Richard Woodward Seaver, 1926–2009, was born in Watertown, Connecticut, on December 31, 1926. After graduating from the University of North Carolina, Seaver was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to France, studying at the Sorbonne in Paris in the early 1950s while he wrote his dissertation on James Joyce. It was there that he met his wife, Jeannette Medina, whom he married in 1953. Seaver worked at Grove Press through the 1970s and then founded his own imprint at Viking before launching Arcade Publishing in 1988. He became an important American translator, editor, and publisher who defied censorship and was instrumental in bringing works by Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, the Marquis de Sade, William Burroughs, Jean Genet, D. H. Lawrence, Jack Kerouac, Octavio Paz, and Eugéne Ionesco, among others, to the attention of American readers. He died in Manhattan, New York, on January 5, 2009.