In December 1942, two guests at a Lincoln Kirstein mixer bonded over
their shared love of Hart Crane's poetry. One of them was James
Laughlin, the founder of a small publishing company called New
Directions, which he had begun only seven years earlier as a sophomore
at Harvard. The other was a young playwright named Thomas Lanier
Williams, or Tennessee, as he had just started to call himself. A little
more than a week after that first encounter, Tennessee sent a letter to
Jay--as he always addressed Laughlin in writing-- expressing a desire to
get together for an informal discussion of some of Tennessee's poetry. I
promise you it would be extremely simple, he wrote, and we would
inevitably part on good terms even if you advised me to devote myself
exclusively to the theatre for the rest of my life.
So began a deep friendship that would last for forty-one years, through
critical acclaim and rejection, commercial success and failure, manic
highs, bouts of depression, and serious and not-so-serious liaisons.
Williams called Laughlin his literary conscience, and New Directions
serves to this day as Williams's publisher, not only for The Glass
Menagerie and his other celebrated plays but for his highly acclaimed
novels, short stories, and volumes of poetry as well. Their story
provides a window into the literary history of the mid-twentieth century
and reveals the struggles of a great artist, supported in his endeavors
by the publisher he considered a true friend.
