Laughlin dedicated himself to publishing and keeping in print Ezra Pound's poetry and literary criticism, as well as the writings of William Carlos Williams, Dylan Thomas, George Oppen and Tennessee Williams, while also reprinting Gertrude Stein's Three Lives and Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts. When no one would print F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack-Up, New Directions did. When The Great Gatsby was out of print, New Directions brought it back. Translations of Lolita, Metamorphosis and Siddhartha made foreign writers such as Vladimir Nabokov, Franz Kafka and Herman Hesse familiar to generations of American readers and scholars. As a tribute to Laughlin, the Brown University Program in Creative Writing will host a three-day festival from March 31 through April 2, featuring readings and talks by noted New Directions writers such as Robert Creeley and Walter Abish.
All events are free and open to the public.
It all started with rejection. Laughlin recalled in his short biography. He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. New Directions, with approximately 1,000 titles in print, continues its tradition of publishing new works of fiction and poetry while maintaining a backlist of extraordinary depth and quality. New Directions is the most important independent press around.