William Stafford
1914-1993
Other Works
Traveling Through the Dark
Allegiances
Down in My Heart
Stories That Could Be True
Getting Started William Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, and grew up in small towns
scattered across the Kansas plains. A conscientious objector in World War II, he lived in U.S. Forest Service work camps with other conscientious objectors during the war. In 1948 he began teaching English at Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, where he remained for much of the rest of his life.
Experiments in Writing Primarily a poet, Stafford viewed writing as a kind of exploration: "I feel like Daniel Boone going into Kentucky," he once said. All of his poems started out as experiments, and despite his many successes, most of them—"thousands," according to him—were never completed.
Awards and Honors Stafford was a highly respected poet who won numerous awards and honors.
His book Traveling Through the Dark received the National Book Award in 1963. He was named poetry consultant for the Library of Congress in 1970 and served as Oregon's poet laureate from 1975 to 1990. He also won the Shelley Memorial Award in 1964 and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1981. In 1986 Stafford was named one of America's ten major living poets by his peers in a Writer's Digest poll.
|
|
