John Berryman and Robert Giroux: A Publishing Friendship. By Patrick Samway SJ. Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press. 2020. xv, 247 pp. Cloth, $45.00; e-book, $35.99.
This study examines the long, turbulent, personal, and professional relationship between the editor Robert Giroux and the poet John Berryman. Beginning in 1932 (when the two men met at Columbia), the book covers the poet’s time at Cambridge and Princeton, the editor’s work at Harcourt, Brace and Co. and Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, and both of their scholarship on William Shakespeare. Samway—who worked with Giroux and had access to his letters—concludes with a detailed narrative of Giroux’s work on Berryman’s final poetry collection (one of dozens he edited) and a summary of Berryman’s 1972 death and Giroux’s demise in 2008.
Poetry in a Global Age. By Jahan Ramazani. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. 2020. 323 pp. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $30.00;...
