This article is about the publisher and poet. For the economist, see James Laurce Laughlin. For the steel industry pioneer, see James Laughlin (industrialist).
He was born in Pittsburgh, the son of Hry Hughart and Marjory Rea Laughlin. Laughlin's family had made its fortune with the Jones and Laughlin Steel Company, founded three gerations earlier by his great grandfather, James H. Laughlin,

And this wealth would partially fund Laughlin's future deavors in publishing. As Laughlin once wrote, none of this would have be possible without the industry of my ancestors, the canny Irishm who immigrated in 1824 from County Down to Pittsburgh, where they built up what became the fourth largest steel company in the country. I bless them with every breath. Laughlin's boyhood home is now part of the campus of Chatham University.
O'laughlin, Matt J.
At The Choate School (now Choate Rosemary Hall) in Wallingford, Connecticut, Laughlin showed an early interest in literature. An important influce on Laughlin at the time was the Choate teacher and translator Dudley Fitts, who later provided Laughlin with introductions to promint writers such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. Harvard University, where Laughlin matriculated in 1933, had a more conservative literary bt, embodied in the poet and professor Robert Hillyer, who directed the writing program. According to Laughlin, Hillyer would leave the room wh either Pound or Eliot was mtioned.
In 1934, Laughlin traveled to France, where he met Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. Laughlin accompanied the two on a motoring tour of southern France and wrote press releases for Stein's upcoming visit to the U.S. He proceeded to Italy to meet and study with Ezra Pound, who famously told him, You're never going to be any good as a poet. Why don't you take up something useful? Pound suggested publishing. Later, Laughlin took a leave of absce from Harvard and stayed with Pound in Rapallo for several months. Wh Laughlin returned to Harvard, he used money from his father to found New Directions, which he ran first from his dorm room and later from a barn on his Aunt Leila Laughlin Carlisle's estate in Norfolk, Connecticut. (The firm oped offices in New York soon after, first at 333 Sixth Avue and later at 80 Eighth Avue, where it remains today.) With funds from his graduation gift, Laughlin dowed New Directions with more money, suring that the company could stay afloat ev though it did not turn a profit until 1946.
The first publication of the new press, in 1936, was New Directions in Prose & Poetry, an anthology of poetry and writings by authors such as William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Elizabeth Bishop, Hry Miller, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevs, and E. E. Cummings, a roster that heralded the fledgling company's future as a preemint publisher of modernist literature. The volume also included a poem by Tasilo Ribischka, a pseudonym for Laughlin himself. New Directions in Prose and Poetry became an annual publication, issuing its final number in 1991.
Best Laughlin, Nv Civil Litigation Attorneys
Within just a few years New Directions had become an important publisher of modernist literature. Initially, it emphasized contemporary American writers with whom Laughlin had personal connections, such as William Carlos Williams and Pound. A born cosmopolitan, though, Laughlin also sought out cutting-edge European and Latin American authors and introduced their work to the American market. One important example of this was Hermann Hesse's novel Siddhartha, which New Directions initially published in 1951. Laughlin oft remarked that the popularity of Siddhartha subsidized the publication of many other money-losing books of greater importance.
Although of draft age, Laughlin avoided service in World War II due to a 4-F classification. Laughlin, like several of his male ancestors and like his son Robert, suffered from depression. Robert committed suicide in 1986 by stabbing himself multiple times in the bathtub. Laughlin later wrote a poem about this, called Experice of Blood, in which he expresses his shock at the amount of blood in the human body. Despite the horrific mess left as a result, Laughlin reasons that he cannot ask anyone else to clean it up, because after all, it was my blood too.
A natural athlete and an avid skier, Laughlin traveled the world skiing and hiking. With money from his graduation gift, he founded the Alta Ski Area in Utah and was part-owner of the resort there for many years. Laughlin also spearheaded the surveying of the Albion-Sugarloaf ski area, along with Alta notables Chic Morton, Alf g, and fellow Ski thusiast and Painter Ruth Rogers-Altmann. At times Laughlin's skiing got in the way of his business. After publishing William Carlos Williams' novel White Mule in 1937, Laughlin left for an extded ski trip. Wh reviewers sought additional copies of the novel, Laughlin was not available to give the book the push it could have used, and as a result Williams nursed a grudge against the young publisher for years. Laughlin's outdoor activities helped other literary fridships, though; for many years he and Kneth Rexroth took an annual camping trip together in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. In the 1960s, Laughlin published Rexroth's frid, the poet and essayist Gary Snyder, also an avid outdoorsman.
Northern California's Best Lawyers 2023 By Best Lawyers
In the early 1950s, Laughlin took part in what has come to be known as the Cultural Cold War against the Soviet Union. With funding from the Ford Foundation and with the assistance of poet and editor Hayd Carruth, Laughlin founded a nonprofit called Intercultural Publications that sought to publish a quarterly journal of American arts and letters, Perspectives U.S.A., in Europe. Sixte issues of the journal evtually appeared. Although Laughlin wished to continue the journal, the Ford Foundation cut off funding, asserting that Perspectives had limited impact and that its money would be better spt on the more effective Congress for Cultural Freedom. Following the dissolution of Intercultural Publications, Laughlin became deeply involved in the activities of the Asia Society.

