Richard Poirier

• 1. Introduction

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  Richard Poirier was born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, on the 9th of September, 1925. He enlisted in the US Army before attending any university. He served in the European theater during World War II. When the war ended, the G.I. Bill made his higher education possible. What he built from that education, over the following six decades, helped reshape how Americans engage with their own literary tradition.

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• 2. From War to Cambridge

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  Amherst College was where Poirier completed his undergraduate degree, his tuition covered by the G.I. Bill. He then earned a master's degree at Yale University and completed his doctorate at Harvard University in 1960. During the 1950s, a Fulbright Scholarship took him to Downing College, Cambridge, where he studied under F. R. Leavis. Leavis was one of the most demanding literary critics of the twentieth century. He insisted that reading well was a genuine moral and intellectual commitment, not a matter of personal taste. That time in Cambridge placed Poirier inside one of the most rigorous critical traditions of the English-speaking world. His first book, Stories British and American, was co-authored with Jack Barry Ludwig and appeared in 1953. His doctoral dissertation was published in 1960 as The Comic Sense of Henry James: A Study of the Early Novels. The following year, he took on his first major editorial role.

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• 3. The Editor's Work

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  From 1961 to 1966, Poirier served as series editor of Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. He was also an editor of Partisan Review. His most lasting editorial creation was Raritan, a literary quarterly he founded and edited himself. Raritan gave serious, long-form critical writing a dedicated home. In 1979, Poirier co-founded the Library of America, an institution built to publish authoritative editions of the country's most important writers. He served as chairman of the Library's board. In 1995, working alongside Mark Richardson, he edited the Library of America's collected edition of Robert Frost's poems, prose, and plays. He also edited Raritan Reading in 1990, gathering work from his journal into a permanent collected volume. In 1971, he co-edited The Oxford Reader: Varieties of Contemporary Discourse with Frank Kermode. The critical books he was writing in parallel tell a separate story.

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• 4. A Critic's Range

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  The Renewal of Literature: Emersonian Reflections, published by Random House in 1987, placed Ralph Waldo Emerson at the center of Poirier's critical project. In 1990, he published Ralph Waldo Emerson, a dedicated critical study. Poetry and Pragmatism followed in 1992. Three books on Emerson within five years show how central that nineteenth-century figure had become to his thinking. A World Elsewhere: The Place of Style in American Literature appeared in 1966, his first extended solo study after the Henry James book. The Performing Self came in 1971. His studies of individual writers included Mailer, published in the Fontana Modern Masters series in 1972, and Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing, from 1977. His final book, Trying It Out in America: Literary and Other Performances, appeared in 2003. In Defense of Reading was co-edited with Reuben A. Brower in 1963. That collection appeared three years before A World Elsewhere.

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• 5. Against the War

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  In 1968, Poirier signed the Writers and Editors War Tax Protest pledge. The document committed its signatories to refusing payment of federal taxes in protest against the Vietnam War. Poirier held the Marius Bewley Professorship of American and English Literature at Rutgers University at the time. His signature on a public pledge to withhold taxes was a deliberate act. It placed his name alongside other American writers and editors who believed the war required a public response. He died in Manhattan on the 15th of August, 2009. American Literature: Volume Two, co-edited with William L. Vance for Little, Brown in 1970, appeared two years after the protest. That volume came nine years before he co-founded the Library of America in 1979.

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