“Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions

New Directions founder Laughlin (1914–1997) emerges as a perceptive, if distracted, visionary in this meticulously detailed biography. Though he aspired to be a poet, and eventually published verse and fiction, “J” was persuaded by mentor Ezra Pound to channel his creative ambitions into publishing. In 1936, while still an undergrad at Harvard, he rolled out the first New Directions title, the anthology New Directions in Poetry and Prose, and soon became the primary publisher for Pound, William Carlos Williams, Delmore Schwartz, Kenneth Rexroth, and other modernists whose work usually flew below the radar of most trade publishers. Laughlin’s patrician heritage, as MacNiven (Lawrence Durrell: A Biography) presents it, endowed him with a worldliness that made him receptive to the work of underappreciated literary talents, both here and abroad. MacNiven quotes extensively from Laughlin’s vast correspondence with luminaries, capturing their camaraderie and occasional capricious sulks. While working as a publisher, Laughlin was also trying to run a ski lodge in Utah, write, and keep his neglected family together; there is much here to suggest that New Directions succeeded despite, rather than because of, his abundant energies. Laughlin’s professional and personal lives were so packed with incident that it’s all MacNiven can do to contain the torrents of detail; readers will come away from the book appreciating Laughlin’s impact on 20th-century letters. 16 pages of b&w illus. [em]Agent: Michael Carlisle, Inkwell Management. (Nov.) [/em]