Richard Howard - Life

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.

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 for his 1983 translation of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal. Howard was a long-time poetry editor of The Paris Review and is currently poetry editor of The Western Humanities Review. He has also received a Pulitzer prize, the Academy of Arts and Letters Literary Award and a MacArthur Fellowship. In 1985, Howard received the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, he is Professor of Practice in the writing program at Columbia's School of the Arts. He was previously University Professor of English at the University of Houston and, before that, Ropes Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Cincinnati. He served as Poet Laureate of the State of New York from 1993 to 1995.

In 1982, Howard was named a Chevalier of L'Ordre National du Mérite by the government of France.