Pure Lives

Reed Whittemore was born Edward Reed Whittemore Jr. in New Haven, Connecticut on September 11, 1919. He received a bachelor's degree in English from Yale University. He co-founded a literary magazine Furioso while attending Yale. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Forces. He was a member of the faculty of Carleton College in Minnesota for nearly two decades before joining the faculty of the University of Maryland from 1968 to 1984. He was the literary editor of The New Republic from 1969 to 1973.

He wrote numerous collections of poetry including Heroes and Heroines (1946), The Self-Made Man (1959), and The Feel of Rock: Poems of Three Decades (1982). He also wrote several non-fiction works including William Carlos Williams, Poet from Jersey (1975), Six Literary Lives: The Shared Impiety of Adams, London, Sinclair, Williams, Dos Passos, and Tate (1993), and Against the Grain (2007). He served as the poet laureate of the United States from 1964 to 1965 and from 1984 to 1985. He died on April 6, 2012 at the age of 92.

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