David Rytman Slavitt was born in White Plains, New York, the son of Samuel Saul (a prominent attorney) and Adele Beatrice Rytman Slavitt. He married Lynn Nita Meyer in 1956. This marriage produced three children--Evan, Sarah, and Joshua. It ended, by divorce, in 1977. In 1978 he married Janet Lee Abrahm, a physician.

Slavitt attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he studied with the late Dudley Fitts and where he published his first poem--a parody of Whittier's "Snowbound" that Winfield Townley Scott printed in the magazine section of the Providence Journal . He entered Yale in 1952 and studied with Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, Richard Sewall, and Paul Weiss. He was Scholar of the House and, among other things, followed after William F. Buckley, Jr., as anchorman on the Yale debate team. He graduated magna cum laude in 1956. In 1957 he took an M.A. at Columbia University and there wrote his...