Karl Shapiro

Karl Shapiro (1913-2000) was born in Baltimore, studied at Virginia and Johns Hopkins, and served in the southwest Pacific in World War II. He returned home with the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for his second book of poems, V-Letter and Other Poems, and went on to a long and distinguished career as an American poet, writing books of poetry, autobiography, and essays (including In Defense of Ignorance, The Bourgeois Poet, White-Haired Lover, and To Abolish Children), and teaching at various universities...See more

Karl Shapiro (1913-2000) was born in Baltimore, studied at Virginia and Johns Hopkins, and served in the southwest Pacific in World War II. He returned home with the 1945 Pulitzer Prize for his second book of poems, V-Letter and Other Poems, and went on to a long and distinguished career as an American poet, writing books of poetry, autobiography, and essays (including In Defense of Ignorance, The Bourgeois Poet, White-Haired Lover, and To Abolish Children), and teaching at various universities. Robert Phillips teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Houston and is Karl Shapiro's literary executor. See less