Alexander Laing

Alexander Kinnan Laing (August 7, 1903 – April 23, 1976) was a poet, novelist, writer and compiler of sea stories, and professor. He spent his career at Dartmouth College, where he also studied.

Life and career Laing dropped out of Dartmouth in 1925 and spent two years at sea, an experience that informed much of his later work. He served on the SS Leviathan, a German-built passenger liner that had been seized by the United States in 1917. On the Leviathan, he sailed to Southampton and, later, to Los Angeles via the Panama Canal. He retained his affection for the sea, using a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1934 to sail around the world via Europe, the Suez Canal, Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Hawaii.

After his return to Dartmouth, he won the Walt Whitman Prize for Poetry in 1929.

Laing married three times. His first wife was Isabel Lattimore, his second, the poet Dilys Laing, with whom he had one son, David Bennet Laing. His third wife, Veronica, was the daughter of the illustrator Rudolph Ruzicka. He died as the result of a bicycle accident at the age of 72. His 1933 book The Sea Witch, by contrast, is a historical novel set on board a mid-nineteenth-century clipper ship and featuring a mutiny by the ship's cargo of coolie laborers. These books are representative of Laing's enormously diverse literary output, which included both fiction and nonfiction informed by his days at sea, poetry for The New Yorker and many other prominent literary magazines, and reviews of serious contemporary poetry and drama noted decades later for their balanced acknowledgment of experimental and political strains in literature of the period. Laing was also a co-founder of a newsletter opposed to the Vietnam War called American Voters Betrayed By Johnson, which eventually evolved into the left-wing political journal Groundswell Quarterly.

Works Fool's Errand. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Dorand, and Company, 1928. End of Roaming. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1930. The Cadaver of Gideon Wyck. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934. The Motives of Nicholas Holtz. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1936. The Methods of Dr. Scarlett. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1937. Way for America. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1943. The Sea Witch. New York: Murray Hill Books, 1944. Clipper Ship Men. Garden City, New York: Garden City Publishing, 1950. Jonathan Eagle: Sea Stories. New York: Bantam, 1957. Matthew Early: A Novel. New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1957. American Sail: A Pictorial History. New York: Dutton, 1961. Clipper Ships and their Makers. New York: Bonanza Books, 1966. American Ships. New York: American Heritage Press, 1971. The American Heritage History of Seafaring America. New York: American Heritage Publishing, 1974. Brant Point: Poems. Hanover, New Hampshire: University Press of New England, 1975.