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A biography, thoughtful and playful, of the man who founded New Directions and transformed American publishing.
James Laughlin-poet, publisher, world-class skier, was the man behind some of the most daring, revolutionary works in verse and prose of the twentieth century. As the founder of New Directions, he published Ezra Pound's The Cantos and William Carlos Williams's Paterson; he brought Hermann Hesse and Jorge Luis Borges to an American audience. Throughout his life, this tall, charismatic intellectual, athlete, and entrepreneur preferred to stay hidden. But no longer-in "Literchoor Is My Beat": A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions, Ian S. MacNiven has given us a sensitive and revealing portrait of this visionary and the understory of the last century of American letters.
Laughlin-or J, as MacNiven calls him-emerges as an impressive and complex figure: energetic, idealistic, and hardworking, but also plagued by doubts-not about his ability to identify and nurture talent but about his own worth as a writer. Haunted by his father's struggles with bipolar disorder, J threw himself into a flurry of activity, pulling together the first New Directions anthology before he'd graduated from Harvard and purchasing and managing a ski resort in Utah.
MacNiven's portrait is comprehensive and vital, spiced with Ezra Pound's eccentric letters, J's romantic foibles, and anecdotes from a seat-of-your-pants era of publishing now gone by. A story about the struggle to publish only the best, it is itself an example of literary biography at its finest.
James Laughlin-poet, publisher, world-class skier, was the man behind some of the most daring, revolutionary works in verse and prose of the twentieth century. As the founder of New Directions, he published Ezra Pound's The Cantos and William Carlos Williams's Paterson; he brought Hermann Hesse and Jorge Luis Borges to an American audience. Throughout his life, this tall, charismatic intellectual, athlete, and entrepreneur preferred to stay hidden. But no longer-in "Literchoor Is My Beat": A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions, Ian S. MacNiven has given us a sensitive and revealing portrait of this visionary and the understory of the last century of American letters.
Laughlin-or J, as MacNiven calls him-emerges as an impressive and complex figure: energetic, idealistic, and hardworking, but also plagued by doubts-not about his ability to identify and nurture talent but about his own worth as a writer. Haunted by his father's struggles with bipolar disorder, J threw himself into a flurry of activity, pulling together the first New Directions anthology before he'd graduated from Harvard and purchasing and managing a ski resort in Utah.
MacNiven's portrait is comprehensive and vital, spiced with Ezra Pound's eccentric letters, J's romantic foibles, and anecdotes from a seat-of-your-pants era of publishing now gone by. A story about the struggle to publish only the best, it is itself an example of literary biography at its finest.
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Reviews
"As the storied founder of the publishing house New Directions, James Laughlin caught butterfiles with Vladimir Nabokov, went swimming with Ezra Pound and quarreled with Henry Miller . . . And in the thick of it it all, he published some of the most important books of the twentieth century. In "Literchoor Is My Beat," Ian MacNiven's meticulous and informative biography, the life of this tireless litterateur and athlete resembles nothing so much as a ski trip: a thrilling rush through a rarefied atmosphere."
Abigail Deutsch, The Wall Street Journal
"As Ian S. MacNiven . . . ably demonstrates in this impeccable biography, Laughlin was a born publisher, whose work 'shaped English-language modernist poetry.' . . . 'Literchoor Is My Beat' looks at Laughlin's low points, too, such as his failures as a husband and struggles through a number of financial crises. But it's hard to pull focus from the authors he championed: Hermann Hesse, Thomas Merton (his good friend), Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Paul Bowles and Pablo Neruda. It's an amazing story, and MacNiven tells it brilliantly with depth, grace and acuity."
Tom Lavoie, Shelf Awareness