Edward De Grazia
Edward De Grazia was a prominent American lawyer, author, and educator known for his significant contributions to First Amendment rights and the fight against censorship. After earning his law degree from the University of Chicago, he specialized in legal cases involving obscenity and the censorship of artistic works. De Grazia is best known for defending controversial publications such as Henry Miller's "Tropic of Cancer" and William S. Burroughs's "Naked Lunch," successfully arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court that these works possessed cultural value and should be protected under the First Amendment.
In addition to his legal practice, De Grazia authored several books on censorship, including "Censorship Landmarks" and "Girls Lean Back Everywhere," the latter of which sparked dialogue with its provocative views on artistic expression. He also contributed to various periodicals and wrote twelve plays throughout his career. As an educator, De Grazia taught at multiple universities, including Yale and Georgetown, and was a founding faculty member of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His advocacy for artistic freedom and censorship rights left a lasting impact on American literature and the arts before his passing in 2013.
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Edward De Grazia
Born: February 5, 1927, Chicago, Illinois
Died:April 11, 2013, Potomac, Maryland
Identification: American attorney, law professor, and author
Significance: A well-known defender of writers and artists accused of obscenity, de Grazia wrote widely on censorship.
After obtaining his law degree from the University of Chicago, de Grazia practiced law, specializing in cases involving the First Amendment, many of which involved censorship of materials deemed by the government as either obscene or pornographic. His most famous cases involved defending the publishers of such works as Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer , William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, and the Swedish film I Am Curious—Yellow.
De Grazia represented publisher Barney Rosset of Grove Press in defense of a 1961 edition of Tropic of Cancer, which was first published in Paris in 1934. The novel, which is sexually explicit, was ruled obscene by lower courts. De Grazia appealed the obscenity rulings before the US Supreme Court, which overturned them in 1964, thus reversing a 1957 ruling that obscenity was not protected by the First Amendment and therefore allowing the publication of the book to proceed. De Grazia’s successful appeal helped expand the range of literature, films, and art available in the United States to include sexually explicit works that also had some degree of cultural, scientific, or social value.
In addition to practicing law, de Grazia also wrote on the subject of censorship, particularly censorship involving the arts. His books include Censorship Landmarks (1969), featuring important censorship cases of the past century; Banned Films: Movies, Censors and the First Amendment (1982; written with Roger K. Newman), giving information about censored motion pictures; and Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius (1992), which contains information from writers and artists who have been censored. The book also contains de Grazia’s controversial opinion that publishers could disseminate child pornography as long as it had artistic or social value and was produced with parental consent. De Grazia wrote twelve plays, and his articles have appeared in such periodicals as the New Republic and the Nation. He taught at American University, Catholic University of America, Georgetown University, University of Connecticut, and Yale. He was among the founding faculty of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in Manhattan, where he taught for thirty years. He was also a member of the PEN American Center’s Freedom to Write Committee.
De Grazia died on April 11, 2013, in Potomac, Maryland. He was eighty-six.
Bibliography
De Grazia, Edward. “How Justice Brennan Freed Novels and Movies during the Sixties.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 8.2 (1996): 259–65. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.
Kincaid, Larry, and Grove Koger. “‘Tropic of Cancer’ and the Censors: A Case Study and Bibliographic Guide to the Literature.” RSR: Reference Services Rev. 25.1 (1997): 31–38, 46. ERIC. 19 Nov. 2015.
Martin, Douglas. “Edward de Grazia, Lawyer Who Fought Censorship of Books, Is Dead at 86.” New York Times. New York Times, 23 Apr. 2013. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.
Sullivan, Kathleen M. “The First Amendment Wars.” New Republic 28 Sept. 1992: 35–40. EBSCO Discovery Service. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.
Thomas, Louisa. “The Most Dangerous Man in Publishing.” Newsweek 15 Dec. 2008: 68–73. EBSCO Discovery Service. Web. 19 Nov. 2015.