Harvey Shapiro

Harvey Shapiro was born into a Yiddish-speaking family in Chicago in 1924. He flew 35 missions as a radio gunner in the United States Air Force from 1943 to 1945, and was awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross. After the war, Shapiro earned a bachelor's degree from Yale and a master's from Columbia. He has taught at Cornell University and Bard College, and has had a distinguished career as a journalist and editor, working as fiction editor of The New Yorker from 1956-1957, editor of The New York Times Book Review from 1975-1983, and a senior editor for many years at The New York Times Magazine.

Shapiro began writing poetry after World War II, partly as a result of his experiences in that war. In New York, he was neighbors and friends with many of the Objectivist poets, including Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen, who credited Shapiro's work with a "poignant awareness of vitality."
His first collection of poems, The Eye, was published by Swallow Press in 1953. This and ten other collections, including The Light Holds and How Charlie Shavers Died, have been gathered together by Wesleyan University Press in The Sights Along the Harbor: New and Collected Poems. He is also the editor of Poets of World War II, part of the Library of America's American Poets Project. His honors include a Swallow Press award and a Rockefeller Grant.

Online Resources:

Interview with Shani Friedman in The Villager
NPR / Fresh Air profile
NYT review of Sights Along the Harbor
Interview in SmartishPace

Selected Bibliography:

The Sights Along the Harbor (Wesleyan University Press 2006)

The Light Holds (Wesleyan University Press 1984)

This World (Wesleyan University Press 1971)

Battle Report: Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press 1966)

The Eye (Swallow Press 1953)