Horace Liveright was a man of puzzling contradictions - a self-professed socialist and a high-living Wall Street gambler, a deeply caring father and a compulsive philanderer.

It was Liveright who first thought of books as front-page news and invented the art of ballyhoo to publicize them. A risk-taker in publishing as well as on Wall Street, Liveright had much to do with the creation of the modern American literary canon. Besides Pound's work, Liveright's firm, Boni and Liveright, brought out T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, all of Eugene O'Neill's plays, Hemingway's In Our Time, Dreiser's An American Tragedy, Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay, and Hart Crane's The Bridge.

Daring the fury of the antivice societies, Liveright published Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell. He relished bringing out books that were deemed obscene or affronts to common decency. Out of all this came seven Nobel Prize-winning authors. Liveright was also the cofounder of the Modern Library.