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Other authors named Archibald:
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Author's popularity: -1
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Popularity: 4
Vote: | A man who lives, not by what he loves but what he hates, is a sick man. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard-by stealing what he has a taste for and can carry off. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | America is promises to take! America is promises to us to take them. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Conventional wisdom notwithstanding, there is no reason either in football or in poetry why the two should not meet in a man's life if he has the weight and cares about the words. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold. |
Popularity: 7
Vote: | Freedom is the right to one's dignity as a man. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | I think you have to deal with the confused situation that we're faced with by seizing on the glimpses and particles of life, seizing on them and holding them and trying to make a pattern of them. In other words, trying to put a world back together again out of its fragmentary moments. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Journalism is concerned with events, poetry with feelings. Journalism is concerned with the look of the world, poetry with the feel of the world. |
Popularity: 8
Vote: | Journalism wishes to tell what it is that has happened everywhere as though the same things had happened for every man. Poetry wishes to say what it is like for any man to be himself in the presence of a particular occurrence as though only he were alone there. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Spring has many American faces. There are cities where it will come and go in a day and counties where it hangs around and never quite gets there. Summer is drawn blinds in Louisiana, long winds in Wyoming, shade of elms and maples in New England. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The American mood, perhaps even the American character, has changed. There are few manifestations any longer of the old American self-assurance which so irritated Dickens. Instead, there is a sense of frustration so perceptible that even our politicians have attempted to exploit it. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | The business of the law is to make sense of the confusion of what we call human life - to reduce it to order but at the same time to give it possibility, scope, even dignity. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | The dissenter is every human being at those moments of his life when he resigns momentarily from the herd and thinks for himself. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | There are those who will say that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is the American Dream. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | There are those, I know, who will reply that the liberation of humanity, the freedom of man and mind, is nothing but a dream. They are right. It is. It is the American Dream. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | To separate journalism and poetry, therefore-history and poetry-to set them up at opposite ends of the world of discourse, is to separate seeing from the feel of seeing, emotion from the acting of emotion, knowledge from the realization of knowledge. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | What is more important in a library than anything else - than everything else - is the fact that it exists. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | You burned the city of London in our houses and we felt the flames. |
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Biography
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Archibald MacLeish (May 7, 1892 – April 20, 1982) was an American poet, writer, and Librarian of Congress. He is associated with the modernist school of poetry.
Biography
MacLeish was born in Glencoe, Illinois. His father, Andrew MacLeish, was a dry-goods merchant. His mother, Martha Hillard, was a college professor. He grew up on an estate bordering Lake Michigan.
He attended the Hotchkiss School from 1907 to 1911, before moving on to Yale University where he majored in English and became a member of the Skull and Bones secret society. He then enrolled in the Harvard Law School. In 1916, he married Ada Hitchcock.
His studies were interrupted by World War I, in which he served first as an ambulance driver and later as a captain of artillery. He graduated from the law school in 1919. He taught law for a semester for the government department at Harvard, then worked briefly as an editor for The New Republic. He next spent three years practicing law.
In 1923 MacLeish left his law firm and moved with his wife to Paris, where they joined the community of literary expatriates that included such members as Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. He returned to America in 1928.
From 1930 to 1938 he worked as a writer and editor for Fortune Magazine, during which time he also became increasingly politically active, especially with anti-fascist causes. He was a great admirer of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who appointed him Librarian of Congress in 1939. According to MacLeish, Roosevelt invited him to lunch and "Mr. Roosevelt decided that I wanted to be librarian of Congress." MacLeish held this job for five years, and is remembered as an effective leader who helped modernize the Library.
During World War II MacLeish also served as director of the War Department's Office of Facts and Figures, and as the assistant director of the Office of War Information. These jobs were heavily involved with propaganda, which was well-suited to MacLeish's talents; he had written quite a bit of politically-motivated work in the previous decade.
He spent a year as the Assistant Secretary of State for cultural affairs, and a further year representing the U.S. at the creation of UNESCO. After this, he retired from public service and returned to academia.
Despite a long history of criticizing Marxism, MacLeish came under fire from conservative politicians of the 1940s and 1950s, including J. Edgar Hoover and Joseph McCarthy. Much of this was due to his involvement with anti-fascist organizations like the League of American Writers, and to his friendship with prominent left-wing writers.
In 1949 MacLeish became the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard. He held this position until his retirement in 1962. In 1959 his play J.B. won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
From 1963 to 1967 he was the John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer at Amherst College.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Archibald MacLeish".
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