Appendix 1 a Note on the Author

Appendix 1 A Note on the Author Conrad Aiken (1889–1973). Aiken was born in Savannah, Georgia. His father killed his mother and then himself when Conrad was eleven, and he moved to New Bedford, Massachusetts, to live with his great aunt. After attending Middlesex School in Concord, Massachusetts, he was admitted to Harvard University, graduated with a B.A. in 1912, and, shortly after, married the first of three wives. Although relatively obscure and somewhat dated in style, he was awarded practically every literary prize of any significance, including the Pulitzer Prize and National Book award. A respected essayist and critic and editor of the Dial, he was twice divorced and once attempted suicide. His work is intensely psychological and at times vitriolic. He died in the city of his birth, Savannah, Georgia, in 1973. John Berryman (1914–1972). Berryman was born John Smith in McAlester, Oklahoma, but the family moved to Florida when the boy was ten. John’s father threatened to drown both himself and his son by swimming far out to sea; and having failed at this, he shot himself beneath the boy’s window. His mother moved to New York and remarried, and John took the name of his stepfather. He graduated from Columbia and Clare College, Oxford, returned to the United States, and taught English at Brown, Harvard, Princeton , and the University of Minnesota. Berryman’s major work and most significant publication is the 385 Dream Songs—a series of narratives about a character referred to as “Henry Pussycat,” but who is very likely a persona for Berryman himself. A series of broken marriages, alcohol addiction, and counseling along with the tensions of his personal life make up the gist of his work. He has often been compared 120 Writing Under the Influence with Homer, Dante, and Whitman. Berryman waged a lifelong battle with alcohol and committed suicide on January 7, 1972. Hart Crane (1899–1932). Although Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio, he spent his boyhood in Cleveland; and, while his father was determined to prepare him to take over the family candy business, young Hart was just as determined to be a writer, although he was not particularly successful and had to depend on his father for financial support throughout most of his life. Although he never quite got over his differences with his father, he had an extremely close if not unhealthy relationship with his hypochondriacal mother (Crane’s parents fought constantly and eventually divorced). He traveled alternately to Pines, Cuba (to visit his mother) and to Paris and New York, where he was occasionally employed as a writer in advertising. Crane suffered from depression and was deeply involved in a number of intense sexual relationships with other men. He began to drink heavily during his late twenties and wrote less and less after concluding that he had squandered much of his talent on projects of questionable value. The financial support of Otto Kahn enabled him to complete his major work, The Bridge, which received mixed reviews; and, in 1931, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to travel to Mexico where he planned to write a long poem about Mexican history. However, nothing much came of the project; and, a year later, he killed himself by jumping off the stern of the vessel that was returning him to New York. Robert Creely (1926–2005). Creely was born in Arlington, Massachusetts and was educated at Harvard (which he left because of excessive partying and drinking), Black Mountain College, and the University of New Mexico. He taught at Black Mountain College, the University of New Mexico, and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He edited the Black Mountain Review, a highly influential literary journal and came to be regarded as a leading proponent of the “Projectivists” school and the Black Mountain School of poetry, although he is essentially regarded as having something of a Puritan sensibil- ity. Thrice married and constantly hounded by mental problems, A Note on the Author 121 he associated for a time with the writers of the “Beat” genera- tion, including Kerouac, Ginsberg, and McClure. It was at this time that he became interested in the creative effects of psyche- delic drugs and alcohol. E. E. Cummings (1894–1962). The son of a Boston clergyman, Cummings earned both his B.A. and M.A. at Harvard. He joined the Ambulance Corps in World War I and later served in the infantry. Following the war, he lived in Paris and New York and divided his time between writing and painting. Known for his unusual versification, spelling, and linguistic experimentation, he was something of a pagan moralist, satirist, and a passionate enthusiast of youth, anarchy, nonconformity, and sensuality. Thrice married and very possibly bisexual, Cummings traveled widely and was both praised and criticized for his unique poetic style and wide range of subjects, including alcohol, physical regeneration, the natural world, and erotic love. He received the Dial award, held the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry chair at Harvard, was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was awarded the Bollingen Prize in Poetry. Alan Dugan (1923–2003). Dugan was born in Jamaka, Queens, attended various Colleges, and graduated with a B.A from Mexico City College in 1949. Trenchant and rebellious in con- tent and style, his poetry is notable for its intense and forthright examination of the disenchantments of daily life. An avowed Marxist with an admitted fondness for alcohol, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award as well as numerous other prizes. William Faulkner (1897–1962). For sheer literary genius and his remarkable descriptive skills and character development, Faulkner has very few peers. His major work consists of a complex reconstruction of Lafayette County in northern Mississippi, which he renamed “Yoknapatawpha County.” This is the set- ting for much of his work and almost all of his novels. Born of an old southern family in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897, the family later moved to Oxford, the seat of the University of Mississippi. William joined the Canadian Flying 122 Writing Under the Influence Corps in 1918 (although he never saw combat), returned to Oxford; and, in 1924, he attended the University of Mississippi for two years. In 1926, he moved to New Orleans where he did a good deal of writing and publishing. After a six month tour of Europe, he returned to Oxford, where he continued to write and publish for the remainder of his life. Best known for his complex style and experiments with point of view, some of his most notable works (along with many of his remarkable short stories) include The Sound and the Fury (1929), Sartoris (1929), As I Lay Dying (1930), Light in August (1932), Abasalom, Absalom (1936), and The Unvanquished (1938). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, the National Book Award, and innumera- ble other literary prizes. Faulkner drank excessively on a daily basis during most of his life, usually until he passed out; and the fact that he was able to produce so much great literature is in itself astonishing, although it is generally agreed that much of his later work is not of the same quality as his early material. F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940). Fitzgerald is commonly regarded as the spokesman and symbol of the Jazz Age, which he named and described with extraordinary brilliance. He was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attended Princeton briefly where he did a good deal of partying and very little studying. The memories of his years at Princeton played a major role in much of his later work. Fitzgerald joined the wartime army as a lieutenant at staff headquarters, but the war ended before he could be assigned abroad. In 1919, he married Zelda Fitzgerald, a southern belle, and—with the immense profits from his short stories and his first novel, the two bought an estate in North Carolina, although they were constantly on the move and spent a good deal of time in New York, The Riviera, Paris, and Hollywood. A chronic alcoholic, he and Zelda partied continuously and carelessly throughout most of their marriage and attained a cer- tain amount of notoriety because of their carefree and noncon- formist (though self-destructive) antics and arguments. Zelda had to be confined to a mental institution after a breakdown in A Note on the Author 123 1930; and Scott continued on, working and writing to support her confinement, although, in his own words, he felt that he left his “capacity for hope on the little roads that led to Zelda’s sanitarium.” His finest novel, The Great Gatsby (1925) was not well received at first, and he did not complete his last novel, Tender Is the Night, until 1934. He eventually overcame his addiction to alcohol with the help of columnist Sheila Graham (who described her relationship with Scott in her book, Beloved Infidel), but he was unable to recover his health and died of a heart attack in 1940. He was writing The Last Tycoon at the time (it was never completed). Eight years later, Zelda died in a fire in the hospital where she had been confined because of intermittent episodes of schizophrenia. Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997). Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, and graduated from Columbia University in 1948. He was a leader of the “Beat” Movement and the San Francisco Renaissance, suffered a nervous breakdown, did a stint with the Merchant Marine, reviewed for Newsweek, and was awarded grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

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