William Meredith Papers

William Morris Meredith was born in 1919 in New York City. After completing his undergraduate education in English literature, Morris worked briefly as a copy boy for the New York Times before enlisting in the United States Army in 1940. He later transferred to the U.S. Navy Air Corps and served in non-combat roles in the Pacific for the duration of the war and in the Korean War. He retired from the Navy with the rank of lieutenant commander. After stints at Princeton University and the University of Hawaii, Meredith began teaching at Connecticut College in 1956. Among the students Meredith mentored at Connecticut were the novelist Gayl Jones and the poet Michael Collier. In addition to his professorial duties, Meredith was active in the Academny of American Poets (serving as chancellor from 1964 to 1967) and the National Institute of Arts and Letters (serving on the board from 1978 to 1980). After turning down an invitation to be Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress in 1960, Meredith took up that role for two years between 1978 and 1980. In 1983 Meredith suffered a stroke, forcing him into retirement and from most professional activities. Meredith's first collection of poetry, Love Letter from an Impossible Land, was published by the Yale University Press as part of its Younger Poets Series while he was still on active duty in 1944. Among other collections of poetry are The Open Sea (1957), The Wreck of the Thresher (1964), Earth Walk (1970), Hazard the Painter (1975), The Cheer (1980), Partial Accounts (1987, winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and Effort at Speech (1997, winner of the National Book Award). William Meredith died in New London, Connecticut in 1907.