biography
| name: |
MacLeish, Archibald
|
pronunciation:
[muhkleesh]
| sex:
| male
|
| lived:
| (1892–1982)
|
| biography:
| Poet, writer, and public official, born in Glencoe, Illinois, USA. He studied at Yale (1915 BA) and served in World War 1 before receiving an LLB from Harvard (1919). He practised law in Boston (1920–3) and then set off to Europe to concentrate on his writing, which came under the influence of T S Eliot and Ezra Pound. He returned to the USA to become editor of Fortune in New York City (1928–38), and then Librarian of Congress (1939–44) and assistant secretary of state (1944–5), among other posts. In 1932 he received a Pulitzer Prize for his epic poem Conquistador about the Spanish conquest of Mexico. Much of his poetry in this period shows a pronounced concern for national life, culture, social issues, and the preservation of democracy, and he became known as ‘the poet laureate of the New Deal’. He was Boylston professor at Harvard (1949–62), and in 1952 he won a second Pulitzer Prize for his Collected Poems, 1917–1952, and a third for his play J B (1958) , a modernized treatment of the story of Job. |
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