Description
Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. Poetry History & Criticism. Foreword by Garrison Keillor. In this literary memoir, Reed Whittemore—a self-considered bourgeois anarchist—gives us marvelous glimpses into his wide-ranging life as poet, little magazine editor, critic and essayist, journalist, biographer, and teacher. Writing in third person about his alter ego R, Whittemore looks back in a conversational, self-deprecating, voice that in his poetry and prose became recognizably his own. "Brilliant and original poet," wrote Victor Navasky, "provcoateur, literary lobbyist, anti-bureaucratic cultural bureaucrat, interdisciplinarian, his way of deepening, as distinguished from promoting, democracy has been to carry on its conversation in exemplary tropes. Our country and our culture are the better for it.""Reed Whittemore owns the only sort of immortality that matters to a writer which is to have written things that people remember years later."—Garrison Keillor"For what a long time Reed Whitmore has been a central figure in our national letters—his whole career has been one brave protest against dullness and stodginess."—X. J. Kennedy
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Prolific poet and essayist, teacher, poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, Reed Whittemore began his literary life in the late 1930s when he and Yale roommate James Angleton founded the poetry magazine Furioso—whose pages saw the publication of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and ee cummings, among others. This remarkable memoir chronicles the life and times of this self-considered “bourgeois anarchist,” whose storied career included four wartime years in North Africa and Europe, as well as a second run of Furioso, which Victor Navasky called “the ne plus ultra of little mags.”While teaching at Carleton College, Whittemore continued his pursuit of poetry, essays, reviews, and literary magazines, eventually becoming instrumental to the founding of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. In the mid-1960s, Whittemore and his family moved to Washington, where he became active in Artists of Conscience against the Vietnam War. He went on to serve as literary editor of the New Republic until leaving to write a biography of William Carlos Williams and teach at the University of Maryland, all the while publishing the National Book Award–nominated poetry and essays that made his name—and even restarting Delos, a journal of world literature and translation. Against the Grain presents the memorable and brilliant life of this twentieth-century original.
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