SOURCE: "Joseph Brodsky, Exiled Poet Who Won Nobel, Dies at 55," in The New York Times, January 29, 1996, pp. A1, B5.

In the obituary below, McFadden provides an overview of Brodsky's life and career.

Joseph Brodsky, the persecuted Russian poet who settled in the United States in the early 1970's, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1987 and became his adopted country's poet laureate, died yesterday at his apartment in Brooklyn Heights. He was 55.

The cause was believed to be a heart attack, said Roger Straus, Mr. Brodsky's friend and publisher. Mr. Brodsky had open-heart surgery in 1979 and later had two bypass operations, and had been in frail health for many years.

The poetry of Joseph Brodsky, with its haunting images of wandering and loss and the human search for freedom, was not political, and certainly not the work of an anarchist or even of an active dissident. If anything...