Fierce solitude

the long version

In this biography of John Gould Fletcher, Ben Johnson examines Fletcher's work as a poet and critic and his life as a child, writer, husband, and lover. Fletcher's life was intertwined professionally and personally with those of Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, T. S. Eliot, Allen Tate, Van Wyck Brooks, and Conrad Aiken. His books often bore the imprint of major publishers, and his essays appeared in leading journals. Fletcher won the 1938 Pulitzer Prize for his Selected Poems and later was installed in the American Institute of Arts and Letters. Well documented and researched, Johnson's study draws upon all the available sources on Fletcher's life and work. Johnson tells us of Fletcher's childhood in the Albert Pike house in Little Rock, where the young boy lived in an isolated and regimented world. As an adult, Fletcher moved in high literary circles, often causing confusion among his critics and followers with his writing - was he an Imagist, an Agrarian, or a Modernist? Or was he simply John Gould Fletcher, the man, caught up in tumultuous times and events, seeking no particular label to pin on his writing, but rather reflecting the changing world as he saw and lived it? Fletcher suffered extreme, cyclical depression; nonetheless, he continued to compose some of his best work until his death just one quarter mile from his home at Johnswood in Little Rock in 1950. There he was found twelve feet from the bank of a pond, lying in two and one-half feet of water, with his coat, hat, billfold, and cigarettes laid out along the edge.