1. Life

2. Personal life

3. Works
    Poetry  Critical essays  Major translations (French to English) 

4. References

5. External links

Richard Joseph Howard (born October 13, 1929; adopted as Richard Joseph Orwitz) is an American poet, literary critic, essayist, teacher, and translator. He was born in Cleveland, Ohio, and is a graduate of Columbia University, where he studied under Mark Van Doren,^[1] and where he teaches.{{dubious|date=August 2018}} He lives in New York City.

Life

After reading French letters at the Sorbonne in 1952–53, Howard had a brief early career as a lexicographer. He soon turned his attention to poetry and poetic criticism, and 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. For much of his career, Howard has written poems using a quantitative verse technique.

A prolific literary critic, Howard's monumental 1969 volume Alone With America stretched to 594 pages^[2] and profiled 41 American poets who had published at least two books each and "have come into a characteristic and—as I see it—consequential identity since the time, say, of the Korean War." Howard would later tell an interviewer

I wrote the book not for the sense of history, but for myself, knowing that a relation to one's moment was essential to getting beyond the moment. As I quoted Shaw in the book's preface, if you cannot believe in the greatness of your own age and inheritance, you will fall into confusion of mind and contrariety of spirit. The book was a rescuing anatomy of such belief, the construction of a credendum—articles of faith, or at least appreciation.^[3]

He was awarded the PEN Translation Prize in 1976 for his translation of E. M. Cioran's A Short History of Decay and the National Book Award