W.D. Snodgrass

This link is for the Biography Resource Center, one of the databases on Lehigh's library website, in case it doesn't work.

This site has a more extensive personal biography.

I was drawn to Ten Days Leave (p. 37) for the way it describes what is going on in the soldier's mind when he is home again. I found it to be an interesting subject matter. It turns out that Snodgrass served in the Navy during WWII. He was born in 1926 in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania. He has been married and divorced several times, which lent inspiration to his first collection, Heart's Needle, where he explored divorce's effect on his relationship with his daughter. He has been considered a "confessional poet" which seems to mean that he aims, "...to reveal the repressed, violent feelings that often lurk beneath the seemingly placid surface of everyday life." One of his works, which sounds particularly interesting, is a series of monologues from the men and women under Hitler, called The Fuehrer Bunker. It was first released as a work in progress in 1977 and was completed in 1995.