Nobel Prize winner and fifth U.S. poet laureate, Russian-born Joseph Brodsky (born Iosif Alexandrovich Brodsky; 1940-1996) was imprisoned for his poetry in the former Soviet Union but was greatly honored in the West.

Joseph (Iosif Alexandrovich) Brodsky was born on May 24, 1940, in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg), where he attended school until about 1956. His father was an officer in the old Soviet Navy. The family fell into poverty when the government stripped the older Brodsky, a Jew, of his rank.

When he left school, Joseph began an intensive program of self education, reading widely and studying English and Polish. He worked in photography and as an aid to a coroner and a geologist. He translated into Russian the work of John Donne, the 17th-century English poet, and Czeslaw Milosz, a modern Polish poet. He also wrote his own poetry, which impressed Anna Akhmatova, one of the country's leading...