introduction by Garrison Keillor who took a class from him in his youth calling him a "movie-star handsome poet and teacher" who "owns the only sort of immortality that matters to a writer, which is to have written things that people remember years later . . . What makes R.W. permanently readable and relevant is his wit and humor, which is the underground spring that keeps the gardens of American literature green. Always self-effacing, Whittemore describes himself at 21 in his memoir: "He was nearsighted but wore no glasses. He had a medium-grade mind and managed to mix intellectual modesty with sudden arrogance. . . . He preferred to think of himself as a genuine rebel yet couldn't help being polite." He was married to Helen Lundeen and had four children: Cate, Ned, Jack, and Daisy. Bibliography Poetry Heroes & Heroines (1946) An American Takes a Walk (1956) The Self-Made Man (1959) The Boy from Iowa (1962) Poems, New and Selected (1967) Fifty Poems Fifty (1970) The Mother's Breast and the Father's House (1974) The Feel of Rock: Poems of Three Decades (1982) The Past, the Future, the Present: Poems Selected and New (1990) Ten from Ten & One More (2007) The Season of Waiting: Selected Poems: 1946-2006 (Hebrew trans by Moseh Dor) (2007) Prose The Little Magazine and Contemporary Literature (1966) From Zero to Absolute (1967) The Fascination of the Abomination: Poems, stories, essays (1963) William Carlos Williams: Poet from Jersey (1975) The Poet as Journalist: Life at the New Republic (1976) Pure Lives: The Early Biographers (1988) Whole Lives: Shapers of Modern Biography (1989) Six Literary Lives (1993) Against The Grain: The Literary Life of a Poet, a Memoir by Reed Whittemore (2007) References External links Reed Whittemore biography at Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved 2 Aug 2013. Reed Whittemore papers at the University of Maryland Libraries 1919 births 2012 deaths 20th-century American poets American Poets Laureate Poets Laureate of Maryland Writers from New Haven, Connecticut Carleton College faculty 21st-century American poets