For Richard Seaver, our publisher: with gratitude and respect Billy and Jodie Sinclair From NYTIMES Richard Seaver, an editor, translator and publisher who defied censorship, societal prudishness and conventional literary standards to bring works by rabble-rousing authors like Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade to American readers, died Monday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82. The cause was a heart attack, said his wife of 55 years, Jeannette Seaver. For the past 20 years, Mr. Seaver and his wife ran Arcade Publishing, which has endured to become one of the most prominent independent publishers left in the United States, specializing in works by far-flung and underexposed authors from all over the world. But the mission of Arcade, to publish new voices that seemingly flout the wisdom of the marketplace, was one that Mr. Seaver began pursuing decades earlier. He was a Fulbright scholar in Paris, studying at the Sorbonne in the early 1950s, when he and several other scholars founded a literary quarterly, Merlin, which published, in English, early works by Eugène Ionesco and Jean Genet. In 1952 Mr. Seaver himself wrote an essay extolling the work of a young Irish novelist and then-unknown playwright, Samuel Beckett, that became ...