notably his Pulitzer Prize winning novel Lonesome Dove. Some of the Texan author's books have become fully realized movies, with The Last Picture Show and Brokeback Mountain among the best known projects. McMurtry has also opened and continues to operate an independent bookstore. If the adage "do what you love, and the money will follow" has any practical substance, McMurtry's activities would qualify to support it.

The 76-year-old author-businessman, who recently married Ken Kesey's widow, recently decided to auction two-thirds of his bookstore's 450,000-unit inventory. His rationale, according to a Reuters story picked up by the Chicago Tribune, was estate management. The decision had nothing to do with e-books, declining patronage, or "content yearns to be free" ideology.

Commercially successful authors such as McMurtry are increasingly becoming business enterprises. In that way, writers now mirror other highly individualized talent, such actors and athletes. "Personal branding" will only exacerbate this trend toward sophisticated business structures. We've come a long way from Henry Miller and Anais Nin, whose erotic works were among the items sold at McMurtry's auction.