William Morris Meredith, Jr.
| William Meredith | |
|---|---|
 |
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| Born | William Morris Meredith Jr. January 9, 1919 New York City, New York, USA |
| Died | May 30, 2007 (aged 88) New London, Connecticut, USA |
| Occupation | Author, poet, professor |
| Nationality | American |
| Notable awards |
National Book Award 1988 |
| Partner | Richard Harteis (1970s–2007) |
National Book Award
1997
William Morris Meredith Jr. (January 9, 1919 – May 30, 2007) was an American poet and educator. He was Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1978 to 1980.
Meredith was born in New York City to William Morris Meredith Sr. and Nelley Keyser. He attended Lenox School in Massachusetts, graduating in 1936. He began writing while a college student at Princeton University. He graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in 1940, having written a senior thesis on Robert Frost. His first volume of poetry, Love Letter from an Impossible Land, appeared in 1944. It was selected by Archibald MacLeish for publication as part of Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition.
He worked briefly for the New York Times as a copy boy and (later) a reporter, before joining the United States Army Air Force in 1941. The following year he transferred to the United States Navy as a carrier pilot. He served in the Aleutian Islands and Pacific Theater, and he achieved the rank of lieutenant. He continued his service in the United States Navy Reserve until 1952, when he re-enlisted to serve in the Korean War. He ultimately achieved the rank of Lieutenant Commander and was awarded two Air Medals.
In 1988 Meredith was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a Los Angeles Times Book Award for Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems and in 1997 he won the National Book Award for Poetry for Effort at Speech. Meredith was also awarded a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the Carl Sandburg Award, and the International Vaptsarov Prize in Poetry.
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