Karl Shapiro
Karl Jay Shapiro (November 10, 1913 – May 14, 2000) was an American poet. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945 for his collection V-Letter and Other Poems.[1] He was appointed the fifth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1946.
Not to be confused with Carl Shapiro.
Karl Shapiro
November 10, 1913
Baltimore, Maryland, U.S.
May 14, 2000 (aged 86)
New York City, New York, U.S.
Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1945)
Bollingen Prize in Poetry (1969)
Evalyn Katz (1945–1967)
Teri Kovach (1967-1982)
Sophie Wilkins (1984-2000)
Shapiro served in the Pacific Theater as a United States Army company clerk during World War II.
Death and legacy[edit]
By 1984, Shapiro began to divide his time between California and an apartment in the Manhattan Valley section of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he initially spent at least half the year.[13] He became a full-time resident of New York in 1994.[5] In 1985, Richard Tillinghast of The New York Times Book Review asserted that Shapiro had become "more a name than a presence," and he obtained a settlement from the American Medical Association after the organization "mistakenly included him in a list of writers who had committed suicide."[14] As early as 1978, Shapiro had been erroneously characterized as a "late U.S. poet" in a New York Times crossword puzzle clue.[14]
He died at a New York City hospice, aged 86, on May 14, 2000. Survivors included his third wife, Sophie Wilkens (m. 1985), along with three grandchildren and one great-grandchild. More recent editions of his work include The Wild Card: Selected Poems Early and Late (1998) and the John Updike-edited Selected Poems (2003). His last work, Coda: Last Poems, (2008) was recently published in a volume organized posthumously by editor Robert Phillips. The poems, divided into three sections according to love poems to Wilkens, poems concerning roses, and other various poems, were discovered in the drawers of Shapiro's desk by his wife two years after his death.