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Louise Elisabeth Glück ( GLIK; April 22, 1943 – October 13, 2023) was an American poet and essayist. She won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose judges praised "her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal". Her other awards include the Pulitzer Prize, National Humanities Medal, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Bollingen Prize. From 2003 to 2004, she was Poet Laureate of the United States. Glück was born in New York City and raised on Long Island. She began to suffer from anorexia nervosa while in high school and later overcame the illness. She attended Sarah Lawrence College and Columbia University but did not obtain a degree. In addition to being an author, she taught poetry at several academic institutions. Glück is often described as an autobiographical poet; her work is known for its emotional intensity and for frequently drawing on mythology or nature imagery to meditate on personal experiences and modern life. Thematically, her poems have illuminated aspects of trauma, desire, and nature. In doing so, they have become known for frank expressions of sadness and isolation. Scholars have also focused on her construction of poetic personas and the relationship, in her poems, between autobiography and classical myth. Glück served as the Frederick Iseman Professor in the Practice of Poetry at Yale University and as a professor of English at Stanford University. She split her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts; Montpelier, Vermont; and Berkeley, California. Biography Early life Louise Glück was born in New York City on April 22, 1943. She was the elder of two surviving daughters of Daniel Glück, a businessman, and Beatrice Glück (née Grosby), a homemaker. Glück's mother was of Russian Jewish descent. Her paternal grandparents, Terézia (née Moskovitz) and Henrik Glück, were Hungarian Jews from Érmihályfalva, Bihar County, in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, Austro-Hungarian Empire (present-day Romania); her grandfather ran a timber company called "Feldmann és Glück". They emigrated to the United States in December 1900 and eventually owned a grocery store in New York. Glück's father, who was born in the United States, had an ambition to become a writer, but went into business with his brother-in-law. Together, they achieved success when they invented the X-Acto knife. Glück's mother was a graduate of Wellesley College. In her childhood, Glück's parents taught her Greek mythology and classic stories such as the life of Joan of Arc. She began to write poetry at an early age. As a teenager, Glück developed anorexia nervosa, which became the defining challenge of her late teenage and young adult years. She described the illness, in one essay, as the result of an effort to assert her independence from her mother. Elsewhere, she connected her illness to the death of an elder sister, an event that occurred before she was born. During the fall of her senior year at George W. Hewlett High School, in Hewlett, New York, she began psychoanalytic treatment. A few months later, she was taken out of school in order to focus on her rehabilitation, although she still graduated in 1961. Of that decision, she wrote, "I understood that at some point I was going to die. What I knew more vividly, more viscerally, was that I did not want to die". She spent the next seven years in therapy, which she credited with helping her to overcome the illness and teaching her how to think. As a result of her condition, Glück did not enroll in college as a full-time student. She described her decision to forgo higher education in favor of therapy as necessary: "… my emotional condition, my extreme rigidity of behavior and frantic dependence on ritual made other forms of education impossible". Instead, she took a poetry class at Sarah Lawrence College and, from 1963 to 1966, she enrolled in poetry workshops at Columbia University's School of General Studies, which offered courses for non-degree students. While there, she studied with Léonie Adams and Stanley Kunitz. She credited these teachers as significant mentors in her development as a poet. Career While attending poetry workshops, Glück began to publish her poems. Her first publication was in Mademoiselle, followed soon after by poems in Poetry, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, and other venues. After leaving Columbia, Glück supported herself with secretarial work. She married Charles Hertz Jr. in 1967. In 1968, Glück published her first collection of poems, Firstborn, which received some positive critical attention. In a review, the poet Robert Hass described the book as "hard, artful, and full of pain". However, reflecting on it in 2003, the critic Stephanie Burt said the collection "revealed a forceful but clotted poet, an anxious imitator of Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath". Following the publication, Glück experienced a prolonged case of writer's block, which was not cured, she said, until 1971, when she began to teach poetry at Goddard College in Vermont. The poems she wrote during this time were collected in her second book, The House on Marshland (1975), which many critics have regarded as her breakthrough work, signaling her "discovery of a distinctive voice". In 1973, Glück gave birth to a son, Noah, with her partner, Keith Monley, who helped raise him for the first two years of his life. Her marriage to Charles Hertz, Jr. had ended in divorce, and in 1977 she married John Dranow, an author who had started the summer writing program at Goddard College. In 1980, Dranow and Francis Voigt, the husband of poet Ellen Bryant Voigt, co-founded the New England Culinary Institute as a private, for-profit college. Glück and Bryant Voigt were early investors in the institute and served on its board of directors. In 1980, Glück's third collection, Descending Figure, was published. It received some criticism for its tone and subject matter: for example, the poet Greg Kuzma accused Glück of being a "child hater" for her now anthologized poem, "The Drowned Children". On the whole, however, the book was well received. In The American Poetry Review, Mary Kinzie praised the book's illumination of "deprived, harmed, stammering beings". Writing in Poetry, the poet and critic J. D. McClatchy said the book was "a considerable advance on Glück's previous work" and "one of the year's outstanding books". That same year, a fire destroyed Glück's house in Vermont, resulting in the loss of most of her possessions. In the wake of that tragedy, Glück began to write the poems that would later be collected in her award-winning work, The Triumph of Achilles (1985). Writing in The New York Times, the author and critic Liz Rosenberg described the collection as "clearer, purer, and sharper" than Glück's previous work. The critic Peter Stitt, writing in The Georgia Review, declared that the book showed Glück to be "among the important poets of our age". From the col.... Discover the Joanne Feit Diehl popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Joanne Feit Diehl books.