James Laughlin
James Laughlin was an influential American lyric poet and a prominent publisher, born on October 30, 1914, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Coming from a wealthy family linked to the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation, he received a varied education, which included time in Switzerland and at the Choate School in Connecticut. He later attended Harvard University, where he became disillusioned with the lack of modernist literature courses. This led him to Europe, where he worked with notable figures, including Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, the latter of whom encouraged him to pursue publishing.
In 1936, Laughlin founded New Directions, a publishing company that became known for its commitment to modernist and contemporary authors, publishing over a thousand works, including his own poetry. Throughout his career, he published celebrated writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Henry Miller, and Pablo Neruda. His contributions to literature earned him several prestigious accolades, including the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Laughlin continued to write and lecture at various universities until his death on November 12, 1997, leaving behind a legacy as a key figure in 20th-century literature and publishing.
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James Laughlin
Poet
- Born: October 30, 1914
- Birthplace: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
- Died: November 12, 1997
- Place of death: Norfolk, Connecticut
Biography
James Laughlin, a lyric poet and one of the most important publishers of the twentieth century, was born on October 30, 1914, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His family’s long- standing fortune was made in the Jones and Laughlin Steel Corporation. His parents, Marjory Rea Laughlin and Henry Hughart Laughlin, raised him in Pittsburgh before sending him to school in Switzerland. Laughlin then enrolled at the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut, where he edited the school’s literary magazine and discovered the newly published work of many important modernist writers. After entering Harvard University in 1933, he was disappointed to find that there were no courses on these writers; in fact, one of Laughlin’s teachers would leave the room whenever anyone mentioned the names of poets Ezra Pound or T.S. Eliot. Laughlin left Harvard and returned to Europe, becoming a chauffeur for author Gertrude Stein in France and studying under Pound in Rapallo, Italy.
Pound recommended that Laughlin give up poetry and try publishing; fortunately, Laughlin took the latter advice but not the former. He returned to Harvard and, with money from his father, began New Directions, his publishing company, in 1936. Laughlin eventually published more than a thousand volumes under the New Directions imprint; his first was New Directions in Prose and Poetry (1936), a collection of modernist writings. This title became the first in a series that continues today and included some of Laughlin’s own poems, under the pseudonym Tasilo Ribischka. The first volume of his poetry, The River, was published in 1938. The following year, Laughlin earned an A.B. degree from Harvard and published his own translation of Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. By the time of Laughlin’s graduation from Harvard, New Directions had already published more than a dozen books.
Laughlin married Margaret Keyser in 1942; the couple had two children but divorced in 1952. He served as president of Intercultural Publications (sponsored by the Ford Foundation) from 1952 to 1969, editing the magazine Perspectives USA. On May 19, 1957, Laughlin married Ann Clark Resor, with whom he had two more children. He traveled extensively, lecturing at more than thirty universities, including the University of Iowa and Brown University.
However, his publishing was always foremost. Laughlin became Vladimir Nabokov’s first American publisher and published the works of Pound, Henry Miller, Djuna Barnes, Dylan Thomas, Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Yukio Mishima, Pablo Neruda, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and many others, as well as reprinting the works of more traditional authors such as Evelyn Waugh and Henry James. Laughlin was awarded an honorary doctorate from Yale University in 1982, and the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1992. He won the Legion of Honor award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award. His Selected Poems, 1935-1985 came out in 1986, and The Collected Poems of James Laughlin in 1994. Laughlin died at the age of eighty-three on November 12, 1997, in Norfolk, Connecticut, of complications following a stroke. He was survived by his third wife, Gertrude Huston Laughlin, and three children.