22 Facts About John Berryman

John Berryman was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry.

John Berryman was born on October 25,1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma, where he was raised until the age of ten, when his father, John Smith, a banker, and his mother, Martha, a schoolteacher, moved to Florida.

In 1926, in Clearwater, Florida, when Berryman was 11 years old, his father shot and killed himself.

John Berryman was haunted by his father's death for the rest of his life and wrote about his struggle to come to terms with it in much of his poetry.

John Berryman's mother changed her first name from Peggy to Jill.

John Berryman then attended Columbia College, where he was president of the Philolexian Society, joined the Boar's Head Society, edited The Columbia Review, and studied under the literary scholar and poet Mark Van Doren.

John Berryman later credited Van Doren with sparking his interest in writing poetry seriously.

For two years, John Berryman studied overseas at Clare College, Cambridge, on a Kellett Fellowship from Columbia.

John Berryman published some of this early verse in his first book, Poems, in 1942.

The book received largely negative reviews from poets like Jarrell, who wrote, in The Nation, that Berryman was "a complicated, nervous, and intelligent [poet]" whose work was too derivative of W B Yeats.

In October 1942, John Berryman married Eileen Mulligan in a ceremony at St Patrick's Cathedral, with Van Doren as his best man.

The couple moved to Beacon Hill, and John Berryman lectured at Harvard.

In 1947, John Berryman started an affair with a married woman named Chris Haynes, documented in a long sonnet sequence that he refrained from publishing in part because that would have revealed the affair to his wife.

John Berryman eventually published the work, Berryman's Sonnets, in 1967.

In 1950, John Berryman published a biography of the fiction writer and poet Stephen Crane, whom he greatly admired.

John Berryman was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1967, and that same year Life magazine ran a feature story on him.

John Berryman continued to work on the "dream song" poems at a feverish pace and in 1968 published a second, significantly longer, volume, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest, which won the National Book Award for Poetry and the Bollingen Prize.

The next year John Berryman republished 77 Dreams Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest as one book, The Dream Songs, in which the character Henry serves as John Berryman's alter ego.

Responses to the poems from critics and most of John Berryman's peers ranged from tepid to hostile; the collection is generally "considered a minor work".

John Berryman was fired from the University of Iowa after a fight with his landlord led to his being arrested, jailed overnight, and fined for disorderly conduct and public intoxication.

For instance, in addition to the elegies, John Berryman writes about his trip to Ireland, as well as his own burgeoning literary fame.

In 2004, the Library of America published John Berryman: Selected Poems, edited by the poet Kevin Young.