New Directions Publishing

Based on Wikipedia: New Directions Publishing

The Publisher That Changed American Literature Started as a Piece of Advice

In 1936, a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore named James Laughlin approached Ezra Pound—the cantankerous, brilliant, and deeply controversial poet who had already reshaped modernist literature—looking for guidance. Pound's advice was blunt: stop dabbling and "do something useful." What Laughlin did next would alter the course of American publishing for nearly a century.

He started a publishing company.

New Directions Publishing, born from that offhand remark, became the house that introduced American readers to some of the most important literary voices of the twentieth century. Vladimir Nabokov. Jorge Luis Borges. Henry Miller. These writers found their first American home at New Directions, years before they became household names. The company operated from the premise that literature should challenge, provoke, and expand consciousness—a radical position in an industry often driven by commercial calculations.

The Anthology as Laboratory

Laughlin's first move was characteristically unconventional. Rather than betting on individual books, he created a series of anthologies called New Directions in Poetry and Prose. These volumes functioned as literary laboratories, gathering experimental work from writers who hadn't yet found their audiences. The early anthologies included Dylan Thomas, whose dense Welsh lyricism was virtually unknown in America. Marianne Moore appeared in these pages, as did Wallace Stevens, whose insurance-executive-by-day, poet-by-night existence seemed impossibly romantic to young readers. Thomas Merton, who would later become famous for his writings on monasticism and Eastern spirituality, published early work here. So did Denise Levertov, James Agee, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

Think about what this meant in practical terms. A young reader in 1940 could pick up a single volume and encounter the future of American literature, all collected in one place. No algorithm recommended these writers. No bestseller list validated them. Laughlin simply believed they mattered, and he was right.

The Poet-of-the-Month Club

Laughlin had an entrepreneurial streak that manifested in curious ways. He launched a "Poet of the Month" series—thin pamphlets containing either a single long poem or a small collection, delivered to subscribers on a monthly basis. Once a year, he'd release a more substantial "Poet of the Year" volume. The model didn't survive long. Subscription-based literary publishing has always struggled in America, where readers tend to want books they can hold and shelve rather than ephemeral mailings that pile up on kitchen counters.

But the experiment revealed something about Laughlin's philosophy. He saw poetry not as a rarefied art form for specialists, but as something that could be delivered like milk or newspapers—a regular part of intellectual life. The series failed commercially. Philosophically, it was ahead of its time.

He tried other experiments too. A quarterly journal called Directions launched in 1941, each issue devoted entirely to a single author or work. Early editions featured Vladimir Nabokov's short stories and a play by William Carlos Williams. Again, the subscription model faltered, and later issues were sold individually. Another periodical, Pharos, lasted only four issues before Laughlin pulled the plug in winter 1947.

These failures matter because they show a publisher willing to take risks, adjust, and try again. The successful experiments—the anthologies, the individual books—emerged from a willingness to absorb losses on the unsuccessful ones.

A House for the Homeless

New Directions developed a specialty that made it indispensable: rescuing important books that had fallen out of print. Through series called "New Classics" and "Modern Readers," Laughlin reissued works that commercial publishers had abandoned. James Joyce's Exiles and Stephen Hero—neither as famous as Ulysses or Dubliners, but essential for understanding Joyce's development—found new life through New Directions. So did F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, which seems astonishing today given that novel's iconic status, but which had actually gone out of print by the time Laughlin rescued it.

This is worth pausing on. The Great Gatsby—the novel we now consider the quintessential American story of ambition and disillusionment, assigned in virtually every high school English class—was unavailable to readers until a small independent publisher decided it deserved better. The book's current reputation owes something to Laughlin's intervention.

The Visual Identity of the Avant-Garde

After World War Two, New Directions forged a partnership with the artist Alvin Lustig that would define the company's visual identity for decades. Lustig created modernist abstract book jackets that announced, before readers opened a single page, that they were entering unconventional territory. His designs were bold, geometric, and slightly unsettling—perfect for books that aimed to unsettle.

Lustig later taught at Black Mountain College, that legendary experimental school in North Carolina where artists, poets, and composers gathered to push boundaries. One of his students, Ray Johnson—who would later become known as the father of mail art—designed covers for New Directions, including Arthur Rimbaud's Illuminations in 1957. The visual lineage connected the company to the broader avant-garde movement, making New Directions books instantly recognizable on shelves.

