Archibald MacLeish: An American LifeSome of the greatest poets--Victor Hugo, Paul Claudel, George Seferis, Pablo Neruda, St.-John Perse--have also been public figures, but in the history of twentieth-century American poetry, Archibald MacLeish stands alone. Born on May 7, 1892, in Glencoe, Illinois, to the craggy but prosperous president of Carson Pirie Scott and an idealistic mother who had been a college president, Archibald MacLeish grew up to become not only a highly regarded poet, even eventually the unofficial poet laureate of his time, but one of our most dedicated and effective public servants. Educated at Hotchkiss (which he hated), Yale (football, Skull and Bones), and Harvard Law School, he abandoned a promising law practice in Boston on the very day he was to be offered a partnership, to take his wife, a gifted singer, and their young children to Paris and write poetry full-time. Much of MacLeish's finest work ("Ars poetica", "The End of the World", "You, Andrew Marvell") was written in France, where he lived out the 1920s in the company of Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Picasso, and Gerald and Sara Murphy. But as the Great Depression loomed, MacLeish came home, bought a farm in Conway, Massachusetts, and looked for gainful employment. He became one of the early and foremost editors of Fortune, for which he wrote copiously and brilliantly for a decade, often contributing as much as a quarter of each issue. During this time his poetry became more public ("Frescoes for Mr. Rockefeller's City") and his political opinions more liberal, controversial, and beleaguered. For a year he served as the first curator of Harvard's Nieman fellowships, but in 1939 Franklin Roosevelt summoned him to be librarian ofCongress. In that position he entirely reorganized the Library of Congress, continuing this work even while serving in the wartime Office of Facts and Figures and later as assistant secretary of state. In 1945, with his friend Adlai Stevenson, he worked to establish the United Nations and drafted the preamble to its charter. After war's end MacLeish became Boylston Professor at Harvard, where he spent nearly fifteen years teaching the university's most distinguished writing students every autumn. Wintering in Antigua and summering at his country retreat, he also turned to the creation of verse plays such as the tremendously successful J.B., which won him his third Pulitzer Prize. Surviving nearly into his nineties, he wrote some of his finest lyrics as the darkness drew in. This generous and eloquent biography, richly illustrated, is published on the centenary of his birth. |
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