photo courtesy of the Mary Oppen Collection, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of C

George Oppen was born in New Rochelle, New York, on April 24, 1908. Oppen and his wife, Mary, sailed and hitchhiked from the West Coast to New York City in the 1920s. There, Oppen became a central member of the Objectivist Group of poets that flourished in the 1930s. The famous Objectivist Anthology which contained writing by Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Charles Reznikoff, and Kenneth Rexroth, was edited by Louis Zukofsky and published under the direction of Oppen and his wife in Toulon, France, in 1932. Oppen's first book of poetry, Discrete Series, with a preface by Ezra Pound, was published by the Objectivist Press in 1934.

George and Mary Oppen moved increasingly to the left during the Depression, becoming social activists and joining the Communist party in 1935. During this period Oppen's poems appeared in small journals such as Active Anthology, Poetry, and Hound and Horn, but he soon gave up writing for more than two decades. Oppen served in World War II, from which he returned badly wounded. Back in New York, Oppen and his wife found that their politics made their position difficult. They were targets of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy era, and ultimately fled to Mexico in 1950, where Oppen worked as a furniture maker.

Oppen revived his poetic career when he returned to the United States in 1958. In 1962, New Directions published Oppen's second book of poetry, The Materials, which was followed by This in Which (1965). In 1969, Of Being Numerous (1968) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Oppen's Collected Poems (1975) includes all of his poetry from Discrete Series (1934) through his last work, Myth of the Blaze (1975).

In the late 1960s, Oppen moved to San Francisco, where he lived until his death in 1984.

A Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Discrete Series (1934)
George Oppen: The Collected Poems (1975)
Myth of the Blaze: New Poems (1975)
Of Being Numerous (1968)
Seascape: Needle's Eye (1972)
The Materials (1962)
This in Which (1965)