Saipan, Battle of, Northern Mariana Islands, 1944

Abstract Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet W.D. (William De Witt) Snodgrass (1926-2009) wrote 58 letters between 1944 and 1946 to his then-fiancée Lila Jean Hank after being drafted into the United States Navy and stationed in Saipan. The letters described life on the naval base at the end of World War II and a long, anxious period of demobilization in the Pacific. Snodgrass was one of the early practitioners of the confessional style in American poetry with his first volume ...