RICHARD HOWARD, American poet, born (d: 2022); A distinguished American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher and translator, Howard was born in Cleveland, Ohio and was a graduate of Columbia University where he studied under Mark Van Doren, and where he now teaches. He lived in New York City and was a companion of novelist, SANFORD FRIEDMAN.
After reading French letters at the Sorbonne in 1952-53, Howard had a brief, early career as a lexicographer, but soon turned his attention to poetry and poetic criticism. He won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for his 1969 collection Untitled Subjects, which took for its subject dramatic imagined letters and monologues of 19th century historical figures.
He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize in 1976 for his translation of E.M. Cioran’s A Short History of Decay and the American Book Award for his 1983 translation of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. Howard was a long-time poetry editor of The Paris Review and is currently poetry editor of The Western Humanities Review. In addition to his Pulitzer, he has also received the Academy of Arts and Letters Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. A former Chancellor of the Academy of Poets, he is Professor of Practice in the writing program at Columbia’s School of the Arts. He served as Poet Laureate of the State of New York from 1994 to 1997. In 1982, Howard was named a Chevalier of L’Ordre National du Mérite by the government of France.