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

Williams, 79, lived and worked in Scaly Mountain. The cause of death was pneumonia, said Thomas Meyer, his companion for more than 40 years.

Williams was 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," Meyer said. "But as a publisher he was extraordinarily generous, always looking for the overlooked."

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