Selected Essays

Poet and critic Hayden Carruth was born in Waterbury, Connecticut in 1921. He received a bachelor's degree from the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill in 1943 and a master's degree from the University of Chicago in 1948. His first poetry collection, The Crow and the Heart, was published in 1959. He wrote about 30 books of poetry throughout his lifetime that addressed a wide range of subjects including madness, loneliness, death, and fragility of the natural world. Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey won the National Book Award for poetry in 1996. He also wrote a novel entitled Appendix A. He was the poetry editor of Harper's from 1977 to 1983 and the advisory editor for The Hudson Review from 1971 until his death on September 29, 2008 at the age of 87.

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