George Oppen

1908 - 1984

Publications | Works About Oppen | Modern American Poetry Page
Photo credit: Michael West

 

Personal Information: Born 1908, died 1984, son of George August Oppenheimer and Elsie Rothfeld, married Mary Colby, 1927, children Linda Oppen.

Nationality: American.

Education: Oregon State University at Corvallis

Career: Writer.

Awards/Honors: Pulitzer Prize for Of Being Numerous, 1969.


 

Publications:

Discrete Series, Objectivist Press 1932 - 35

The Materials, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1962

This in Which, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1965

Of Being Numerous, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1968

Seascape: Needle's Eye, The Sumac Press, 1972

Collected Poems of George Oppen, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1975

Primitive, Black Sparrow Press, 1979

Selected Letters of George Oppen, edited by Rachel Blau Duplessis, Duke University Press, 1990

New Collected Poems, Preface by Eliot Weinberger, edited by Michael Davidson, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2002

Selected Poems of George Oppen, edited by Robert Creeley, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 2003

Selected Prose, Daybooks, and Papers, edited by Stephen Cope, University of California Press, 2008

Work included in American Literary Anthology, Volume 1, edited by John Hawkes, Farrar, Straus, 1966, and Volume 2, edited by George Plimpton and Peter Ardery, Random House, 1968.

Collections of Oppen's papers are housed at the University of California at San Diego.

 

Biographical/Critical Sources:

Ironwood 5: George Oppen: A Special Issue, edited by Michael Cuddihy, Ironwood Press, 1975

George Oppen (Paideuma, Vol 10. No. 1), National Poetry Foundation, 1981

George Oppen: Man and Poet, edited by Burton Hatlen, National Poetry Foundation, 1981

Ironwood 26: George Oppen Special Issue, edited by Michael Cuddihy, Ironwood Press, 1985

Not Comforts//But Vision: Essays on the Poetry of George Oppen, edited by John Freeman, Interim Press, 1985

Weather Within: In Memoriam George Oppen, edited by Theodore Enslin, Membrane Press, 1986

Bibliography of Interviews of George and Mary Oppen Chronologically Arranged, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, 1987

Meaning a Life: An Autobiography, Mary Oppen, Black Sparrow Press, 1990

George Oppen: A Radical Practice, Susan Thackery, O Books, 2001

Depression Glass: Documentary Photography and the Medium of the Camera Eye in Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, and William Carlos Williams, Monique Vescia, Routledge, 2005

George Oppen: A Critical Study, Lyn Graham Barzilai, McFarland & Company, 2006

George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism, Peter Nicholls, Oxford University Press, 2007

Speaking the Estranged: Essays on the Work of George Oppen, Michael Heller, Salt Publishing, 2008