Happy 75th Birthday to NEW DIRECTIONS PUBLISHING

New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin, then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard student, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies.  New Directions was intended "as a place where experimentalists could test their inventions by publication.  Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, who once had difficulty finding publishers, were early New Directions authors and have remained at the core of ND's backlist of modernist writers.  Tennessee Williams made his first appearance as a poet in the early Five Young American Poets, which was published by New Directions.  Although New Directions started in the service of verbal revolution, it also reprinted Henry James, E.M. Forster, and Evelyn Waugh when other publishers would not; when no one would print F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Crack Up, ND did; when The Great Gatsby was out of print, New Directions brought it back. New Directions has published nearly 20 of Henry Miller's unorthodox essays and travel books and first printed James Joyce's Stephen Hero, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha, and brought back into print books of such importance as Gary's Promise at Dawn, Henry Green's Back, Joyce Cary's Second Trilogy, and Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts. This tradition is carried on today in our series of New Directions Classics. Begun in 1981, this series has brought back works by Sherwood Anderson, Kay Boyle and H.E. Bates, among many others, and introduced works by little-known European masters such as Eça de Queirós, Krleza, and Kosztolányi.

In addition, ND has relaunched many classics recently with introductions by contemporary authors: these include Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (Introduction by Arthur Miller) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Introduction by Edward Albee), John Hawkes' Second Skin (Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides), and John Gardner's October Light (Introduction by Tom Bissell).

Its authors have won the Nobel Prize (Frédéric Mistral, Eugenio Montale, Pablo Neruda, Saint-John Perse, Octavio Paz, José Camilo Cela), Pulitzer Prize (Richard Eberhart, Selected Poems 1930-1965; George Oppen, Of Being Numerous; Gary Snyder, Turtle Island; Tennessee Williams, A Streetcar Named Desire; William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel), MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (Walter Abish, Allen Grossman, and Ralph Manheim, translator), and the PEN/Faulkner Award (Walter Abish, How German Is it?; Toby Olson, Seaview), among many others.
New Directions authors inducted into the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters include Robert Creeley, James Laughlin and Gary Snyder. James Laughlin was the recipient of the American Academy and Institute Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts, the Annual P.E.N. Publisher Citation, and the National Arts Club Medal of Honor for Literature. In 1980, he was the first winner of the New York State Arts Council James Laughlin Award for distinguished achievement in independent publishing. Laughlin passed away in 1997.
 
New Directions now publishes about 30 books annually in hardcover and paperback.
 
(top photo, from left: Lyn Roberts, Cody Morrison, David Swider, & Richard Howorth outside Square Books)