Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) was an American poet, playwright, teacher, and public official and a Pulitzer Prize winner.

Archibald MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Ill. on May 7, 1892. He graduated from Yale University in 1915. After serving in World War I as a field artillery officer, he received a degree from the Harvard Law School in 1919 and practiced law in Boston for 3 years. In 1923 he departed for Europe to travel and write. He lived mainly in France for the next five years, publishing several books of poetry during this period, including The Pot of Earth (1925), which echoed T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, and The Hamlet of A. MacLeish, an expression of MacLeish's disillusionment with the postwar scene.

During the 1930s MacLeish was a reporter on the staff of Fortune magazine. A strong supporter of the New Deal, he served as adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt while working as librarian...