Louis Simpson

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Louis Simpson (born March 27, 1923 in Jamaica) is a United States poet. He won the 1964 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his work At The End Of The Open Road.

His father was a lawyer of Scottish descent, and his mother Russian. At 17 he emigrated to the United States and began attending Columbia University. During World War II, from 1943 to 1945 he was a member of the 101st Airborne Division and would fight in France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany. After the end of the war he attended the University of Paris.

His first book was The Arrivistes, published in 1949. It was hailed for its strong formal verse, but Simpson later moved away from the style of his early successes and embraced a spare yet obscure brand of free verse. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia and taught there, as well as University of California, Berkeley, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Awards that he has received are the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1962 and the Prix de Rome.

He currently lives on the north shore of Long Island near Stony Brook.

[edit] Selected works

The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems, 1940-2001
Nombres et poussière; There You Are (1995)
Ships Going Into the Blue: Essays and Notes on Poetry (1994)
In the Room We Share (1990)
Collected Poems (1988)
The Character of the Poet (1986)
People Live Here: Selected Poems 1949-83 (1983)
The Best Hour of the Night (1983)
A Company of Poets (1981)
Caviare at the Funeral (1980)
Armidale (1979)
A Revolution in Taste: Studies of Dylan Thomas, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, and Robert Lowell (1978)
Searching for the Ox (1976)
Three on the Tower (1975)
Adventures of the Letter I (1971)
Selected Poems (1965)
At the End of the Open Road, Poems (1963)