Towards the Meaning of James Laughlin
A symposium exploring the nature of literary history and biography and the role of the archival and oral record in constructing them.
Friday, 9 February 2001, 4pm
Lamont Forum Room, Lamont Library, 5th floor, in Harvard Yard, Harvard University, Cambridge.
Reception follows in the
Houghton Library Exhibition Room.
RSVP (acceptances only): 617.495.2449
This symposium is in conjunction with the Houghton Library's current exhibition:
"Make It New!"
James Laughlin and New Directions Publishing Corporation
(on view through 24 February)
Ian MacNiven, author of Lawrence Durrell: A Biography, has also edited the Durrell-Henry Miller and Durrell-Richard Aldington correspondence. He is now at work on a biography of James Laughlin.
Eliot Weinberger, translator, essyist, and critic is perhaps best known for his translations of Octavio Paz and his work promoting Hispanic literature in the US. A New Directions author, he has been associated with the firm for more than twenty-five years. His latest works are Karmic Verses, a collection of essays, and a translation of Bei Dao's poems, Unlock.
Publisher and poet Jonathan Williams' Jargon Society has, for three decades, explored the fringes of American and British literary culture. He credits James Laughlin for much of his 'literary madness'.
James Laughlin (1914-1997)
New Directions was founded in 1936 when James Laughlin, then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of his New Directions anthologies. Intended "as a place where experimentalists could test their inventions by publication," these volumes continued to appear each year until 1991. Here readers were first introduced to the early work of such writers as William Saroyan, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Merton, John Hawkes, Denise Levertov, James Agee, Bertolt Brecht, Céline, Cocteau, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.
From that precocious start, Mr. Laughlin published the works of several notable authors. Tennessee Williams and, later, Karl Shapiro printed their first works in the Five Young American Poets series. Mr. Laughlin was also interested in issuing new editions of older, influential European writers, sometimes in new translations, often in bilingual editions. An author as well as publisher, Mr. Laughlin wrote a number of poetry books. Click here for a selected bibliography of Mr. Laughlin's work.
