Howard Nemerov

1920–1991

Born on February 29, 1920 in New York, New York, Howard Nemerov
displayed an early interest in the arts, as did his younger sister, the
photographer Diane Arbus. He graduated from the Society for Ethical
Culture's Fieldstone School in 1937 and went on to study at Harvard,
where he earned his bachelor's degree in 1941.

Throughout World War II, he served as a pilot in the Royal Canadian unit
of the U. S. Army Air Force. He married in 1944, and after the war, having
earned the rank of first lieutenant, returned to New York with his wife to
complete his first book.

Nemerov was first hired to teach literature to World War II veterans at

Hamilton College in New York. His teaching career flourished, and he
went on to teach at Bennington College, Brandeis University, and
Washington University in St. Louis, where he was Distinguished Poet in
Residence from 1969 until his death.

His numerous collections of poetry include Trying Conclusions: New and

Selected Poems, 1961-1991 (University of Chicago Press, 1991); War
Stories: Poems About Long Ago and Now (1987); Inside the
Onion (1984); Sentences (1980); The Collected Poems of Howard
Nemerov (1977), which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award,
and the Bollingen Prize; Gnomes and Occasions (1973); The Winter
Lightning: Selected Poems (1968); The Blue Swallows (1967); Mirrors and
Windows (1958); The Salt Garden(1955); Guide to the Ruins (1950);
and The Image and the Law (1947).

Nemerov was also an accomplished prose writer. His essay collections

include The Oak in the Acorn (1987); Figures of Thought (1978); Reflexions
on Poetry and Poetics (1972); Journal of the Fictive Life (1965); and Poetry
and Fiction (1963). His fiction titles include Stories, Fables and Other
Diversions (1971); The Commodity of Dreams and Other
Stories (1959); The Homecoming Game (1957); Federigo: Or the Power of
Love (1954); and The Melodramatists (1949).

Nemerov was the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including

fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and The Guggenheim
Foundation, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the National
Medal of the Arts. He also served as poetry consultant to the Library of
Congress in 1963 and 1964, as a Chancellor of the Academy of American
Poets beginning in 1976, and as poet laureate of the United States from
1988 to 1990. Nemerov died of cancer in 1991 in University City,
Missouri.