of the Bibliographical Center of Research for the Rocky Mountain Region, which was used as a model for a national union catalog. That same year, he married Ann Swan. In early 1941, Kees signed a provisional contract with Alfred A. Knopf for a novel, Fall Quarter, an academic black comedy about a young professor who battles the dreariness and banality of a staid Nebraskan college. Fall Quarter, part surreal, part social commentary, was rejected by Knopf in the days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the declaration of war having changed publishing contingencies for war books. A farce about a dystopic heartland would look unpatriotic on Knopf's 1942 list. From this point on, Kees turned from fiction to writing only poetry. New York and Provincetown A pacifist, Kees left Denver for New York City, where he believed Selective Service psychiatrists were more likely to declare him unfit for military duty. He had also, during previous visits, made contacts with a number of literary figures, such as William Carlos Williams, Edmund Wilson and his then wife Mary McCarthy, Saul Bellow, Dwight Macdonald, Allen Tate, Lionel Trilling, and many others. It was during his first year in New York that he worked as a book and film critic for Time and as newsreel scriptwriter for Paramount News. With his first book of poems, The Last Man (San Francisco: Colt Press, 1943), Kees quickly established his reputation and his poems began to appear regularly in The New Yorker (which published his first Robinson persona poems, which pathologize the urban man), Poetry, and The Partisan Review. By the time his second book appeared, The Fall of Magicians (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1947), Kees had already been painting for more than a year and had befriended a number of Abstract Expressionism artists, including Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Hans Hofmann, as well as the critic Clement Greenberg—whose column Kees took over at The Nation from 1948 to 1950. In 1948, Weldon and Ann Kees began summering at the artist colony at Provincetown, Massachusetts on Cape Cod. In the autumn of that year, Kees had his first one-man show at the Peridot Gallery and one of his paintings was included in a group show of established and rising artists at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Despite these initial successes, Kees's work only had very modest sales. During the summer of 1949, Kees established a