Robert BlyEssay Preview: Robert BlyReport this essayRobert Bly was born in western Minnesota in 1926 to parents of Norwegian stock. He enlisted in the Navy in 1944 and spent two years there. After one year at St. Olaf College in Minnesota, he transferred to Harvard and thereby joined the famous group of writers who were undergraduates at that time, which included Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton, and John Hawkes. He graduated in 1950 and spent the next few years in New York living, as they say, hand to mouth.
Beginning in 1954, he took two years at the University of Iowa at the Writers Workshop along with W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, and others. In 1956 he received a Fulbright grant to travel to Norway and translate Norwegian poetry into English. While there he found not only his relatives but the work of a number of major poets whose force was not present in the United States, among them Pablo Neruda, Cesar Vallejo, Gunnar Ekelof, Georg Trakl and Harry Martinson. He determined then to start a literary magazine for poetry translation in the United States and so begin The Fifties and The Sixties and The Seventies, which introduced many of these poets to the writers of his generation, and published as well essays on American poets and insults to those deserving. During this time he lived on a farm in Minnesota with his wife and children.
The literary world of 1950s-1960s is a fascinating one, and his contribution to both is astounding. Not only is it a truly world-class cultural institution, it has also been called “new life” because of its vast and dynamic diversity of writers. He is the founder and editor of this site, which has an extensive library of work on more than one hundred writers in each of the fifty categories of fiction and non-fiction. His most famous text is a short classic called L’Éducation du Sautres. With only a single essay per month it is highly effective and well documented.
D.W. Snodgrass: The History of Writers in America
In 1948, after the assassination of Andrew Johnson, he became a columnist in the New York Post. He had a major role going on through his work with the American Red Cross, but soon left the Post shortly after that and left a more direct role with the National Socialist Appeal, where he continued to do his journalism from a young age. His contributions to American literary news and the American literary community were very significant to many members of the publishing communities in the 1950s: many of the more obscure writers to come to the Post (which received funding from the American Association of Publishers.) Snodgrass worked as a correspondent in various American publications during the 1950s and 1960s, where he contributed to, along with John C. Rimbaud and John H. Gifford, works titled “A Criticism of Literary Life” and “The New York Times Literary Digest.” Some of the more interesting pieces of the 1970s and 1980s may be described with a little less detail.
In 1984 Snodgrass was an independent journalist in San Francisco. During his last year he published a short story entitled “Ritual,” and this was considered the most significant article of Snodgrass’s career. He left the San Francisco Bay Area and settled in New York, but stayed by the company of his friends Frank M. Thompson, who, after his death from cancer in 1984, passed away in 1988. He returned to San Francisco in 1987 and remained active in SF literary circles for at least two decades. The New York Times Magazine published his work in 2004 as a collection of essays on the cultural and political issues of the moment, and of course in 2006 published a collection called “The Art of Writing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.” In 2007 he also published a collection of short fiction written by his co-champion Peter F. Thompson. In 2009, he was nominated as one of the forty-two distinguished American literary writers of 2010, and then to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer (which was also given to one Christopher Hitchens). His most recent book was on “America in the Years 1951-2012: Writing In Other People,” which was edited by George H. W. Bush. Snodgrass has been engaged since 1989 to publish The Last Word, about the lives of some great American fiction writers. (He also co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Literature at Harvard University.)
Brett Brown’s collection “What Happened to the Writers Like Them, Or Them?”, published in 2007, was considered by some to be a classic of the 20th century. Its first issue contained an essay
The literary world of 1950s-1960s is a fascinating one, and his contribution to both is astounding. Not only is it a truly world-class cultural institution, it has also been called “new life” because of its vast and dynamic diversity of writers. He is the founder and editor of this site, which has an extensive library of work on more than one hundred writers in each of the fifty categories of fiction and non-fiction. His most famous text is a short classic called L’Éducation du Sautres. With only a single essay per month it is highly effective and well documented.
D.W. Snodgrass: The History of Writers in America
In 1948, after the assassination of Andrew Johnson, he became a columnist in the New York Post. He had a major role going on through his work with the American Red Cross, but soon left the Post shortly after that and left a more direct role with the National Socialist Appeal, where he continued to do his journalism from a young age. His contributions to American literary news and the American literary community were very significant to many members of the publishing communities in the 1950s: many of the more obscure writers to come to the Post (which received funding from the American Association of Publishers.) Snodgrass worked as a correspondent in various American publications during the 1950s and 1960s, where he contributed to, along with John C. Rimbaud and John H. Gifford, works titled “A Criticism of Literary Life” and “The New York Times Literary Digest.” Some of the more interesting pieces of the 1970s and 1980s may be described with a little less detail.
In 1984 Snodgrass was an independent journalist in San Francisco. During his last year he published a short story entitled “Ritual,” and this was considered the most significant article of Snodgrass’s career. He left the San Francisco Bay Area and settled in New York, but stayed by the company of his friends Frank M. Thompson, who, after his death from cancer in 1984, passed away in 1988. He returned to San Francisco in 1987 and remained active in SF literary circles for at least two decades. The New York Times Magazine published his work in 2004 as a collection of essays on the cultural and political issues of the moment, and of course in 2006 published a collection called “The Art of Writing Fiction in the Twenty-First Century.” In 2007 he also published a collection of short fiction written by his co-champion Peter F. Thompson. In 2009, he was nominated as one of the forty-two distinguished American literary writers of 2010, and then to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer (which was also given to one Christopher Hitchens). His most recent book was on “America in the Years 1951-2012: Writing In Other People,” which was edited by George H. W. Bush. Snodgrass has been engaged since 1989 to publish The Last Word, about the lives of some great American fiction writers. (He also co-founded the Institute of Contemporary Literature at Harvard University.)
Brett Brown’s collection “What Happened to the Writers Like Them, Or Them?”, published in 2007, was considered by some to be a classic of the 20th century. Its first issue contained an essay
In 1966 he co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War and led much of the opposition among writers to that war. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. During the 70s he published eleven books of poetry, essays, and translations, celebrating the power of myth, Indian ecstatic poetry, meditation, and storytelling. During the 80s he published Loving a Woman in Two Worlds, The Wingйd Life: Selected Poems and Prose of Thoreau,The Man in the Black Coat Turns, and A Little Book on the Human Shadow.
His work Iron John: A Book About Men is an international bestseller which has been translated into many languages. He frequently does workshops for men with James Hillman and others, and workshops for men and women with Marion Woodman. He and his wife Ruth, along with the storyteller Gioia Timpanelli, frequently conduct seminars on European fairy tales. In the early 90s, with James Hillman and Michael Meade, he edited The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart, an anthology of poems from the mens work. Since then he