Literchoor Is My Beat: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions

Literchoor Is My Beat: A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions

Ian S. MacNiven

#2140 of 3,809 books · #760 in Biography & Memoir

Shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography (2014).

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. 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.