Howard McCord papers

American poet Howard McCord was born on November 3, 1932, in El Paso, Texas. A recipient of a Fulbright award and a National Endowment for the Arst fellowship, McCord is author of more than twenty-five volumes of fiction, poetry, essays including The Life of Fraenkel’s Death, co-authored with Walter Lowenfels.

McCord was educated at Texas Western College and at the University of Utah, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in 1957 and a Master of Arts in 1960, respectively.

Howard McCord began his academic teaching career in 1960, as assistant professor at Washington State University, Pullman, where he taught until 1971. Since 1971 McCord has taught at Bowling Green State University, Ohio, where he began as director of the M. F. A. and creative writing programs. He was later named director of the Ph.D. Creative Emphasis degree program.

McCord has written more than twenty-five volumes of fiction, poetry, essays, and most recently his first novel, The Man Who Walked to the Moon (1998). He has contributed his work to anthologies, such as A Geography of Poets (1977), and to periodicals, including The New York Times, Partisan Review, Harper’s Bazaar, and Iowa Review.

Howard McCord’s awards and honors include a 1965 Fulbright award, selection as a National Endowment for the Arts fellow (1976), the Hart Crane Memorial Award (1970), the Ohioana Award for Poetry, (1990) and the Golden Nugget Award, University of Texas at El Paso (1990).

Poet and social critic Walter Lowenfels (1897-1976) was born in New York City and began writing poetry following his military service in World War I. Together with Michael Fraenkel, he established the Carrefour Press.

After graduating from a New York City preparatory school in 1914, Lowenfels worked in the family butter business. He began writing poetry following his military service in World War I. Some of these early poems appeared in local newspapers. His first collection of poetry, Episodes & Epistles, was published in 1925, with the financial assistance of Lillian Apotheker, whom he met in 1924 and married in 1926, soon after his arrival in Paris.

By relocating to Paris, Lowenfels intended to dedicate his time to writing. His poems were soon accepted for publication in such little magazines as transition and This Quarter, as well as periodicals in London. In 1931 Lowenfels shared with E. E. Cummings This Quarter’s Richard Aldington Poetry Prize. His poetry was admired by Nancy Cunard, owner of the Hours Press, who published his Apollinaire: An Elegy in 1930.

It was in Paris that Lowenfels first met Michael Fraenkel. Although Fraenkel and Lowenfels disagreed philosophically – Fraenkel believing that the world was doomed to moral and physical destruction versus Lowenfels’s belief that the world could be saved by socialistic humanism – they became friends. Together they established the Carrefour Press, which was intended to support the “anonymous” movement. This movement was based on the idea of total anonymity in art, a concept which eventually proved unworkable. However, the Carrefour Press continued to publish work, but began to credit the authors. In 1970 Lowenfels co-authored with Howard McCord a biography of Fraenkel, The Life of Fraenkel’s Death: a Biographical Inquest.

In 1934 Lowenfels returned with his wife and three daughters to the United States and for several years worked in the family business. By 1938 he had moved to Philadelphia to become a reporter for the Pennsylvania edition of the Daily Worker. As his social activism increased, his poetry writing ceased and did not resume until his imprisonment for treason in 1953, the result of which was The Prisoner’s Poems for Amnesty (1954).

During the 1950s and 1960s Lowenfels worked as an anthologist, particularly of avant-garde writing. Where Is Vietnam? (1967), a collection of poetry protesting the war, and In the Time of Revolution (1969), civil rights poems by African Americans, were two of the volume of social consciousness poetry he edited. An anthology of Lowenfels’s writing was published as The Portable Walter (1968).

Walter Lowenfels died on July 7, 1976, in Tarrytown, New York.

Evory, Ann (ed.) Contemporary Authors. New Revision Series, Volume 3. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1981. pp. 349-350.Rood, Karen lane (ed.) Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 4: American Writers in Paris, 1920-1939. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1980. pp. 255-258.Trotsky, Susan M. (ed.) Contemporary Authors. New Revision Series, Volume 40. Detroit: Gale Research Inc., 1993. pp. 294-295.Zadrozny, Mark (ed.) Contemporary Authors: Autobiography Series, Volume 9. Detroit: Gale Research, Inc., 1989. pp. 171-189.