Richard Poirier
American literary critic (1925–2009)
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Richard Poirier (September 9, 1925 – August 15, 2009) was an American literary critic. He was known for his editorship of Raritan and Partisan Review and for co-founding the Library of America. He was a named chair professor of English Literature at Rutgers University.
Early life and education
Poirier was born on September 9, 1925[1] in Gloucester, Massachusetts.[2] After high school, he served in the US Army and served in the European theater of World War II.[2]
He graduated from Amherst College on the G.I. Bill, earned an MA from Yale University, and then a PhD from Harvard University in 1960.[2] He also studied under the literary critic F. R. Leavis at Downing College, Cambridge, on a Fulbright Scholarship during the 1950s.[2][3]
Career
He co-founded the Library of America in 1979 and served as chairman of its board.[2] He was the Marius Bewley Professor of American and English Literature at Rutgers University.[4] He was also the founder and editor of Raritan, a literary quarterly, and an editor of Partisan Review.[2] He was series editor of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards from 1961 to 1966.[2]
In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[5]
Death
Works
- Stories British and American (1953) with Jack Barry Ludwig
- The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels (1960)
- In Defense of Reading : A Reader's Approach to Literary Criticism (1963) editor with Reuben A. Brower
- A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature (1966)
- American Literature: Volume Two (Little, Brown 1970) editor with William L. Vance
- The Oxford Reader: Varieties of Contemporary Discourse (1971) editor with Frank Kermode
- The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (1971)
- Mailer (Fontana Modern Masters, 1972)
- Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing (1977)
- The Renewal Of Literature: Emersonian Reflections (Random House, 1987) ISBN 0-394-50140-3
- Raritan Reading (1990) editor
- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1990)
- Poetry and Pragmatism (1992)
- Collected Poems, Prose, and Plays of Robert Frost (Library of America, 1995) editor with Mark Richardson
- Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances (2003)