“To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that
eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth
together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold.
”
Archibald MacLeish
(1892- 1982)
An Illinois native, MacLeish attended Hotchkiss, Yale, and Harvard Law,
where he was an editor of the Law Review, but only practiced for three years
before marrying and decamping to Paris to join the expatriate community of
the 1920’s, where his friends included Hemmingway, Stein, Dos Passos,
Fitzgerald, Parker and Benchley. During this time his poetry began to be
published and he was awarded the first of three Pulitzer prizes for his
writing. He was Franklin Roosevelt’s controversial choice to be Librarian of
Congress, and although he lacked formal training in Library Science, he is
credited with transforming the Library of Congress from an out of date
backwater to the literary archive of record is still is today. He was
instrumental in establishing the post of Poet Laureate, and was a founding
representative to UNESCO. He returned to Harvard in the late forties and
taught there until his retirement despite the opposition of Joseph McCarthy
and other Red Scare proponents. In addition to his multiple Pulitzers, his
writing garnered a National Book Award, a Tony for one of his plays, and an
Academy Award for a documentary. In 1977 Jimmy Carter recognized his
contributions to literature with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Greg Bover
Good Morning Gloucester 