George Oppen

George Oppen (April 24, 1908 – July 7, 1984) was an American poet.

Oppen was born in 1908 in New Rochelle, New York. In 1917 his family moved to San Francisco, California. He went to a high school military academy but was unhappy, got in trouble, and had to leave it.

From 1930 to 1933 he lived in France. He and his wife started a book publishing company called To Publishers. They printed work by poets who were connected to Objectivism. They printed Louis Zukofsky's An ‘Objectivists’ Anthology in 1932.

His own first book of poetry, Discrete Series came out in 1934. Ezra Pound wrote its Preface. Oppen joined the Communist Party in 1935 but left it in 1942 and joined the U. S. Army to fight fascism. He was wounded during World War II. After the war he became a cabinet-maker in Los Angeles. Due to American anti-communism, he moved to Mexico in 1950. After 1958, he and his wife Mary lived mostly in San Francisco. 

His second book of poetry, The Materials, came out in 1962. Then This in Which appeared in 1965. In 1969, Of Being Numerous won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Oppen died in 1984 from pneumonia and complications from Alzheimer’s disease.  

 Books 
Discrete Series (1934)
The Materials (1962)
This in Which (1965)
Of Being Numerous (1968)
Alpine (1969)
Seascape: Needle's Eye (1972)
The Collected Poems (1975) 
Primitive (1978)
Poems of George Oppen (1990)
The Selected Letters of George Oppen (1990)
New Collected Poems (2001, revised 2008)
Selected Poems (2002)
Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers (2008)
Speaking with George Oppen: Interviews with the Poet and Mary Oppen, 1968-1987 (2012)
21 Poems (2017)

 Related pages 
List of poets from North America

References

Category:1908 births
Category:1984 deaths
Category:American poets
Category:Oregon State University alumni