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. But no longer—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. A story about the struggle to publish only the best, it is itself an example of literary biography at its finest.
Ian S. MacNiven’s authorized biography of Lawrence Durrell was listed by the New York Times as a Notable Book in 1998, and it was awarded a prize by the city of Antibes in France for the best study on Durrell in the same year, cited as “l’étude le plus complète et la plus pénétrante sur cet auteur méditerranéen.” In the course of researching his biography of Durrell, MacNiven traveled over a period of twenty years from India to California, interviewing hundreds of individuals and visiting all but one of the many places his subject had lived.
MacNiven’s authorized biography of the poet and publisher James Laughlin, “Literchoor Is My Beat”: A Biography of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions, was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014. Earlier, he edited two collections of Durrell’s correspondence with Richard Aldington and Henry Miller. MacNiven is also the author of numerous articles on various figures of literary modernism, and over the years has directed and spoken at conferences on three continents. He is an emeritus professor of literature at SUNY Maritime College, and he currently resides on the west bank of the Hudson, outside Athens, New York.