Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
Even before establishing "New Directions", James Laughlin had met and studied with Ezra Pound. These selected letters capture the spirit of their growing relationship from pupil and teacher to publisher and author. Pound's correspondence summons up the inner man and the literary figure. Literature, music, friends and politics fill his pages.
Synopsis
Ezra Pound and James Laughlin: Selected Letters is a modernist source book - essential reading for anyone interested in tracing the real development of twentieth-century literature.
About the Author
New Directions has been the primary publisher of Ezra Pound in the U.S. since the founding of the press when James Laughlin published New Directions in Prose and Poetry 1936. That year Pound was fifty-one. In Laughlin's first letter to Pound, he wrote: "Expect, please, no fireworks. I am bourgeois-born (Pittsburgh); have never missed a meal. . . . But full of 'noble caring' for something as inconceivable as the future of decent letters in the US." Little did Pound know that into the twenty-first century the fireworks would keep exploding as readers continue to find his books relevant and meaningful.James Laughlin (1914-1997) founded New Directions in 1936 while still a student at Harvard. He wrote and compiled more than a dozen books of poetry as well as stories and essays; seven volumes of his correspondence with his authors are available from W.W. Norton.