ISBN: 0688050263 9780688050269

Category: Biography & Autobiography / General

Page count: 519

In this balanced biography of the complex and troubled man, Mariani interweaves Berryman's personal life with his evolving ideas about poets and poetry, and places him amongst his artistic and critical contemporaries. Concerned with Berryman the poet and critic, the author traces Berryman's literary career from his Columbia days where he was befriended by Blakmur and Van Doren, to his Cambridge study and meetings with T.S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas and W.B. Yeats, to his Harvard and Princeton teaching days, and his relationships with Schwartz, Lowell, and Saul Bellow. Although Mariani covers Berryman's struggle with alcohol and drugs, his obsessions with women and fame, and other reasons for his agony, he does not justify his suicide, or deduce from them an index to the quality of his poetry. ISBN 0-688-05026-3: $29.95.