Book Description
A personal history of one of America's most successful writers, whose career included publishing and screenwriting in addition to his beloved poetry.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In the history of American poetry, Ogden Nash is difficult to pin down. Few poets have enjoyed a career so wide-ranging. His poetry appealed to literati and everyday readers alike who reveled in his irreverent tone, jaunty rhythms, and linguistic acrobatics. Attempts to imitate his style have rarely measured up to his singular legacy.

In The Life and Rhymes of Ogden Nash, David Stuart traces Nash's life from his idyllic boyhood in upstate New York through his rise to literary fame in the rapidly expanding publishing industry in New York City of the 1950s and '60s to his gradual retirement to family homes in Baltimore and New Hampshire. Stuart includes selections and complete poems from the poet whose astute observations of American society earned him the title "Master of Light Verse."

Ogden Nash was a rare poet. He celebrated the ordinary with delight and curiosity: husbands and wives at work, children at play, a society in motion. He studied popular culture with a penetrating eye and wrote about America, its icons, habits, and affectations with humor and levity. He struggled with comparisons to "serious" poets, those heroes of the canon who abandoned the rhyme and meter that Nash found crucial to his style of writing. His witty, insightful, and graceful vignettes captured those moments in life that defy heavy-handed treatment.

Nash did not live out the stereotype of the aloof poet-recluse. In addition to his writing, Nash pursued publishing, screenwriting, and a rigorous lecture circuit. This self-styled poet of wide appeal appeared in newspapers and magazines found in homes across the country, accessible publications such as Life, New Yorker, Cosmopolitan, Sports Illustrated, Reader's Digest, and McCall's. At a time when children's literature meant Winnie-the-Pooh, Nash produced verses for and about young people that amused, educated, and, more importantly, didn't pander or lecture. These poems and collections, including Custard the Dragon, The New Nutcracker Suite and Other Innocent Verses, A Boy Is a Boy, and Girls Are Silly, were classics of the genre.