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Curated playlist

20th-century American poets

  • Stephen KingA minivan hit Stephen King on a Maine road in June 1999. A dog in the back distracted the driver.
  • Ernest HemingwayErnest Hemingway, only 18, carried Italian soldiers to safety despite being seriously wounded by mortar fire.
  • T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot compared an evening sky to a patient on a surgical table.
  • H. P. LovecraftH. P. Lovecraft died in 1937 virtually unknown to readers. His monsters later became global touchstones.
  • William FaulknerWilliam Faulkner never told his daughter he had won the Nobel Prize. She heard it when the principal called her in.
  • Jack KerouacJack Kerouac typed On the Road on a 120-foot roll of taped tracing paper. He finished the final draft in 20 days.
  • Kurt VonnegutKurt Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden by hiding in an underground meat locker.
  • Dr. SeussAn education publisher dared Dr. Seuss to write a book children can't put down. The result was The Cat in the Hat.
  • Langston HughesLangston Hughes's ashes rest beneath the floor of a Harlem research center.
  • Jim MorrisonOn live TV in 1967, Jim Morrison sang a lyric censors had told him to change. Ed Sullivan then banned the Doors.
  • Ezra PoundEzra Pound cut T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land by about half. Eliot called the edits proof of Pound's critical genius.
  • John CageJohn Cage once had a pianist play nothing for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Audience noise became the music.
  • W. H. AudenW. H. Auden died hours after reading his poems aloud in a Vienna hotel.
  • Patti SmithPatti Smith, the American singer, songwriter, poet and author, lost her place in the middle of a song at the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Stockholm. The date was the 10th of December 2016. She was standing in for Bob Dylan, winner of the…
  • Tupac ShakurTupac Shakur wrote and recorded the album The Don Killuminati in three days. Mixing took four more.
  • Vladimir NabokovNovelist Vladimir Nabokov also named butterfly species, and later genetic research backed his theory.
  • Edmund WilsonCritic Edmund Wilson mailed strangers a postcard listing over two dozen things he would not do.
  • Robert E. HowardRobert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, died at thirty with almost none of his work in a book.
  • Roger ZelaznyA story by Roger Zelazny traveled to Mars in 2008. "A Rose for Ecclesiastes" rode on a DVD aboard the Phoenix lander.
  • Audre LordeAudre Lorde answered questions about her feelings by reciting a poem. She was a nearly blind child in Harlem.

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