Marianne Moore author page

Marianne Moore biography

Marianne Moore was an American modernist poet, critic, translator and editor. She was born in 1887 near St Louis, Missouri, and grew up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She earned a BA in biology and histology from Bryn Mawr College, where early poems including “A Jelly-Fish” were published in college literary magazines.

After graduation, Moore studied at Carlisle Commercial College and taught at the Carlisle Indian School. She moved to New York City in 1918 and began work at the New York Public Library in 1921. Her first volume, Poems, was published in 1921, and her second collection, Observations, followed in 1924.

Moore edited the literary magazine Dial from 1925 to 1929. Selected Poems was published in 1935, followed by The Pangolin and Other Verse in 1936, What Are Years in 1941 and Nevertheless in 1944. Collected Poems won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the National Book Award after its publication in 1951.

Moore’s later books include a translation of The Fables of La Fontaine in 1954, Like a Bulwark in 1956, O, to Be a Dragon in 1959, Tell Me, Tell Me: Granite, Steel, and Other Topics in 1966, and The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore in 1967. Her prose books include Predilections, A Marianne Moore Reader and The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore.

Moore made her professional American journal debut in Poetry in May 1915, when her poems appeared alongside work by William Carlos Williams. Her poems appeared in that magazine on ten occasions between May 1915 and October 1972.