Mr. Rosset was most identified with his work at Grove Press, the New York-based book publisher he bought in the early 1950s. For the next several decades, he helped introduce a variety of European authors to American audiences, including Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco, Harold Pinter and Jean-Paul Sartre.

More often, he used his company to distribute critically acclaimed but sexually explicit books by D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs and engaged in a series of groundbreaking legal battles that changed the way the government interpreted the First Amendment.

Speaking of Mr. Rosset and his staff at Grove, First Amendment scholar William W. Van Alstyne of the College of William and Mary Law School said, “Their willingness to take risks at the margin of criminal law undoubtedly pushed the envelope and made a positive contribution in the Supreme Court’s gradual rethinking and evolving protection of obscenity.”

In 1959, the federal Post Office Department, the primary government enforcer of obscenity statutes at the time, seized 24 cartons of Grove’s unexpurgated edition of “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Lawrence’s 1928 novel about an aristocrat’s wife who has an affair with a gamekeeper.

“We decided the best thing to do was send the book through the mail so it would be seized by the post office,” Mr. Rosset told the Paris Review in 1997. “We thought this would be the best way to defend the book. The post office is a federal government agency, and if they arrest you, you go to the federal court. That way you don’t have to defend the book in some small town.”

Several months after the confiscation, a federal judge overturned the ban on the book by confirming its “literary merit” and disputing the postmaster general’s finding that it was obscene. An appeals court upheld the decision, agreeing that the novel’s depictions of sex were not prurient because of their importance to the plot.

Mr. Rosset had made “Lady Chatterley’s Lover” a test case because Lawrence, who died in 1930, had earned wide literary respect. Mr. Rosset’s ultimate goal was to publish Miller’s quasi-autobiographical “Tropic of Cancer,” first published in Paris in 1934 and filled with raunchy descriptions of the author’s purported sexual conquests.

Once “Tropic of Cancer” hit stores in 1961, a flurry of charges erupted against Grove and booksellers. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review and reversed the ban against the Miller book in the same ruling.

Mr. Rosset said his court victories on those two books were merely a stepping-stone to continued efforts to confront what he saw as a prudish American society. “Who knows if the limits have been reached?” he told Time magazine in 1965. “Just because the scientists split the atom, did they sit back and say, ‘Well, that’s it’?”