Dick Seaver

Richard “Dick” Seaver, who defied legal censorship and cultural prudishness in a long career as an editor, translator, and publisher of avant garde writers including Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, and William Burroughs, died of a heart attack at his home in Manhattan last night at the age of 82. As a New York Times obituary by Bruce Weber notes, Seaver was one of the leading lights of American independent  publishing, becoming known in the fifties for his work at Grove Press, and subsequently founding Arcade Publishing with his wife of 55 years, Jeannette Seaver. Adding to his long list of well-known credits, Jeannette Seaver has revealed something else to the Times that her husband kept secret: he was the mysterious “Sabine d’Estrée,” the anonymous translator of one of the sixites’ biggest books: The Story of “O”.