John Berryman, 1914-1972. American author
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Finding-Aid for the Berryman Papers [00145]Collection Description
Papers, 1957-1967
2 items
Access: Open
Born John Smith in MacAlester, Oklahoma, in 1914, Berryman received an undergraduate degree from Columbia College in 1936 and attended Cambridge University on a fellowship. He taught at Wayne State University in Detroit and went on to occupy posts at Harvard and Princeton. From 1955, he was a professor at the University of Minnesota until his suicide in 1972. He first won acclaim for Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in 1956, but he is best known for his sequence of Dream Songs, which were begun in 1964 and continued in various books until there were close to 400 songs. In these he invented the character of Henry Pussycat, whose dream adventures are recounted with wrenched syntax, playful lyricism, attention to various forms of speech, and an all-abiding tone of unexpected strangeness.
The papers at Washington University consist of a ts. of Beloved, Do Not Think of Me, a collection of poems later published as His Thoughts Made Pockets and the Plane Buckt. The page proof of the latter collection is also here, as is an uncut page proof copy of Berryman’s collection, Short Poems.