Barney Rosset, the American publisher who fought countless legal actions against banned books and ran Grove Press, has died at 89, reports the NY Times. Newer generations of readers may not be familiar with him but readers of the 1960s and 1970s should know him.

He defied censors in the 1960s by publishing D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, ultimately winning legal victories that opened the door to sexually provocative language and subject matter in literature published in the United States. He did the same thing on movie screens by importing the sexually frank Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow).” Mr. Rosset called Grove “a breach in the dam of American Puritanism.”