MacLeish, Archibald, 1892-1982
Dates
- Existence: 1892 - 1982
Biography
Archibald MacLeish, poet, playwright, and government official, was born on May 7, 1892, in Glencoe, Illinois. He graduated from Yale in 1915, entered Harvard Law School, and married Ada Hitchcock in 1916. After the United States entered World War I, he enlisted as a private in the army, served in the artillery in France, and was discharged with the rank of captain. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1919 and the next year joined the Boston law firm of Choate, Hall, and Stewart. In 1923 the MacLeish family moved to Paris, where they remained for five years. After returning to the United States, he travelled to Mexico to follow the route of Cortez's army in preparation for writing Conquistador.
During the 1930s MacLeish was an editor of Fortune magazine. He served as Librarian of Congress, 1939-44, Assistant Secretary of State for Public and Cultural Affairs, 1944-45, and Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Poetry at Harvard University, 1949-62. MacLeish's poetry and dramatic writings earned him Pulitizer Prizes in 1932, 1952, and 1959, the Bollingen Prize and the National Book Award for poetry in 1953, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1977, and the National Medal for Literature in 1978. Archibald MacLeish died in Boston on April 20, 1982.
His major works of poetry include Tower of Ivory (1917), The Pot of Earth (1925), The Hamlet of A. MacLeish (1928), New Found Land (1930), Conquistador (1932), America Was Promises (1939), Collected Poems, 1917-1952 (1952), and Songs for Eve (1954). MacLeish also wrote several plays, some of the most important being Panic (1935), The Fall of the City (1937), Air Raid (1938), J.B. (1958), Herakles (1967), and Scratch (1971). Counted among his works of prose are A Time to Speak (1941), The American Story (1944), Poetry and Experience, (1960), and A Continuing Journey (1968).
Found in 41 Collections and/or Records:
Harold Dwight Lasswell papers
Max Lerner papers
Letter : Elizabethan Club, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, to Julia Morrow, #4, Seventeenth Ave East, Duluth, Minnesota, [1913 Jun 7?]
Letters, 1941 February
One TLS from MacLeish to Leonard Lyons, asking if he will "set the record straight" on an unspecified matter, and one typescript carbon from Lyons to MacLeish.
Letters : Conway, Mass. 01341, USA, to László Magyar, 24413 Palic, Kizur Ištvan 10/A, Yugoslavia, 1973, 1979
Two autograph letters, signed, the first listing books by MacLeish published from 1925 to 1971 and the second discussing radio "as a stage" for poetry and verse plays and travel to Yugoslavia. With envelopes.
Annie Burr Lewis and Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis Photographs
Wilmarth Sheldon Lewis Papers
Anne Morrow Lindbergh papers
Robert Abercrombie Lovett papers
Archibald MacLeish collection
The collection contains writings, correspondence, a handful of personal papers, and a songbook. The bulk of the material consists of drafts of such works as Songs for Eve (1954), The Wild Old Wicked Men & Other Poems (1968), The American Bell (1962), Herakles (1967), J. B. , and A Continuing Journey (1968).
Archibald MacLeish Collection Addition
The Archibald MacLeish Collection Addition consists of material related to the life and career of the American poet Archibald MacLeish received by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library after the processing of the Archibald MacLeish Collection acquired in 1976. The Addition consists of correspondence, manuscripts, photographs, personal papers, and sound recordings documenting MacLeish and his family between 1801 and 1995.
Sara and Gerald Murphy papers
Myers family papers
The papers contain correspondence with family, friends, and acquaintances, plus a variety of personal papers, including obituaries, letters of sympathy, diaries, and scrapbooks documenting the lives of Richard E. and Alice Lee Myers and their children. Prominent correspondents include Stephen Vincent Benét, Nadia Boulanger, Grace Flandrau, John Gielgud, Charlotte Kett, Archibald MacLeish, and Gerald Murphy.
Wallace Notestein papers
The papers consist of correspondence, writings, printed material, notes, speeches, and other papers of Wallace Notestein, historian, teacher, author, and Sterling Professor of English History at Yale from 1928-1947. The bulk of the papers consist of letters received by Notestein from other historians, scholars, writers, students, and publishers and relate largely to academic and professional matters, to politics, and to his personal life.
Ezra Pound Papers
The Ezra Pound Papers document the literary career and political interests of Ezra Pound. Major correspondents include Richard Aldington, George Antheil, William Bird, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, James Laughlin, Wyndham Lewis, Marianne Moore, Odon Por, and Henry Swabey. The collection contains manuscripts of many of Pound's works, including the Cantos, Guide to Kulchur, and scripts of Pound's wartime radio broadcasts.
Harry Roskolenko collection
Anson Phelps Stokes family papers
The Virgil Thomson Papers
Music, correspondence and other papers, photographs, and additional materials by and about the American composer and critic Virgil Thomson (1896-1989)
Robert Penn Warren papers
The papers consist of drafts of manuscripts and related material, correspondence, photographs, and newspaper clippings documenting Warren's life from his undergraduate years until his death in 1989.
Register to the Papers of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya
Music, correspondence and other papers, photographs, and additional materials by and about the German-American composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950) and the German-American actress and singer Lotte Lenya (1898-1981)