John Berryman papers

John Berryman was a poet, scholar, and professor born in MacAlester, Oklahoma in 1914. Born John Allyn Smith, Jr., the poet spent a majority of his childhood in Oklahoma until 1926 when his father, John Smith, Sr., committed suicide. Shortly after his father's death, his mother Martha Smith remarried John Berryman and changed her to Jill Berryman. The poet also took the last name of his new stepfather, and the family moved to New York City.

Berryman attended Columbia College in New York City from 1932 to 1936. There he studied English under the mentorship of Mark Van Doren, who urged Berryman to seriously pursue poetry writing. His earliest published poems appeared in The Southern Review (1937), and his first publication of collected poems appeared in Five Young American Poets (1940).

Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet was the first work to garner significant critical attention. Published in 1953, Homage concerned 17th-century poet Anne Bradstreet; the work was complex in it's mixture of historical allusions and Berryman's own fantasies about Bradstreet and her life. His most significant contribution to the American poetic canon came in 1964 with the publication of 77 Dream Songs, the first of two volumes of short, three-stanza lyric poems. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and the poems were praised for their range in language and tone, as well as Berryman's tight technical control.

Along with his accomplishments in poetry writing, Berryman was also an avid scholar and active professor throughout his career. He taught at several universities until he settled in Minneapolis in the mid-1950s as a lecturer in the Humanities Department at the University of Minnesota. His research interests included fiction writer Stephen Crane, Shakespeare and his dramatic works, and the work of his contemporaries. His biography of Stephen Crane was published in 1950; his essays on Shakespeare, Robert Lowell, Dylan Thomas, and other writers were collected posthumously in The Freedom of the Poet (1976).

John Berryman suffered from depression and alcoholism throughout much of his adult life, likely stemming from the trauma of his father's death and his turbulent childhood. In 1972 the poet committed suicide when he jumped from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His poetry is now considered exemplary of the Confessional poetry movement, as defined by the intensely personal poems of writers such as himself, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell during the 1950s and 1960s.