was named a Chevalier of L'Ordre National du Mérite by the government of France. In 2016, he received the Philolexian Society Award for Distinguished Literary Achievement. Howard died in New York City on March 31, 2022, from complications of dementia. Personal life Richard Howard was born to poor Jewish parents. His last name at birth is unknown. He was adopted as an infant by Emma Joseph and Harry Orwitz, a middle-class Cleveland couple, who were also Jewish; his mother changed their last names to "Howard" when he was an infant, after she divorced Orwitz. Howard never met his birth parents, nor his sister, who was adopted by another local family. Howard was gay, a fact that comes up frequently in his later work. He was out to some degree since at least the 1960s, when he remarked to friend W. H. Auden that he was offended by a fellow poet's use of Jewish and gay epithets, "since [he was] both these things", to which Auden replied, "My dear, I never knew you were Jewish!" Howard kept on his bed in a nook of his New York City apartment a large stuffed gorilla named "Mildred". Works Poetry Quantities (1962) Damages (1967) Untitled Subjects (1969) Findings (1971) Two-Part Inventions (1974) Fellow Feelings (1976) Misgivings (1979) Lining Up (1984) No Traveller (1989) Selected Poems (1991) Like Most Revelations (1994) Trappings (1999) Talking Cures (2002) Fallacies of Wonder (2003) Inner Voices (selected poems), 2004 The Silent Treatment (2005) Without Saying (2008) A Progressive Education (2014) Critical essays Alone With America: Essays on the Art of Poetry in the United States Since 1950 (1969) Preferences: 51 American Poets Choose Poems From Their Own Work and From the Past (1974) Travel Writing of Henry James (essay) (1994) Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965–2003 (2004) Major translations (French to English) The Traitor by André Gorz Les Fleurs du mal by Charles Baudelaire Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes and other works, such as Mythologies and Mourning Diary Force of Circumstance by Simone de Beauvoir Nadja by André Breton Mobile by Michel Butor and other works A Happy Death by Albert Camus The Trouble with Being Born by Emil Cioran and other works Proust and Signs by Gilles Deleuze William Marshal: The Flower of Chivalry by Georges Duby Madness and Civilization by Michel Foucault and other works The War Memoirs (Unity and Salvation) by Charles de Gaulle The Immoralist by