Giancarlo DiTrapano, Defiantly Independent Book Publisher, Dies at 47

Mr. DiTrapano had tucked it there before putting him in a taxi home.

Giancarlo Veazey DiTrapano was born on Jan. 30, 1974, in Charleston, W.Va. His father, Rudolph, was a prominent plaintiff’s lawyer who also represented The Charleston Gazette. His mother, Martha (Veazey) DiTrapano, was a homemaker. His grandfather Luigi DiTrapano emigrated to the area from Italy in the early 1900s and worked in a coal mine before returning to buy a 17th-century property in Sezze Romano, near Rome, where Giancarlo spent summers as a boy.

In middle school, Giancarlo gave a class presentation about Charles Manson’s past as a frustrated artist. He also began reading the works of William Faulkner and Joseph Conrad. He graduated with a degree in philosophy from Loyola University New Orleans in 1998.

Mr. DiTrapano arrived in New York in 2001, landing an internship at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and he later attended the fabled writing workshops of the editor Gordon Lish, the father of the future Tyrant author Atticus Lish.

Mr. DiTrapano started a literary magazine, New York Tyrant, in 2006, publishing writers like Tao Lin and Sam Lipsyte. He founded Tyrant Books three years later.

In 2015, he met Giuseppe Avallone, a set and costume designer from Salerno, Italy. They married a year later. Mr. DiTrapano soon started running a writers’ workshop at the family home in Sezze Romano.

In addition to his husband and his sister Lia, Mr. DiTrapano is survived by his mother; another sister, Luisa DiTrapano; and a brother, Dante.

Last month, Mr. DiTrapano arrived in New York and checked into the Bowery Hotel for a week of meetings. He was working on the debut books of a group of young writers that he believed marked the arrival of the first wave of Gen Z literary voices.