John Malcolm Brinnin
John Malcolm Brinnin was a notable Canadian-American poet, biographer, and literary critic, born on September 13, 1916, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He spent his early years in Detroit, Michigan, before pursuing higher education at the University of Michigan and later Harvard University. Brinnin's teaching career included positions at prestigious institutions such as Vassar and Harvard, and he played a significant role as the director of the Young Men's and Young Women's Hebrew Association Poetry Center during its flourishing years from 1949 to 1956. He is perhaps best known for his close association with the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, whom he introduced to American audiences and for whom he organized reading tours. Brinnin authored several works, including the memoir "Dylan Thomas in America," which chronicles his experiences with the poet.
As a poet himself, Brinnin published multiple collections, starting with "The Garden Is Political" in 1942, and received several accolades throughout his career, including the Poetry Society of America’s gold medal for distinguished service to poetry and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Beyond poetry, he explored themes of travel in his works "The Sway of the Grand Saloon" and "Beau Voyage." Brinnin passed away on June 25, 1998, in Key West, Florida, leaving behind a substantial legacy, including a significant bequest to the Wolfsonian-FIU museum, where he served on the board of trustees.
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John Malcolm Brinnin
Author
- Born: September 13, 1916
- Birthplace: Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada
- Died: June 26, 1998
- Place of death: Key West, Florida
Biography
John Malcolm Brinnin was born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on September 13, 1916, to John A. Brinnin and Frances Malcolm Brinnin. When he was four years old, his family moved to Detroit, Michigan. Brinnin graduated from the University of Michigan in 1942; within a year, he entered graduate school at Harvard University. Brinnin taught at Vassar, Boston University, the University of Connecticut, and Harvard. During one of the most successful periods for the Young Men’s and Young Women’s Hebrew Association Poetry Center (1949-1956), Brinnin was its director. In addition to his teaching and his work with young people, Brinnin was a biographer, a poet, a critic, and an anthologist.
Dylan Thomas in America: An Intimate Journal is Brinnin’s best-known work. Brinnin was the first person to bring the Welsh poet to the United States, and the responsibility for all of Thomas’s reading tours in this country was Brinnin’s. His memoir, published in 1955, offers his observations as shepherd to the poet. Included in the memoir is Brinnin’s moving account of the period of Thomas’s death in 1953. Dylan Thomas in America was made into the 1964 Broadway play Dylan. Brinnin later narrated the motion picture The Days of Dylan Thomas.
While he was best known for his association with the famous poet Dylan Thomas, John Malcolm Brinnin was a poet in his own right. He published a number of collections of poems. His first collection of verse, The Garden Is Political, was published in 1942. Skin Diving in the Virgins, and Other Poems (1970) was his final collection of published poetry, although he continued to write—and to abandon—poems until he died at the age of eighty- one.
In 1955, the Poetry Society of America awarded Brinnin its gold medal for distinguished service to poetry. Following the publication of his Selected Poems of John Malcolm Brinnin in 1963, he was awarded the Centennial Medal for Distinction in Literature by his alma mater, the University of Michigan. He was elected in 1978 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This latter honor is considered the highest formal recognition of artistic merit in the United States.
Brinnin served as editor to the literary journal Signatures from 1936 to 1939. He also compiled several anthologies of modern poetry, and he wrote a critical study of poet William Carlos Williams. His lifelong love of travel is reflected in his two popular works on transatlantic travel, The Sway of the Grand Saloon: A Social History of the North Atlantic (1971) and Beau Voyage: Life Aboard the Last Great Ships (1981).
Gertrude Stein and Truman Capote, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Osbert, Sacheverell Sitwell, Alice B. Toklas, and T. S. Eliot were also subjects for Brinnin as biographer. Stein is the subject of his book The Third Rose (1959). Capote, of course, is the subject of his Truman Capote: Dear Hear, Old Buddy (1986). The others were among the subjects of his biographical sketches in Sextet (1981).
John Malcolm Brinnin died at his home in Key West, Florida, on June 25, 1998. He bequeathed more than $425,000 to the Wolfsonian-FIU (Florida International University). Brinnin had served as a member of the board of trustees of the museum from its inception in 1989 until 1997, when he left the post due to failing health.