James Laughlin, a poet and pioneering publisher who introduced American readers to some of the best-known writers of this century, died Wednesday of complications following a stroke. He was 83.
Laughlin died at his home, his family said.He was still an undergraduate at Harvard University in 1936 when he founded New Directions with money from his father and issued the first of the anthologies that he said were a place "where experimentalists could test their inventions by publication."
His first book, "New Directions in Prose & Poetry," included writings from Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams.
For more than 50 years, his anthologies showcased writers he considered originals, among them Vladimir Nabokov, William Saroyan, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Merton, James Agee, Delmore Schwartz, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and John Hawkes and a host of others.