Reuel Denney

by George J. Dance

Reuel Denney. Courtesy University of California Press.

Reuel Denney (April 13, 1913 - May 1, 1995) was an American poet and academic.

Life

Denney was born in New York City, and grew up in Buffalo, New York. He graduated from Dartmouth College with a B.A. in 1932, and in 1935 returned to Buffalo to teach high school English. He attended the University of Buffalo 1937-1938.

In 1938 he married Ruth Norton. In 1939 he won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, resulting in the publication of his first poetry collection, The Connecticut River and other poems.

In Buffalo, Denney met and befriended college sociology instructor David Reisman; the two became "tennis pals" (in Reisman's words). When Reisman moved to the University of Chicago, he arranged for Denney to be hired by the University as well. Denney became an Assistant Professor (of Humanities) at the University of Chicago in 1948.

Reisman also asked Denney to be a collaborator on his book, The Lonely Crowd. Published in 1950, that book has become a classic of sociology, selling more than 500,000 copies.

Denney became an Associate Professor of the University of Chicago in 1951, and a full Professor in 1953. In 1961 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Hawaii, and the following year became Professor of American Studies and English there.

Denney remained at the University of Hawaii until his retirement in 1977. He died in Honolulu, Hawaii.

Recognition

• Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, 1939.
• Guggenheim Fellowship, 1941.
• Grace Thayer Bradley Award of the Friends of Literature, 1954.
• Eunice Tietjens Memorial Prize of Poetry magazine, 1954.
• Quantrell Prize for Excellence in Teaching, University of Chicago, 1957.
• National Institute of Arts and Letters prize, 1968.
• Quarterly Review of Literature prize for The Portfolio of Benjamin Latrobe, 1984.
• Hawai'i Award for Literature, 1987.

Except where noted, award information courtesy Dartmouth College.

Publications

Poetry

• The Connecticut River, and other poems (foreword by Stephen Vincent Benet). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (Yale Series of Younger Poets), 1939; AMS Press, 1971 ISBN 978-0-404-53838-5
• In Praise of Adam: Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961.
• Keepsake of Below. Honolulu, HI: Monserrat Press, 1974.

Non-fiction

• The Lonely Crowd (by David Reisman, Reuel Denney, & Nathan Glazer). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1950.
• The Astonished Muse. Chicago: University of Chicaco Press, 1957; New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964; New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1989 ISBN 978-0-88738-762-3 (limited preview)
• Conrad Aiken. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press (Pamphlets on American Writers), 1964. ISBN 978-0-7837-2891-9

Collected editions

• Feast of Strangers: Selected prose and poetry of Reuel Denney (edited by Tony Quagliano). Greenwood Press, 1999. ISBN 978-0-313-30085-1

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

Summer Round - Reuel Denney

See also

• List of U.S. poets

References

Fonds

Denney's papers are at the Rauner Special Collections Library at Dartmouth College.

External links

Poems

• "Fixer of Midnight" at the Poetry Foundation

Prose

• "Reactors of the Imagination" in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July 1953.

Books

• Reuel Denney at Amazon.com 

About

• "Reuel Denney, Scholar, Writer And Poet, 82" obituary at the New York Times
• "Replaying Reuel Denny (.PDF) 

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