John Allyn McAlpin Berryman was an American poet and scholar. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and is considered a key figure in the “confessional” school of poetry. His best-known work is The Dream Songs.
Ann Levine: Meet John Berryman’s second wife
Divorced in 1956, Berryman married 24-year-old Ann Levine a week later; the couple had a son. Homage to Mistress Bradstreet was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1956; the next year Berryman was promoted to associate professor, and the State Department sponsored him on a lecture tour of India.
In 1958 Berryman was hospitalized for exhaustion; he also legally separated from Ann. In 1959 they divorced, and Berryman was again in the hospital for alcoholism and nerves; for the rest of his life, he was hospitalized at least once a year. Over the next three years, Berryman taught at the University of California at Berkeley, at Bread Loaf in Vermont, and at Brown University, and he won awards, published a scholarly edition of Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, and married Kate Donahue, age twenty-two, in 1961. They had two daughters.