About Edward Dorn
Edward Merton Dorn (April 2, 1929 – December 10, 1999) was an American poet and teacher. His first book of poetry, The Newly Fallen, was published by LeRoi Jones's Totem Press in 1961. Dorn's main work, his magnum opus, is Gunslinger. Gunslinger is a long poem in five sections. Edward Dorn was not only one of America's finest poets but a rare critical intelligence and commentator. He was a student of Charles Olson, who helped him to see the American West as a site for his quest for self-knowledge; at the core of his work is a deep sense of place and the people who occupy it, underpinned by a wry ironic dissent. It was Dorn's comic-epic masterpiece, Gunslinger, which began appearing in 1968 and had already become an underground classic by the time it was published in its entirety in 1974, that established his reputation in the wider world. Other important publications include The Collected Poems: 1956-1974 (1975), Recollections of Gran Apacheria (1975), Abhorrences (1989), High West Rendezvous: A Sampler (1997), and [Way More West: New and Selected Poems] (2008).Dorn died of pancreatic cancer on December 10, 1999 in Denver, Colorado. His papers are collected at the University of Connecticut as well as at Indiana University at Bloomington.
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