The company's logo, still in use today, is a centaur—that mythological creature half-human, half-horse—based on a sculpture by Heinz Henghes. It appears on the spine of New Directions books, a small mark that signals to knowing readers: this is one of ours.

The Nobel Connection

One measure of a literary publisher's significance is how many of its authors later win major prizes. By this standard, New Directions has been extraordinarily successful. The roster of Nobel Prize winners who published with the company reads like a syllabus for a course on twentieth-century world literature.

Hermann Hesse, whose Siddhartha became a counterculture touchstone, won in 1946. André Gide won the following year. Boris Pasternak—whose Doctor Zhivago was suppressed in the Soviet Union and smuggled out for Western publication in a story worthy of a spy novel—won in 1958. Jean-Paul Sartre won in 1964, though he famously refused the prize, calling it a tool of Cold War cultural politics. Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet whose love poems are recited at weddings around the world, won in 1971. Yasunari Kawabata brought recognition to Japanese literature when he won in 1968. Octavio Paz, Eugenio Montale, Elias Canetti, Camilo José Cela, Tomas Tranströmer—the list continues through the decades.

Most recently, László Krasznahorkai won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2025. The Hungarian novelist, known for his hypnotic, labyrinthine sentences and apocalyptic vision, has been a New Directions author for years. His recognition represents a continuity stretching back to the company's founding: a commitment to international voices, difficult work, and literature that refuses to comfort.

American Voices

The Pulitzer Prize winners tell another story—this one centered on American literature. Tennessee Williams won twice, in 1948 and 1955, for plays that excavated the wounded psyches of Southern families. What's often forgotten is that Williams first appeared in print as a poet, in a New Directions poetry collection, before he turned to drama. The company saw his talent before Broadway did.

William Carlos Williams—no relation to Tennessee, despite the shared surname—won in 1963, recognition for a lifetime of work that reimagined what American poetry could sound like. His famous declaration "no ideas but in things" became a rallying cry for poets who wanted to ground their work in concrete reality rather than abstraction. George Oppen won in 1969. Gary Snyder, the Beat poet who became an environmental sage, won in 1975.

More recent winners include Hilton Als, the New Yorker critic whose essays on race, sexuality, and performance have made him one of the most influential cultural voices of his generation. John Keene, whose Counternarratives reimagined forgotten Black lives from history, won both a MacArthur "genius grant" and numerous other awards.

The International Scope

Walk into the New Directions office—still located at 80 Eighth Avenue in New York City, in the Chelsea neighborhood—and you'll find a publisher with genuinely global reach. The company has always been committed to translation, believing that American readers deserve access to the best writing regardless of where it originates.

This commitment shows in the catalog. European literature includes French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Eastern European voices. Chinese and Japanese literature have been represented since the early days. Southeast Asian writers appear alongside Middle Eastern and Indian authors. The company's position is essentially democratic: great writing exists everywhere, and the job of a serious publisher is to find it and make it available.

The Prix Goncourt, France's most prestigious literary award, has gone to multiple New Directions authors. Romain Gary won in 1956 with his novel The Roots of the Sky. Then, in one of literary history's great pranks, he won again in 1975 under the pseudonym Emile Ajar—the prize committee didn't realize they were honoring the same writer twice until after Gary's death. More recently, Mathias Énard won in 2015 for Compass, a novel that unfolds over a single sleepless night in Vienna as a musicologist reflects on the relationship between East and West.

After Laughlin

James Laughlin died in 1997, having run New Directions for over sixty years. He had outlived many of his authors, watched literary fashions change multiple times, and maintained his commitment to difficult, important work throughout. In his will, he established a trust to own and operate the company after his death, ensuring that New Directions would continue without being absorbed by a corporate conglomerate.

This matters more than it might seem. The publishing industry has consolidated dramatically over the past several decades. The "Big Five" publishers—Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan—dominate the market. Independent publishers face constant pressure to sell or merge. New Directions has resisted, maintaining its independence and its mission.

The company today is led by Barbara Epler, who has been with New Directions since 1984 and became publisher after Laughlin's death. The current focus remains threefold: discovering contemporary international writers and introducing them to American readers; publishing new and experimental American poetry and prose; and keeping the classic New Directions titles in print.

