[4] Before its bankruptcy in 1933 and subsequent reorganization as Liveright Publishing Corporation, Inc., it had achieved considerable notoriety for editorial acumen, brash marketing, and challenge to contemporary obscenity and censorship laws.

It was the first American publisher of William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, E. E. Cummings, Jean Toomer, Hart Crane, Lewis Mumford, Anita Loos, and the Modern Library series.

In addition to being the house of Theodore Dreiser and Sherwood Anderson throughout the 1920s, it notably published T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Isadora Duncan's My Life,[6] Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, Djuna Barnes's Ryder, Ezra Pound's Personae, John Reed's Ten Days That Shook the World, and Eugene O'Neill's plays.

[10] A mix of well-known and hard-to-find literature priced at 60 cents apiece and bound in lambskin, the Modern Library in 1917, according to biographer Walker Gilmer, "reflected the avant-garde influence of [Albert Boni's] Washington Square book-borrowing friends: Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray; Strindberg, Married; Kipling, Soldiers Three; Stevenson, Treasure Island; Wells, The War in the Air; Ibsen, A Doll's House, An Enemy of the People, and Ghosts; France, The Red Lily; de Maupassant, Mademoiselle Fifi, and Other Stories; Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Dostoyevsky, Poor Folk; Maeterlinck, A Miracle of Saint Anthony; and Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism.

The sale of the Modern Library to Bennett Cerf has been noted by biographer Tom Dardis as a critical tactical error and major loss of revenue that likely crippled the firm in their final years of operation.

[15] Though not as politically extreme as Albert Boni, Horace Liveright enjoyed the mantle of radical publisher as he quickly established an openness to new literary trends and avant-garde ideas.

"[18] While The Waste Land would appear on their list in 1922, Boni & Liveright would ultimately give up their pursuit of Ulysses, due to the overwhelming legal challenges surrounding the controversial work.

[20] Despite being commercially risky for the times, Boni & Liveright would introduce many now influential experimental writers to the American reading public, including Cummings, Crane, H.D., Hemingway, and Toomer.

The two Faulkner novels (Soldiers' Pay and Mosquitoes) are considered among the lesser works of the Nobel Prize-winner but still contain modernist devices (such as stream of consciousness) that reflect the direction he took in later fiction.

While most of Liveright's avant-garde publications failed to earn out their advances during the 1920s (Hart Crane would die $210 in debt to the house[21]), O'Neill's plays were frequently amongst the firm's top-selling books.

[23] If publishing the literary new guard brought more acclaim than cash flow to the press, sex, or the suggestion of it, created commercial opportunity for Boni & Liveright.

[24] Yet B&L could not escape the scorn of John Sumner who, as successor to Anthony Comstock at the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, regularly threatened suit against publishers of risqué or prurient material.

[26] Introduced in 1923, the bill broadly defined objectionable literature so any portion of obscene, lewd, or indecent text could serve as sufficient evidence to have a whole work banned.

Liveright was nearly alone amongst New York publishers to publicly oppose the legislation, writing prominent editorials in defense of free speech and leading a contingent of authors, journalists, and lawyers to fight the bill in Albany in April 1923.

[36] Because of its outside status, Boni & Liveright, along with the two other firms founded and run by Jewish-Americans in the late teens – Knopf and Huebsch – took considerably more risks than the established and traditional publishers of the day.

[45] However Pell did retain much of the backlist (including important works by Freud, Toomer, Loos, Cummings, and Crane) in a reorganization of the company called Liveright Publishing Corporation.

[46] That entity remained independent, publishing new books as well as repackaging backlist, until 1969 when it was sold to Harrison Blaine of New Jersey, Inc., a private holding company which also owned The New Republic.