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"W. D. Snodgrass, who found the stuff of poetry in the raw material of his emotional life and from it helped forge a bold, self-analytical poetic style in postwar America, winning a Pulitzer Prize for his debut book, died on Tuesday at his home in Erieville, N.Y., in rural Madison County. He was 83." -- The New York Times
Born in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania on Jan. 5, 1926, Snodgrass was known to his friends as 'De'. He attended Geneva College in Pennsylvania with the intention of studying the symphonic timpani before serving in the United States Navy during World War II. In 1949, he graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa and stayed in Iowa City afterwards to study with Robert Lowell, John Berryman and Randall Jarrell.
His honors include an Ingram Merrill Foundation award and a special citation from the Poetry Society of America. He has also received fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the National Endowment for the Arts.
His first collection of poetry, Heart's Needle, was published in 1959 and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1960. Since then, he has published numerous books of poetry, including Not for Specialists: New and Selected Poems (BOA Editions, 2006); The Führer Bunker: The Complete Cycle (1995); Each in His Season (1993); Selected Poems, 1957-1987; The Führer Bunker: A Cycle of Poems in Progress (1977) (a collection which was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and produced by Wynn Handman for the American Place Theatre) and After Experience (1968).