Richard Howard

Educated at Columbia University and the Sorbonne, Richard Howard (1929–2022) was the author of twelve volumes of poetry, including A Progressive Education (Turtle Point Press, 2014); Trappings: New Poems (Turtle Point Press, 1999); Like Most Revelations: New Poems (1994); Selected Poems (1991); No Traveller (1989); Findings (1971); Untitled Subjects (1969), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize; and Quantities (1962). He published more than 150 translations from the French, including works by Gide, Giraudoux, Cocteau, Camus, De Beauvoir, De Gaulle, Breton, Robbe-Grillet, Barthes, Cioran, Claude Simon, Stendhal, and Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal, for which he received the 1983 American Book Award for translation. He was also the author of Alone with America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States since 1950. In 1994 he edited the Library of America edition of the Travel Writings of Henry James, and the 1995 edition of The Best American poetyry.

His honors included the Levinson Prize, the Harriet Monroe Memorial Prize, the National Institute of Arts and Letters Literary Award, the Ordre National du Mérite from the French government, and the PEN Translation Medal, as well as fellowships from The Academy of American Poets, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He was President of PEN American Center (1979-80) and Poet Laureate of New York State (1994-96). He held teaching positions at the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale, where he was the Luce Visiting Scholar in 1983, and at the University of Houston from 1987 to 1997. He also was poetry editor of The Paris Review and Western Humanities Review. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1970 for “Untitled Subjects: Poems.”

He was a Chancellor of The Academy of American Poets and lived in New York City where he taught in the Writing Division of the School of the Arts of Columbia University.

INNER VOICES: Selected Poems, 1963-2003 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003)

PAPER TRAIL: Selected Prose, 1965-2003 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003)