Adrienne Rich

1
Adrienne Rich

• By Julia S.
• English 6

2
The Basics

• Born in Baltimore, Maryland On May 16, 1929 to a
  Helen and Arnold Rich. She graduated in 1951 from
  Radcliff College.
• 1953 she married Alfred Conrad a Harvard
  professor and moved to Cambridge, Ma. Shortly
  after she had three boys over a five year period.
• In 1966 she moved to New York. There she taught
  underprivileged kids at the SEEK program. She has
  also taught at Columbia, Stanford, Cornell,
  Rutgers, Swarthmore, San Jose State and Brandeis
• She is still alive, 74 years old. She now resides
  in Northern California

3
Family

• She is the daughter of Arnold Rich and Helen
  Jones Rich. Arnold was a pathology teacher at
  Johns Hopkins University. And her mother, Helen
  was a pianist/composer, who gave that up two
  raise the family.
• She was the eldest of two daughters. But they
  were both dominated by their controlling father.
• Her mother was Southern Protestant and father was
  Jewish. Because of this many religious fights
  broke out because the two of them.

4
Education

• Nothing much is documented on Richs education.
  She graduated from Radcliff college in 1951. She
  was probably taught by her father a little since
  he was a professor.

5
Books

• A Change of World (1951)
• Diamond Cutters (1955)
• alienation and loss through modernism
• Snapshots of a Daughter-In-Law (1963)
• describes the tensions between a mother and her
  daughter in law in the 1950s
• Necessities of Life (1966)
• very sad poems, about death (antiwar)

• Leaflets (1969)
• very heavy in anti-war poems (Vietnam)
• The Will to Change (1971)
• these three show the change in society of the
  late 1960s and early 1970s
• Diving into a Wreck (1973)
• Anger towards Womens rights

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Books Continued

• The Dream of a Common Language (1978)
• woman-centered vision of creative energies
• Your Native Land, Your Life (1986)
• relationships with men and her Jewish heritage
• An Atlas of the Difficult World (1992)
• tells to known your country

• Dark Fields of the Republic Poems, 1991-1995
  (1995)
• analysis Americas problems
• Midnight Salvage (1999)
• aged poet looking back on her life

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Awards

• First award was the Yale- Younger Poets Award
  (1951)
• Was given for her first collection of poems, A
  Change of World.
• Won National Book Award for Diving into a Wreck.
• Bollingen Prize
• Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award

• Academy of American Poets Fellowship
• The Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize
• The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
• The National Book Award (1974)
• A MacArthur Fellowship
• Wallace Stevens Award for having mastered and
  being outstanding in poetry (1997).

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Contributions to American Lit.

• Wrote a lot about sexuality, women's rights,
  racism, language and power
• Many people took notice of this and began to give
  there ideas on these subjects by writing poetry.
• Won awards for being a humanitarian
• She was on of the first to express her views on
  women and other things that were semi taboo in
  her time age

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Works Cited

• Microsoft Encarta 98 (photo info)
• http//www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C0
  305 (photo info)
• http//www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/m_r/rich/bi
  o.htm (info)