Archibald MacLeish: An American Life

by Scott Donaldson

Overview

Archibald MacLeish was the winner of the 1993 Ambassador Book Award for biography.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504030021
Publisher:	Open Road Integrated Media LLC
Publication date:	09/27/2016
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.48(d)

About the Author

Scott Donaldson is one of the nation’s leading literary biographers. Among his books are Poet in America: Winfield Townley Scott, By Force of Will: The Life and Art of Ernest Hemingway, Fool for Love: F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever: A Biography, and Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald.
 

Table of Contents

	Preface	ix
1	Beginnings	1
2	Growing Up	14
3	Prep School	30
4	Big Man on Campus	51
5	Ada and the Muses	73
6	The Great War	85
7	A. MacLeish, Esquire	100
8	Fever of Greatness	125
9	Shadow of the Night	151
10	New Found Land	180
11	City of Glass	197
12	Public Poet I	220
13	Middle of the Journey	247
14	Public Poet II	262
15	Mr. M. Goes to Washington	290
16	Brush of the Comet	306
17	The Drums of War	329
18	Propagandist for Democracy	348
19	Making the Peace	366
20	A New Life	396
21	The View from Sixty	422
22	Means of Escape	440
23	Poet Laureate	467
24	Quarrels with the World	492
25	Last Lines	512
	Acknowledgments	527
	Notes	532
	Bibliography	593
	Index	601

Editorial Reviews

There’s so much gold about life and letters on nearly every page of Scott Donaldson’s major biography of Archibald MacLeish that the book almost doesn’t need mining for nuggets.” —Herbert Mitgang, The New York Times
 
“MacLeish was in many ways a child of fortune. . . . His luck still holds in having so fine a chronicler of his enchanted voyage.” —The New England Quarterly
 

From the Publisher

There's so much gold about life and letters...that the book almost doesn't need mining for nuggets. —The New York Times

Herbert Mitgang

Appointed MacLeish's biographer by the MacLeish estate, Donaldson ( John Cheever ) in collaboration with Winnick ( Letters of Archibald MacLeish, 1907 - 1982 ) has produced a sympathetic and fully realized treatment of the writer's life and work. MacLeish (1892-1982) was born into wealth but rejected a law career for poetry, supporting his family by working as a journalist for Fortune magazine. He won the Pulitzer Prize twice for his poems (1932, 1953) and once for his play J.B. (1959). Donaldson details his subject's friendships with Hemingway, Dean Acheson and Dos Passos, acknowledging MacLeish's literary achievements and his outstanding stint as FDR's Librarian of Congress. The book credits him with acting against fascism and McCarthyism but also reveals his snobbishness, extra-marital affairs and failures as a father. Readable and well-researched, this is a solid scholarly biography of a major literary figure. Photos not seen by PW. (May)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

This exhaustive, sympathetic biography helps explain why MacLeish, one of the best-known and respected American poets in the 1930s to the 1950s, is all but forgotten today. Raised to value a life of selfless public service, he early subordinated a pursuit of private poetry to a career in the law, then at the fledgling Fortune magazine. In the Depression, at the request of Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he revered, he became Librarian of Congress and, in the 1950s, Boylston Professor of English at Harvard--all the while carped at by critics both Left and Right, who accused him of ``selling out.'' This fine book should help resurrect MacLeish, not as a poet (liberal samplings of his work suggest he remains too public and hortatory for our tastes), but as a principled and courageous American public servant. For an interview with Donaldson, see Behind The Book, p. 92.--Ed.-- Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.

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