The Tender Hour of Twilight (Hardcover) product details page

Richard Seaver came to Paris in 1950 seeking Hemingway8217;s moveable feast. Paris had become a different city, traumatized by World War II, yet the red wine still flowed, the caf233;s bustled, and the Parisian women found American men exotic and heroic. There was an Irishman in Paris writing plays and novels unlike anything anyone had ever read8212;but hardly anyone was reading them. There were others, too, doing equivalently groundbreaking work for equivalently small audiences. So when his friends launched a literary magazine, Merlin, Seaver knew this was his calling: to bring the work of the likes of Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, and Jean Genet to the world. The Korean War ended all that8212;the navy had paid for college and it was time to pay them back. After two years at sea, Seaver washed ashore in New York City with a beautiful French wife and a wider sense of the world than his compatriots. The only young literary man with the audacity to match Seaver8217;s own was Barney Rosset of Grove Press. A remarkable partnership was born, one that would demolish U.S. censorship laws with inimitable joie de vivre as Seaver and Rosset introduced American readers to Lady Chatterly8217;s Lover, Henry Miller, The Story of O, William Burroughs, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and more. As publishing hurtles into its uncertain future, Seaver8217;s memoir is a stirring reminder of the passion, vitality8212;even the glamour8212; of a true life in literature.