Richard Eberhart Papers

Richard Eberhart was born in Austin, Minnesota, on April 5, 1904. He received a B.A. degree from Dartmouth College, which conferred an Honorary Doctorship in Letters on him in 1954, a B.A. and M.A. from Cambridge University, and attended graduate school at Harvard. He was a school teacher, before entering the U.S. Navy in World War II. After the war, he joined a family business, the Butcher Polish Company of Boston. In 1952 he went back to teaching and served as a poet in residence, professor, and lecturer at various colleges and universities.

His first book, A Bravery of Earth, 1930, was followed by many others, including Reading the Spirit, 1936, Song and Idea, 1940, Undercliff, Poems, 1946-1953, and Great Praises, 1957, and Selected Poems, 1966. His Collected Poems, 1930-1986, was published in 1988. He received many prizes for his work, including the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award (1955), the Bollingen Prize (1962), the Pulitzer Prize (1966), the National Book Award (1976), and the Poetry Society of America Robert Frost Medal. He was the Library of Congress Consultant in Poetry from 1959 to 1961. He died June 9, 2005.