James Laughlin was tall, blue-eyed, athletic, vastly wealthy and, by many accounts, sexually mesmerizing. He could charm the pants off women and usually did. Sometimes he went home and wrote a terrible, simpering poem about the experience.  The heir to a Pittsburgh iron and steel fortune, Laughlin might have become an international playboy, skiing and sampling the thermal springs in elite European hotels. (He did plenty of each.) But he was a courtly man with a sense of noblesse oblige and a bold literary sensibility.  In 1936, while an undergraduate at Harvard, Laughlin used a $100,000 gift from his father to found New Directions, the independent publishing house that would define the course of literary modernism. New Directions revolutionized American reading habits, our parents’ and thus our own.  Gertrude Stein told Laughlin, early on, that the test of a good book is that it must make the bell ring. Laughlin had sensitive ears; his transistors picked up the sound of bells struck on pirate frequencies. It’s impossible to imagine an entire wing of progressive 20th-century literature without him.  Laughlin was Vladimir Nabokov’s first American publisher. He championed Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams when they were little known. He issued the work of Tennessee Williams, Paul Bowles, Henry Miller and Dylan Thomas. (When Thomas died in 1953, Laughlin was summoned to identify the bloated body.) In translation New Directions published the work of Borges, Céline, Neruda, Hesse, Pasternak and many, many others.  This sounds like a boy’s club, and it was. New Directions might have published Elizabeth Bishop if Laughlin hadn’t offended her by remarking that her presence would give one of his poetry anthologies “sex appeal.”  Two new books — “Literchoor Is My Beat,” a biography of Laughlin by Ian S. MacNiven, and “The Collected Poems of James Laughlin” — are mastodonic in size and fail, rather comprehensively, the Gertrude Stein test. The ringing each made in my ears is the sort you recognize after accidentally banging your head on a car’s back hatch.  Mr. MacNiven’s biography is intensely researched and dutiful, so dutiful that it seems to recall every lecture Laughlin gave, every writer’s conference attended, every temple toured while on holiday. The details of each year are assembled, boxed up (“Nineteen forty-seven had been busy and productive”), Scotch taped and then sent down the assembly line.  “Literchoor Is My Beat” is short on flow and penetrating insight. Clichés and tautologies (“J’s life was threatened by complexity, while blessed simplicity escaped him”) scroll past. Laughlin was a hard man to know, his charming public face eating into his private one, and in Mr. MacNiven’s book he dangles at arm’s length.  Pound was his early mentor. Laughlin took seven years to graduate from Harvard, spending time in Rapallo, Italy, at Pound’s “Ezuversity.” Pound pushed for New Directions. He called Laughlin’s poetry “hopeless.” “He urged me to finish Harvard,” Laughlin said, “and do something useful.”  Stein put the nix on Laughlin’s versifying, too. She told him he was “one of those guys who has mistaken sensitiveness for something more.” That line — every writer’s worst fear, uttered aloud — had to hurt. He mostly put aside poetry until late in his life.  Laughlin married three times and had four children. He could be a distant father and husband, the kind of fellow who cried in movies but not in real life. He required sex with comely strangers to keep his spirits high. He had affairs with nurses, hotel maids, bookstore clerks, acrobats, you name it.  When a letter would arrive from one of his other women, his second wife, Ann, would snark, as if she were in a George Booth cartoon, “Here’s one from your Little Ray of Sunshine.”  Mr. MacNiven gives a thorough sense of how Laughlin piloted New Directions. He founded the company during the Depression and maintained a strong sense of thrift. For years he wrote every royalty check to writers himself.  Laughlin was perhaps the canniest but not the bravest American publisher. That title goes to Barney Rosset of Grove Press. When a book that might make legal trouble (“Lolita” and “Tropic of Cancer,” for example) came his way, Laughlin would say, “Let Barney do it.”  “Literchoor Is My Beat” is most soulful in its depiction of Laughlin’s bipolar disorder, which ran in his family, and which he feared all his life. (The disorder might have been a factor in the early suicide of one of his three sons.) It is evocative, too, of Laughlin’s final 15 years, when he wrote the bulk of his poetry.  “The Collected Poems of James Laughlin” comprises some 1,250 of his poems, of which perhaps 8.2 are keepers. They are best read, as Peter Glassgold, the former editor in chief of New Directions, writes in his very good introduction, as Laughlin’s intellectual biography.  There is free verse about his youth in Pittsburgh, about skiing, about New York City and about friends like Kenneth Rexroth and Delmore Schwartz. Several verge on being funny.  After one of his books of poems was harshly reviewed in The New York Times, Laughlin wrote a poem called “My Favorite Newspaper.” It suggests that instead of being assigned to a literary critic, his book was sent to “the expert on cholesterol-free salad dressings.”  Many of the works here are love poems of a candied, gruesome, sub-Rod McKuen sort. Laughlin’s charm sits down with smarm. “I want to touch you/in beautiful places” is a standard opening line, as is “I’m sorry for all the girls/who are not perfect like you.” One of these has a perfect title: “The Love Puddle.”  If there’s a literary heaven, I hope Laughlin the publisher is in it. “I fear death,” he wrote a friend, “because I can’t recall that Dante mentions any book in hell.”  THE COLLECTED POEMS OF JAMES LAUGHLIN  Illustrated. 1,214 pages. New Directions. $49.95.  A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions  Illustrated. 584 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $37.50.  A version of this review appears in print on January 16, 2015, on page C34 of the New York edition with the headline: A Literary Life in Portrait Detail. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
Two new books, a collection and a biography, delve into the life and work of the publisher James Laughlin.