The name Richard Seaver may not be widely known outside of publishing, but this champion of cutting-edge literature, who died in 2009, was highly regarded as a purveyor of some of the most important writing of the second half of the 20th century. It began in the 1950s in Paris, where young Seaver went to live cheaply and study as a Fulbright Scholar and ended up consorting with all manner of literati. With some other young Turks, he started the literary magazine Merlin, introducing the English-speaking world to the work of a range of postwar European writers—not least of all, another expatriate by the name of Samuel Beckett. Back in New York in the ‘60s, Seaver worked for Barney Rosset’s daring Grove Press, where he played an important role in the censorship trials over Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s novels, and shepherded the publication of William Burroughs, John Rechy and Henry Selby, among many other wild and original writers.

Seaver’s arresting memoir, The Tender Hour of Twilight, bears the words “publishing’s golden age” in its subtitle, but perhaps “mercurial” would be a more apt adjective to describe the challenges this iconic editor weathered to bring controversial writing to the fore. Proving to be as fine a writer as he was an editor, Seaver recounts many charming anecdotes about his personal and professional lives—which, really, were inextricably linked. Being roused from his sleep by a drunken stranger named Brendan Behan banging on the door of his shabby Paris digs; tracking down the elusive, largely unknown Beckett; battling legal windmills with Rosset; courting a young French woman, Jeannette Medina, who would become his devoted wife and partner-in-literary-crime for over five decades (and editor of this posthumous volume)—Seaver conjures a magical time before publishing became engulfed by corporate interests, when a talented young man with a vision could make his mark.

Full disclosure: I had a passing acquaintance with Seaver when I worked at Holt, Rinehart and Winston under his stewardship, and I remember him as a refined gentleman whose unassuming demeanor belied the fact that he had brought to light some of the most unapologetically raw writing of the age. Like the man, The Tender Hour of Twilight is often self-deprecating and always civilized. It is a paean to a time that can never be replicated, a book that will appeal to anyone who savors  the literary life.

“Somehow, this time, I would make it work.” That’s the quiet plea of 12-year-old Mikey Walsh, desperate to fit in with his Romany Gypsy family. Such is the power of Walsh’s fantastic memoir, Gypsy Boy, that your heart breaks for his empty hope. Being an outsider is bad enough, but Walsh (a pseudonym) reveals the special hell that is being a pariah in a band of outsiders—and the courage required to start anew.

Walsh’s destiny is sealed as soon as he is born. Like his father, Frank, the boy is meant to become a bare-knuckle boxer, continuing a grand family tradition of clueless pugilists. But it never happens; Mikey never responds to Frank’s abusive boxing lessons, which begin at age four and segue into a bloody blur of nonstop torture. Then Mikey, vulnerable and ignored by his family, becomes the target of his Uncle Joseph’s deviant sexual urges, and can do nothing to stop the much larger man.

In the testosterone-driven Gypsy world, Mikey is an outlier and he’s gay—which is literally life-threatening. If his father ever thought Mikey’s homosexuality was real, “rather than just the worst insult he could think of, he would go ballistic and would, almost certainly, kill me.” Walsh must flee, though he has no idea how; formal education and marrying for love remain mystifying, disdainful concepts in this dangerous environment governed by backward traditions.

Yet it’s the only world he knows, and flowers do bloom there: his salty mom, adventures with his sister, the occasional promising glimpse of friendship. It’s a testament to Walsh’s skill that he portrays his hopelessness so eloquently, without wallowing in sordid self-pity. His understated, lyrical sentences carry the book. You remember the little touches as well as the giant horrors: a magical, midnight car ride to London that serves as Walsh’s youthful salvation, the small gift from a friendly teacher that represents a nearly incomprehensible generosity. “We were all old before our time,” Walsh writes. “That’s the way we lived.”

The last portion of Walsh’s riveting book shows him breaking away from the Gypsy culture. It exacted a heavy price. But as an arts teacher living in London who recently married his partner, Walsh has finally made it work.