Early life
Louise Glück was born in New York City on April 22, 1943. She was the elder of two surviving daughters of Daniel Glück, a businessman, and Beatrice Glück (née Grosby), a homemaker.[7]
Glück's mother was of Russian Jewish descent.[8] Her paternal grandparents, Terézia (née Moskovitz) and Henrik Glück, were Hungarian Jews from Érmihályfalva, Bihar County, in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Romania); her grandfather ran a timber company called "Feldmann és Glück".[9][10] They emigrated to the United States in December 1900 and eventually owned a grocery store in New York.[8] Glück's father, who was born in the United States, had an ambition to become a writer, but went into business with his brother-in-law.[11] Together, they achieved success when they invented the X-Acto knife.[12] Glück's mother was a graduate of Wellesley College. In her childhood, Glück's parents taught her Greek mythology and classic stories such as the life of Joan of Arc.[13] She began to write poetry at an early age.[14]
As a teenager, Glück developed anorexia nervosa,[12][15] which became the defining challenge of her late teenage and young adult years. She described the illness, in one essay, as the result of an effort to assert her independence from her mother.[16] Elsewhere, she connected her illness to the death of an elder sister, an event that occurred before she was born.[7] During the fall of her senior year at George W. Hewlett High School, in Hewlett, New York, she began psychoanalytic treatment. A few months later, she was taken out of school in order to focus on her rehabilitation, although she still graduated in 1961.[17] Of that decision, she wrote, "I understood that at some point I was going to die. What I knew more vividly, more viscerally, was that I did not want to die".[16] She spent the next seven years in therapy, which she credited with helping her to overcome the illness and teaching her how to think.[18]
As a result of her condition, Glück did not enroll in college as a full-time student. She described her decision to forgo higher education in favor of therapy as necessary: "… my emotional condition, my extreme rigidity of behavior and frantic dependence on ritual made other forms of education impossible".[19] Instead, she took a poetry class at Sarah Lawrence College and, from 1963 to 1966, she enrolled in poetry workshops at Columbia University's School of General Studies, which offered courses for non-degree students.[20][21][22] While there, she studied with Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. She credited these teachers as significant mentors in her development as a poet.[23]
Career
While attending poetry workshops, Glück began to publish her poems. Her first publication was in Mademoiselle, followed soon after by poems in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and other venues.[24][25] After leaving Columbia, Glück supported herself with secretarial work.[26] She married Charles Hertz Jr. in 1967.[27] In 1968, Glück published her first collection of poems, Firstborn, which received some positive critical attention. In a review, the poet Robert Hass described the book as "hard, artful, and full of pain".[28] However, reflecting on it in 2003, the critic Stephanie Burt said the collection "revealed a forceful but clotted poet, an anxious imitator of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath".[29] Following the publication, Glück experienced a prolonged case of writer's block, which was not cured, she said, until 1971, when she began to teach poetry at Goddard College in Vermont.[26][30] The poems she wrote during this time were collected in her second book, The House on Marshland (1975), which many critics have regarded as her breakthrough work, signaling her "discovery of a distinctive voice".[31]
In 1973, Glück gave birth to a son, Noah, with her partner, Keith Monley, who helped raise him for the first two years of his life.[12][32] Her marriage to Charles Hertz, Jr. had ended in divorce, and in 1977 she married John Dranow, an author who had started the summer writing program at Goddard College.[27][33] In 1980, Dranow and Francis Voigt, the husband of poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, co-founded the New England Culinary Institute as a private, for-profit college. Glück and Bryant Voigt were early investors in the institute and served on its board of directors.[33]
In 1980, Glück's third collection, Descending Figure, was published. It received some criticism for its tone and subject matter: for example, the poet Greg Kuzma accused Glück of being a "child hater" for her now anthologized poem, "The Drowned Children".[34] On the whole, however, the book was well received. In The American Poetry Review, Mary Kinzie praised the book's illumination of "deprived, harmed, stammering beings".[35] Writing in Poetry, the poet and critic J. D. McClatchy said the book was "a considerable advance on Glück's previous work" and "one of the year's outstanding books".[36] That same year, a fire destroyed Glück's house in Vermont, resulting in the loss of most of her possessions.[27]
