14 Facts About Richard Howard

Richard Joseph Howard was an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator.

Richard Howard was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and was a graduate of Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren, and where he was an emeritus professor.

Richard Howard soon turned his attention to poetry and poetic criticism, and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his 1969 collection Untitled Subjects, which took for its subject dramatic imagined letters and monologues of 19th century historical figures.

For much of his career, Richard Howard composed poems employing a quantitative verse technique.

Richard Howard was the longest-serving Poetry Editor of The Paris Review, from 1992 until 2005.

Richard Howard received a Pulitzer prize, the Academy of Arts and Letters Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship.

Richard Howard was previously University Professor of English at the University of Houston and, before that, Ropes Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati.

Richard Howard served as Poet Laureate of the State of New York from 1993 to 1995.

In 1982, Richard Howard was named a Chevalier of L'Ordre National du Merite by the government of France.

Richard Howard died in New York City on March 31,2022, from complications of dementia.

Richard Howard was adopted as an infant by Emma Joseph and Harry Orwitz, a middle-class Cleveland couple, who were Jewish; his mother changed their last names to "Howard" when he was an infant, after she divorced Orwitz.

Richard Howard never met his birth parents, nor his sister, who was adopted by another local family.

Richard Howard was gay, a fact that comes up frequently in his later work.

Richard Howard was renowned for the extreme number of books which he had collected over his lifetime and which famously lined the walls of his New York City apartment.