The long-awaited memoirs of New Directions' founder. James Laughlin,
the late founder and publisher of New Directions, was also a poet of
elegance and distinction. At his death in 1997 at the age of
eighty-three, he left unfinished his long autobiographical poem,
Byways. It is no exaggeration to say that his publishing house, which
he began in 1936 while still an undergraduate at Harvard, changed the
way Americans read and write serious literature. Yet the man who
published some of the greatest writers of the twentieth century remained
resistant for most of his life to the memoiristic impulse. In the end he
found his autobiographical voice by adopting the swift-moving line of
Kenneth Rexroth's booklength philosophical poem, The Dragon and the
Unicorn (1952). Byways weaves together family history (the Laughlins
were wealthy Pittsburgh steel magnates), the poet's early memories and
travels in Europe and America with his playboy father, his years at
Harvard, first meetings with Pound, the beginning of his publishing
venture, his reminiscences of close friendships with writers including
W.C. Williams, Thomas Merton, and Kenneth Rexroth, his postwar work in
Europe and Asia with the Ford Foundation as publisher of its
international literary magazine, Perspectives, and not least, his many
early loves.