Pound's advice to Laughlin to give up poetry didn't stick. He published his first book of poetry, Some Natural Things, in 1945, and continued to write verse until his death. Although he never joyed the acclaim that the writers he published received, Laughlin's verse (which is plainspok and focused on everyday experice, reminisct of Williams or ev the Roman poet Catullus) was well-respected by other poets, and in the 1990s The New Yorker published six of his poems. Among his other books are In Another Country, The Country Road, and the posthumous autobiographical poem Byways.
Laughlin won the 1992 Distinguished Contribution to American Letters Award from the National Book Awards Program. The Academy of American Poets' James Laughlin award, for a poet's second book, is named in his honor.
James Laughlin Obituary
Laughlin met Gertrude Huston in 1945 at a Hallowe dance party. Huston worked as a book designer and art director for New Directions. The pair married on December 5, 1990.
Laughlin's correspondce with William Carlos Williams, Hry Miller, Thomas Merton, Delmore Schwartz, Ezra Pound, and others has be published in a series of volumes issued by Norton.Mildred Gillars, the “Axis Sally” of wartime German propaganda broadcasts, confers with James Laughlin, her attorney, outside district court after testifying that because she feared for her life she signed a “written oath of allegiance to German” the…
![]()
Berlin Bitch, Berlin Babe and Axis Sally. The American voice of Nazism became famous among the soldiers on the Western front. Her story is now a movie.
Top Rated Seattle, Wa Employment Litigation Attorney
The story of the quintessential American traitor was recently released on Amazon. Although American Traitor: The Trial of Axis Sally features Al Pacino, who saves the film, it is too weak a showing and falls short of the true story.
Mildred Gillars was born in Maine in 1900, in a well-to-do home. She dropped out of her senior year of college because she dreamed of being an actress.
She lived on apples and crackers to get by, said Richard Lucas, who took five years writing her biography. According to the writer, Mildred collapsed in the middle of rehearsals because she was just emaciated.”

James Laughlin Iii
She then met a British diplomat and left for Algeria, and then left with her mother to Berlin around the time the Nazis came to power. Gillars became fascinated with the enthusiastic and well-heeled uniformed men, and although her mother told her they should return, she stayed.
Through new contacts, she began reviewing films and dubbing them into English. Around this time, Goebbles took control of the cultural scene. The idea was to use media in the service of Nazi propaganda. In 1939, the German Foreign Language Service had 500 employees and the Reich radio broadcast in 14 languages, 24/7.
He joined as an anchor and became a powerful figure. ‘Sally’ played swing and jazz to American soldiers and their wives at home, and would also chide them.
American Traitor: The Trial Of Axis Sally Review: 11 Minutes With A Legend
Really, guys, do you really want to die in Germany? Women, do you want your husbands to be murderers? Because that's what they're becoming, were some of the jabs.
When the war ended, she traded her antiques for food. Intelligence services found her in 1946 in the basement of her home along with her tapes, which would be
0 comments
Post a Comment