Laughlin, James, 1914-1997

James Laughlin was an American publisher and poet, and founder of the New Directions press.

The son of a steel manufacturer, Laughlin attended Choate School in Connecticut and Harvard University (B.A., 1939). In the mid-1930s Laughlin lived in Italy with Ezra Pound, a major influence on his life and work; returning to the United States, he founded New Directions in 1936. Initially he intended to publish writings by ignored yet influential avant-garde writers of the period; Pound’s The Cantos and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson were among the works eventually issued by his press.

During the 1940s New Directions also republished out-of-print novels by authors such as Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald. Laughlin’s distinctive paperback editions—with black-and-white covers—of such authors as Dylan Thomas, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Tennessee Williams, and Herman Hesse proved very popular. New Directions also produced a large body of English translations of foreign authors, from classics by French writers such as Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, Arthur Rimbaud, and Charles Baudelaire to modern works by Dazai Osamu, Octavio Paz, and Ernesto Cardenal.

Besides publishing dozens of mid-20th-century poets, Laughlin himself wrote poetry noted for its warmth and imagination; Collected Poems was published in 1992, and Poems appeared posthumously in 1998. Among his prose writings are memoirs of Pound, Random Essays (1989), and Random Stories (1990). He also wrote articles about skiing.