The Key to Everything - by Margaret Brucia (Hardcover)

About the Book

"One of the most important and original poets of the twentieth century, May Swenson (1913-1989) was born in Utah to Swedish immigrant parents. After graduating from Utah State University and working briefly as a reporter, she moved to New York City in the mid-1930s and began her life as a poet. She took various office jobs to support herself, including time with the Federal Writers' Project and, later, as a manuscript reader for New Directions in the 1950s. Swenson went on to publish seven collections of poetry (with several more collections published posthumously), and three poetry books for children. Swenson's work is often compared to the poetry of E. E. Cummings and Elizabeth Bishop, with whom Swenson corresponded for decades. Her many awards include the Shelley Memorial Award, the Bollingen Prize, and the Award in Literature from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. She was a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 1980 to 1989. This book provides an account of Swenson's life that draws on her extensive diaries, which have never been made available to the public. The narrative concentrates on Swenson's life from 1935 to 1959, a period that encompasses her departure from Utah, her personal and professional struggles before her first breakthrough publications, and her early years of literary success. The poet expresses her anxieties and aspirations as she experiments with her sexuality, extricates herself from a sheltered Mormon upbringing, and begins a new life in New York at the height of the Depression. The author traces Swenson's struggles with poverty, anonymity, and predatory men; her romantic relationships, primarily with women; the people she met, books she read, and the work she produced, offering a unique portrait of the times, the place, and a poet who resisted labels throughout her life"--

Book Synopsis

An intimate portrait of the twentieth-century American poet

May Swenson (1913-1989) was one of the most important and original poets of the twentieth century. The Key to Everything is a biography of this experimental American modernist that draws directly from her unpublished diaries and her letters to friends, family, and colleagues, most notably Elizabeth Bishop. In 1952, Swenson wrote in her diary, "I want to confirm my life in a narrative--my Lesbianism, the hereditary background of my parents, grandparents, origins in the 'old country.'" Taking up Swenson's uncompleted autobiographical plan, Margaret Brucia tells Swenson's story as much as possible through her own words.

While chronicling the whole of Swenson's life, this book focuses on the period from 1936 to 1959, when she came of age artistically and personally in New York City. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the Federal Writers' Project, Greenwich Village, and the emergence of gay culture, Swenson's diaries lay bare her aspirations, fears, joys, and disappointments. Readers see the poet and person emerge, inextricably entwined, as Swenson describes her struggles with poverty, anonymity, and predatory men; her romantic relationships; the people she met, the books she read, and the work she produced.

The most detailed and intimate biography of Swenson to date, The Key to Everything is a unique portrait of a poet who resisted labels throughout her life.

About the Author

Margaret A. Brucia is a Fulbright scholar, the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome. Trained as a classicist, she has a special interest in women's diaries and letters. Paul Crumbley is professor emeritus of English at Utah State University and coeditor of Body My House: May Swenson's Work and Life. David Hoak is an independent scholar whose work focuses on letters between poets, including May Swenson and Elizabeth Bishop.