Phyllis McGinley

Jo Gill (University of Glasgow)

Ed. by Nick Selby, University of East Anglia
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Sofia Ahlberg (Uppsala University), Patrick Chura (University of Akron), Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Birmingham Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

Born 21 Mar 1905
Died 22 Feb 1978
Activity 1923-1978

Places

Born in United States
Active in United States

Activities

Primary

Children's/Young Adult writer
Essayist
Humorist
Poet

Resources

McGinley's Works

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“Phyllis McGinley needs no puff”, insists poet W.H. Auden in his foreword to McGinley's 1960 book

Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades

, “her poems are known and loved by tens of thousands. They call for no learned exegesis”. Celebrated and successful in her life time (her collection

The Love Letters of Phyllis McGinley

sold more than 80,000 copies while

Times Three

was awarded the 1961 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry), McGinley's work seems now to have disappeared from public and critical view. It is the subject of just one scholarly study, Linda Wagner's early and brief

Phyllis McGinley

(1971), and appears only occasionally in works of feminist cultural history (Walker 1985) and as a footnote in studies of her near-contemporaries, Sylvia Plath (Bryant 2007) and Anne Sexton…

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868 words

Citation: Gill, Jo. "Phyllis McGinley". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 05 March 2009 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=3046, accessed 24 November 2024.]

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