12 Facts About Kenneth Rexroth

Kenneth Charles Marion Rexroth was an American poet, translator, and critical essayist.

Kenneth Rexroth is regarded as a central figure in the San Francisco Renaissance, and paved the groundwork for the movement.

Largely self-educated, Rexroth learned several languages and translated poems from Chinese, French, Spanish, and Japanese.

Kenneth Rexroth's childhood was troubled by his father's alcoholism and his mother's chronic illness.

Kenneth Rexroth's mother died in 1916 and his father in 1919, after which he went to live with his aunt in Chicago and enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago.

Kenneth Rexroth later testified as a defense witness at Ferlinghetti's obscenity trial for publishing "Howl".

Kenneth Rexroth had previously sent Ginsberg to meet Snyder, and was thus responsible for their friendship.

Kenneth Rexroth ostensibly appears in Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums as Reinhold Cacoethes.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti recalled that Kenneth Rexroth self-identified as a philosophical anarchist, regularly associated with other anarchists in North Beach, and sold Italian anarchist newspapers at the City Lights Bookstore.

Kenneth Rexroth, a pacifist, was a conscientious objector during World War II.

Kenneth Rexroth had spent his final years translating Japanese and Chinese women poets, as well as promoting the work of female poets in America and overseas.

The year before his death, on Easter, Kenneth Rexroth converted to Roman Catholicism.