Edward de Grazia, a lawyer known for defending literary icons in their battles against censorship, particularly in the 1950s and '60s, has died, the New York Times reported. De Grazia helped to defeat government bans on well-known and censored books.
De Grazia died on April 11 in Potomac, Maryland from complications of Alzheimer's disease, his son David said. He was 86.
De Grazia, who taught for 30 years at the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York, defined his life's work as defending "morally defiant artists" against "reactionary politicians and judges," the New York Times reported.
In 1964, de Grazia won a decision by the United States Supreme Court, which overturned a ruling involving Henry Miller's novel Tropic of Cancer, which for years had been deemed obscene. He proved the courts that Miller's work was a valuable artistic piece. The novel had been published in Paris in 1934, and had been banned for many years, and was censored for its sexually explicit content.
De Grazi also defended novelist William Burroughs, involving his novel Naked Lunch. In the Beatnik's defens, de Grazi summoned literary giants Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg to testify in an effort to argue the book's artistic worth. Their testimony helped Burroughs. Also, in the case of Mailer, de Grazi helped free the writer and others from jail when they were arrested during the March on the Pentagon in 1967. In his subsequent 1968 book The Armies of the Night, Mailer described de Grazi as one who "bore a pleasant resemblance to the way Frank Sinatra looked 10 years ago."
In addition to teaching at the Cardozo Law School at Yeshiva University for 30 years until his retirement in 2006, De Grazia also taught at the Catholic University of America, Georgetown, American University and at Yale.
De Grazi is survived by his four children and three grandchildren.
