Although he is most deservedly known for his poetry, John Malcolm Brinnin's broad range of literary activities stamps him as a man of letters. Besides producing six volumes of verse, he has earned reputations as editor, anthologist, social historian, and literary biographer.

John Malcolm Brinnin was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, to American parents, John Thomas and Frances Malcolm Brinnin, but the family moved to Detroit when he was four years old. For a brief time he attended Wayne State University, later transferring to the University of Michigan, where he was a classmate of the young playwright Arthur Miller. By the time of his graduation in 1941 Brinnin was publishing poems regularly in periodicals and was well on the way toward a literary reputation, having won three consecutive Avery Hopwood Awards in Ann Arbor as well as, in 1939, the Jeanette Sewell Davis Prize given by Poetry magazine for a...