A simple and efficient femtosecond nonlinear polarization evolution (NPE) mode-locked laser is presented. Different from conventional NPE fiber lasers, the polarization beam splitter (PBS) is three-dimensionally manipulated to achieve polarization control and state selection in our NPE laser. The polarizer, half-wave plate, and quarter-wave plate from conventional NPE fiber lasers are replaced by this PBS. Thus, the configuration and the system gain of our proposed laser are simply and efficiently improved. As a result, transfer efficiency of 24.17% is experimentally demonstrated. In addition, measured self-started pulses with average power of 49 mW and center wavelength of 1584 nm are generated with single-pulse energy of 1.51 nJ.