Howard Nemerov

Howard Nemerov , 1920-91, American poet, novelist, and critic, b. New York City, grad. Harvard, 1941; brother of photographer Diane Arbus . He taught at Bennington College for many years and was associated with Washington Univ. in St. Louis from 1969 until his death. Nemerov's witty and often gloomy poetry ranges in tone from light to deeply philosophical; collections include The Image and the Law (1947), The Next Room of the Dream (1964), Collected Poems (1977; Pulitzer Prize), By Al Lebowitz's Pool (1979), Inside the Onion (1984), and War Stories (1987). He was poet laureate of the United States (1988-90). His fiction deals largely with moral dilemmas, as in The Melodramatists (1949).

Bibliography: See his Selected Poems (2003), ed. by D. Anderson; studies by B. Duncan, ed. (1971) and J. Bartholomay (1972).

Nemerov, Howard (1920–), after graduation from Harvard and service as a pilot in World War II became a teacher of English at Bennington, Brandeis, and Washington University, St. Louis. His fiction includes The Melodramatists (1949), a satirical portrait of a Boston family's inabilities to find a meaningful way of life; Federigo, or The Power of Love (1954), a comedy; The Homecoming Game (1957), a satire about a professor failing a star football player, dramatized by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse as Tall Story (1959); and A Commodity of Dreams (1959), stories. His well‐wrought poetry has been collected in Image and the Law (1947), Guide to the Ruins (1950), The Salt Garden (1955), Mirrors and Windows (1958); The Next Room of the Dream (1964), including two verse plays with Biblical themes; The Blue Swallows (1967); Gnomes & Occasions (1973), epigrammatic works; The Western Approaches (1976); Collected Poems (1977), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and in 1980 a Bollingen Prize; Inside the Onion (1984); and War Stories (1987). His essays appear in Poetry and Fiction (1963); Journal of the Fictive Life (1966), a psychological inquiry into the creative process; Reflections on Poetry and Poetics (1972); Figures of Thought (1978); New and Selected Essays (1985), introduced by Kenneth Burke; and The Oak in the Acorn (1987), lectures delivered at Brandeis University. He was awarded a National Medal of Arts (1987) and named the nation's Poet Laureate in 1988.