January 14th, 2009
W.D. Snodgrass (William DeWitt Snodgrass), born Jan. 5, 1926 in Wilkinsburg, PA, died at his upstate New York home after a four-month battle with inoperable lung cancer.
Snodgrass won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1960 for his first book, Heart’s Needle, which grew from heartbreak at losing custody of his daughter in a bitter divorce. Although widely credited as a founding member of the Confessional School of poetry, Snodgrass himself dismissed the label. Snodgrass was the author of more than 30 books of poetry and translations.
Smartish Pace