John Allyn McAlpin Berryman (born John Allyn Smith, Jr.; October 25, 1914 – January 7, 1972) was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the "confessional" school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs. Life and career John Berryman was born on October 25, 1914 in McAlester, Oklahoma, where he was raised until the age of ten, when his father, John Smith, a banker, and his mother, Martha (also known as Peggy), a schoolteacher, moved to Florida. In 1926, in Clearwater, Florida, when Berryman was 11 years old, his father shot and killed himself. Smith was jobless at the time, and he and Martha were filing for divorce. Berryman was haunted by his father's death for the rest of his life and wrote about his struggle to come to terms with it in much of his poetry. In "Dream Song #143", he wrote, "That mad drive [to commit suicide] wiped out my childhood. I put him down/while all the same on forty years I love him/stashed in Oklahoma/besides his brother Will". In "Dream Song #145", he also wrote of his father: Similarly, in Dream Song #384, Berryman wrote: After his father's death at the rear entrance to Kipling Arms, where the Smiths rented an apartment, the poet's mother, within months, married John Angus McAlpin Berryman in New York City. The poet was renamed John Allyn McAlpin Berryman. Berryman's mother also changed her first name from Peggy to Jill. Although his stepfather later divorced his mother, Berryman and his stepfather stayed on good terms. With both his mother and stepfather working, his mother decided to send him to the South Kent School, a private boarding school in Connecticut. Berryman then attended Columbia College, where he was president of the Philolexian Society, joined the Boar's Head Society, edited The Columbia Review, and studied under the literary scholar and poet Mark Van Doren. Berryman later credited Van Doren with sparking his interest in writing poetry seriously. For two years, Berryman also studied overseas at Clare College, Cambridge, on a Kellett Fellowship from Columbia. He graduated in 1936. Berryman's early work formed part of a volume titled Five Young American Poets, published by New Directions in 1940". One of the other young poets included in the book was Randall Jarrell. Berryman