"James Laughlin -- poet, ladies' man, heir to a steel fortune, and the founder of New Directions -- was still at work on his autobiography when he died at 83. For his 'auto-bug-offery' he collected personal files crammed with memories and memorabilia: in 'M' he is taking Marianne Moore to Yankee Stadium to discuss 'arcane mammals, ' and in 'N' nearly plunging off a mountain, hunting butterflies with Nabokov ('Volya was a doll in a very severe upper-crust Russian way'). With an accent on humor, The Way It Wasn't is a scrapbook loaded with ephemera -- letters and postcards, clippings and photographs -- which offers an intimate first-hand encounter with twentieth-century Modernism, from the man who helped define it for America"--Jacket.