A major figure in independent publishing, he promoted Henry Miller’s once-banned book and helped make “A Confederacy of Dunces” a best seller after the author’s death.
Herman Graf, a major and intrepid figure in independent publishing who sold copies of Henry Miller’s novel “Tropic of Cancer” to bookstores after it was embroiled in a legal fight over whether it was obscene, died on Feb. 27 at his home in Flushing, Queens. He was 91.
His nephew Paul Lichter said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.
Among Mr. Graf’s many other accomplishments in publishing, he helped turn John Kennedy Toole’s satirical novel, “A Confederacy of Dunces,” into a best seller long after the author’s death.
A raconteur with a booming voice, Mr. Graf was a bibliophile who loved the works of Stendhal and Thomas Mann. His apartment in Queens was filled with books, many of them first editions. And he was a relentless, and boisterous, salesman for Grove Press, where he spent the better part of two decades, and Carroll & Graf, the publishing house he later founded with Kent Carroll.
“He was audacious and unafraid,” John Donatich, the director of Yale University Press and a former assistant to Mr. Graf, said in an interview. “He changed people’s minds and made people see things his way, whether he was acquiring a book, selling a book to a foreign publisher or getting a foreign publisher to sell one to him.”
When Mr. Graf arrived as a salesman at Grove Press in 1964, the publishing house, in Greenwich Village, was near the end of a long First Amendment battle over “Tropic of Cancer,” a sexually explicit first-person account of a writer’s life in Paris during the 1920s and ’30s.
Barney Rosset, who as Grove’s risk-loving owner was known for fighting censorship, had paid Miller $50,000 in 1961 for the rights to reprint his novel, which had been published in Paris in 1934 but never legally in the United States.