The Pearl Series

Recent years have seen New Directions launch the Pearl series, a collection of slim, minimalist volumes designed by Rodrigo Corral. These books echo the spirit of Laughlin's early "Poet of the Month" pamphlets—short works presented beautifully, priced accessibly, designed to be read in a single sitting. Titles include On Booze by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a collection of the author's writings about alcohol (a subject he knew intimately), and The Leviathan by Joseph Roth, the Austrian novelist who chronicled the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The series acknowledges something about contemporary reading habits: not everyone has time for a 500-page novel, but many people hunger for serious literature they can consume on a lunch break or a short commute. The Pearl books meet readers where they are without condescending to them.

What New Directions Means

To understand New Directions' significance, consider what publishing would look like without it. American readers might never have encountered Borges' labyrinths or Nabokov's wordplay—at least not when those writers needed champions. The Great Gatsby might have remained out of print, a forgotten novel rather than a cultural touchstone. Generations of experimental poets might have struggled even more than they did to find publishers willing to take risks on their work.

The company represents a particular idea about what literature should do. Not entertain merely, though entertainment isn't excluded. Not sell primarily, though financial survival requires sales. Literature, in the New Directions vision, should expand consciousness, introduce readers to unfamiliar perspectives, and preserve important work against the amnesia of commerce.

Ezra Pound told a young James Laughlin to do something useful. Nearly ninety years later, the usefulness of what Laughlin built continues to prove itself, one book at a time.

The Backlist as Living Library

Some of the most enduring New Directions titles deserve individual attention, because they suggest the range and ambition of the company's catalog.

Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges introduced English-speaking readers to the Argentine master's impossible libraries, infinite books, and philosophical puzzles disguised as detective stories. Borges wrote about infinity the way other writers wrote about love—obsessively, precisely, with a mixture of terror and wonder. Before Labyrinths, he was virtually unknown outside Latin America. After it, he became inescapable.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti's A Coney Island of the Mind became one of the bestselling poetry collections in American history. Ferlinghetti, who also founded City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco, wrote accessible, jazz-inflected poems that spoke to the counterculture without dumbing down. The book has never gone out of print.

Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha—the story of a young man's spiritual journey in ancient India—became required reading for American seekers in the 1960s and has remained in print ever since. The book distills Buddhist and Hindu concepts into a narrative so simple and archetypal that it reads like a fable.

Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea brought existentialism to American readers in the form of a novel about a man who becomes increasingly aware of the absurd contingency of existence. The book is often assigned in philosophy courses, but it reads like literature—visceral, strange, and oddly funny.

Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie essentially invented the "memory play," with its fragile characters, its narrator addressing the audience directly, and its poetic stage directions. New Directions published it, ensuring that one of American theater's most important works remained available.

Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust—collected in a single volume—offer perhaps the darkest vision of American life in our literature. West died young, in a car accident at age thirty-seven, having produced only four novels. New Directions kept them alive.

Ezra Pound's The Cantos—that vast, unfinished, maddening, brilliant poem that attempted to encompass all of human history and culture—found its home at New Directions despite Pound's increasingly troubling politics and his later years in a psychiatric hospital. Laughlin never abandoned his mentor, even when doing so would have been easier.

The Future of Independent Publishing

As publishing continues to consolidate and algorithms increasingly determine what books readers encounter, New Directions represents a different model. Human judgment, accumulated over decades, guided by aesthetic principles rather than market research. A willingness to publish books that might take years to find their audiences. A commitment to international voices in an increasingly insular cultural moment.

Whether this model can survive indefinitely remains uncertain. Independent publishers face real challenges: rising costs, competition for attention, the difficulty of reaching readers through the noise. But New Directions has survived for nearly ninety years by adapting without abandoning its core mission.

In 1977, the company received a Carey Thomas Award for distinguished publishing in experimental literature. The award recognized what the literary world already knew: New Directions had become essential infrastructure for serious reading in America. That remains true today.

The next time you pick up a book by a writer who seems to exist outside the mainstream—someone strange, challenging, international, or simply unwilling to give readers what they expect—check the spine. You might find a small centaur there, marking it as one of theirs.