Mary Oliver

Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) was an American poet whose work, rooted in the natural world, made her one of the best-selling poets in American history. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984 for *American Primitive* and the National Book Award in 1992 for *New and Selected Poems*. Born in Maple Heights, Ohio, to a social studies teacher and coach, Oliver spent much of her childhood outdoors, walking and reading. She later described her family as dysfunctional and revealed she had been sexually abused as a child, stating that writing helped her create her own world. She began writing poetry at fourteen and, at seventeen, visited the estate of Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz, New York, where she spent six to seven years helping organize the poet’s papers. Oliver attended Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s but did not earn a degree. Her first collection, *No Voyage, and Other Poems*, appeared in 1963. She later taught at Case Western Reserve University, Bucknell University, Sweet Briar College, and Bennington College, where she held a distinguished teaching chair until 2001.

Oliver’s poetry is characterized by wonder at the natural environment, vivid imagery, spirituality, and unadorned language. She found inspiration on solitary walks, often carrying a hand-sewn notebook to record impressions. Her settings draw on memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England, particularly Provincetown, where she moved in the 1960s. Influenced by Walt Whitman and Henry David Thoreau, her work combines dark introspection with joyous release. The 1983 *Chronology of American Literature* described *American Primitive* as presenting a new kind of Romanticism that refuses boundaries between nature and the observing self. Oliver also received the Christopher Award, the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award, the Lannan Literary Award, and several honorary doctorates. In 2007, *The New York Times* called her “far and away, this country’s best-selling poet.”