Larry Flynt, a ninth-grade dropout who built a $US400 million ($518 million) empire of raunchy publications, strip clubs and “adult” shops around his sexually explicit magazine Hustler, and spent decades battling obscenity and libel charges as a self-promoting champion of freedom of the press, died Wednesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 78.

The cause was heart failure, said his brother, Jimmy Flynt.