Lyle Stuart, Publisher of Renegade Titles, Dies at 83
Anthony Ramirez, New York Times
Lyle Stuart, a renegade journalist and publisher whose picaresque life included clashes with Walter Winchell, the publication of Naked Came the Stranger and the decision to print The Anarchist Cookbook, died on Saturday at Englewood Hospital and Medical Center in Englewood, N.J. He was 83 and lived in Fort Lee, N.J.
The cause of death was a heart attack, said his wife, Carole.
In his first career as a journalist in the 1940's and 50's, Mr. Stuart clashed with the powerful columnist Walter Winchell and supported Fidel Castro. In his second, as a publisher, he was notorious for The Anarchist Cookbook. Written by William Powell, the book, which included instructions on making bombs and homemade silencers for pistols, was first released in 1970 at the height of antiwar and anti-establishment protests. Web sites inspired by the book are still proliferating.
Mr. Stuart published the book against his own staff's wishes. "I liked it, but nobody else did — and of course no other publisher would touch it," he told an interviewer in 1978. In 2000, the author, Mr. Powell, told The Observer of London that he disavowed the book, written when he was 19; later, in an open letter on Amazon.com, he called it "a misguided product of my adolescent anger at the prospect of being drafted." But Mr. Stuart, who held the copyright, continued to publish it.
He courted controversy again in 1996 when he reissued The Turner Diaries, an anti-government novel self-published by a neo-Nazi in 1978. It is said to have been a favorite of Timothy J. McVeigh, executed for killing 169 people with a truck bomb in Oklahoma City in 1995.