In the wake of that tragedy, Glück began to write the poems that would later be collected in her award-winning work, The Triumph of Achilles (1985). Writing in The New York Times, the author and critic Liz Rosenberg described the collection as "clearer, purer, and sharper" than Glück's previous work.[37] The critic Peter Stitt, writing in The Georgia Review, declared that the book showed Glück to be "among the important poets of our age".[38] From the collection, the poem "Mock Orange", which has been likened to a feminist anthem,[39] has been called an "anthology piece" because of its frequent inclusion in poetry anthologies and college courses.[40]
In 1984, Glück joined the faculty of Williams College in Massachusetts as a senior lecturer in the English Department.[41] The following year, her father died.[42] The loss prompted her to begin a new collection of poems, Ararat (1990), the title of which references the mountain of the Genesis flood narrative. Writing in The New York Times in 2012, the critic Dwight Garner called it "the most brutal and sorrow-filled book of American poetry published in the last 25 years".[15] Glück followed this collection with one of her most popular and critically acclaimed books, The Wild Iris (1992), which features garden flowers in conversation with a gardener and a deity about the nature of life. Publishers Weekly proclaimed it an "important book" that showcased "poetry of great beauty".[43] The critic Elizabeth Lund, writing in The Christian Science Monitor, called it "a milestone work".[44] It went on to win the Pulitzer Prize in 1993, cementing Glück's reputation as a preeminent American poet.[45]
While the 1990s brought Glück literary success, it was also a period of personal hardship. Her marriage to John Dranow ended in divorce in 1996, the difficult nature of which affected their business relationship, resulting in Dranow's removal from his positions at the New England Culinary Institute.[33][46] Glück channeled her experience into her writing, entering a prolific period of her career. In 1994, she published a collection of essays called Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry. She then produced Meadowlands (1996), a collection of poetry about the nature of love and the deterioration of a marriage.[47] She followed it with two more collections: Vita Nova (1999) and The Seven Ages (2001).
In 2004, in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Glück published a chapbook entitled October. Consisting of one poem divided into six parts, it draws on ancient Greek myth to explore aspects of trauma and suffering.[48] That same year, she was named the Rosenkranz Writer in Residence at Yale University.[49]
After joining the faculty of Yale, Glück continued to publish poetry. Her books published during this period include Averno (2006), A Village Life (2009), and Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014). In 2012, the publication of a collection of a half-century's worth of her poems, entitled Poems: 1962–2012, was called "a literary event".[50] Another collection of her essays, entitled American Originality, appeared in 2017.[51]
In October 2020, Glück was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the sixteenth female literature laureate since the prize was founded in 1901.[52] Due to restrictions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, she received her prize at her home.[53] In her Nobel lecture, which was delivered in writing, she highlighted her early engagement with poetry by William Blake and Emily Dickinson in discussing the relationship between poets, readers, and the wider public.[54]
In 2021, Glück's collection, Winter Recipes from the Collective, was published. In 2022, she was named the Frederick Iseman Professor in the Practice of Poetry at Yale.[55] In 2023, she was appointed a professor of English at Stanford University, where she taught in the Creative Writing Program.[6]
Personal life
Glück's elder sister died young before Glück was born. Her younger sister, Tereze (1945–2018), worked at Citibank as a vice president and was also a writer, winning the Iowa Short Fiction Award in 1995 for her book, May You Live in Interesting Times.[56] Glück's niece is the actress Abigail Savage.[57]
She remained a close confidant and friend to Vermont novelist Kathryn Davis throughout her life. The two often corresponded to share their developing works, seeking creative advice throughout their lengthy friendship and writing careers.
Glück died from cancer at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 13, 2023, at age 80.[58]
