'In the early 1950s Mr. Williams turned down Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” '

From Jonathan Williams, Publisher, Dies at 79 :

 

" ... Jonathan Williams, the founder of the Jargon Society, the small publishing house in the western mountains of North Carolina that for more than 50 years has introduced the works of unknown, little-known and soon-to-be-better-known writers, photographers and artists, died on March 16 in Highlands, N.C.

 

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Mr. Williams was himself a poet, essayist, photographer and graphic artist — talents he brought to the meticulously refined design of the approximately 100 books of avant-garde poetry and fiction, folk art and photography that Jargon has published since 1952.

"The face he presented to the world was of an irascible crank, a loose cannon, a gadfly," Mr. Meyer said. "But as a publisher he was extraordinarily generous, always looking for the overlooked."

Among the writers whose careers budded or bloomed through Mr. Williams's attention were James Broughton, Basil Bunting, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Metcalf, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson and Louis Zukofsky. A book-length poem about the history of industrialization by the futurist Buckminster Fuller was published by Mr. Williams in 1962.

Hugh Kenner, a Canadian literary critic, once called Mr. Williams "the truffle hound of American poetry."

In the early 1950s Mr. Williams turned down Allen Ginsberg's "Howl," which became a Beat Generation classic. He had no regrets. "If Jargon had published it," he told The New York Times in 1976, "it would have sold 300 copies." ... "