Grieg, who told Kees of a possible job offer. Kees also telephoned a friend, the memoirist Janet Richards, seeking her company. On July 19, 1955, Kees's car was found deserted on the Marin County side of the Golden Gate Bridge. Reputation and resurgence The reputation of Weldon Kees has seen as much neglect as it has keen attention. Weeks before his disappearance, a young poet in Florida, Donald Justice, attempted to write Kees a letter of admiration and to send him a sestina he had written since Kees excelled in that form. His letter found its way to Kees's father, John, who eventually gave Justice permission to compile and edit The Collected Poems of Weldon Kees (Iowa City, IA: The Stone Wall Press, 1960), which was subsequently released as a trade paperback in the 1960s. Kees's work attracted the attention of other younger poets and his work gradually became anthologized and received critical attention. During the 1980s and 1990s, a volume of Kees's correspondence appeared, Weldon Kees and the Midcentury Generation: Letters, 1935–1955 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986) and the poets Dana Gioia and James Reidel reclaimed and drew attention to Kees's fiction, nonfiction, and visual art. Gioia edited The Ceremony and other stories (Port Townsend, WA: Graywolf Press, 1984) and Reidel edited selection of Kees's critical writings in Reviews and Essays: 1936-1955 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988) and the novel Fall Quarter (Brownsville, OR: Story Line Press, 1990). Reidel eventually produced a biography of Kees, Vanished Act: The Life and Art of Weldon Kees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). Books and articles about Kees continue to appear. His paintings and collages have also been shown in two major retrospectives. Kees has attracted a number of admirers who have commented at length about his poetry. The late Joseph Brodsky, as poet laureate for the Library of Congress, wrote this appraisal: His poems display neither the incoherence of nostalgia for some mentally palatable past nor, however vaguely charted, the possibility of the future. All he had was the present, which was not to his Muse's liking, and eventually not to his own either. His poetry, in other words, is that of the here and now and of no escape, except for poetry itself. Yet for all he had to say about the present, his language is amazingly clear and direct, and the formal aspects of his verse