Greenfield Community College

About Archibald Macleish


Portrait of Archibald MacLeish - original oil painting on board by Mary K. Eipper, gift of the estate of Elizabeth H. Keith.

During his long and productive life, Archibald MacLeish was many things:

• A U.S. Army captain during World War I (1978-1978)
• A teacher at Harvard Law School (1919-1923)
• An American in Paris (1923-1928)
• A journalist (Fortune Magazine, 1929-1938)
• Librarian of Congress (1939-1944)
• A speech writer for Franklin Roosevelt and others
• Assistant Secretary of State (1944-1945)
• Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard University (1949-1962)
• Simpson Lecturer at Amherst College (1963-1967)

His foremost love was always poetry. This love prompted him to leave a promising law career and take his chances as an artist in Paris, where he struggled to discover his poetic voice and to write the "lines that would seem to me to be good." In Paris, he perfected his craft and began a distinguished literary career.

Macleish was awarded three Pulitzer Prizes: for Conquistador, 1933; for Collected Poems, 1917-1952 in 1953; and J.B., 1959. He also received the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, the National Medal for Literature, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Tony and Academy Awards, the first for J.B. and the second for the Eleanor Roosevelt Story, for which he wrote the script.

Born in Glencoe, Illinois on May 7, 1892, to Andrew and Martha Hillard MacLeish, Archibald MacLeish attended Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut (1907-1911), received a Bachelor's degree from Yale University in 1915, and married Ada Taylor Hitchcock on June 21, 1916. Upon his return from Paris in 1928, he and his family settled in Conway, Massachusetts. Even in his final years, he kept a busy schedule of poetry readings and public appearances. His last book, a collection of six short plays, many of them revised for this edition, was published in 1980, when he was 88 years old. He died at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston on April 20, 1982, just two weeks before his ninetieth birthday.

For more information contact Margaret Howland, Curator of the Archibald MacLeish Collection at Greenfield Community College, in Greenfield, Massachusetts., at howlandm@gcc.mass.edu or (413)775-1835.