About the Author

Kimball Flaccus '33, in the adjoining photograph, is shown at his desk at Greensboro (N.C.) College, where this fall he assumed the duties of Associate Professor and Chairman of the Department of English. In addition to teaching American literature and modern poetry and drama, he has taken a special interest in encouraging creative writing and has established the college's first Writing Workshop.

Flaccus taught previously at City College in New York, New York University, Drexel Institute of Technology, and Pratt Institute, and following three years' service with the Navy during the war, he was assistant professor at the U. S. Navy Intelligence School from 1946 to 1950. He received the M.A. degree from Columbia University, where he was a Graduate Residence Scholar in 1933-34, and the Ph.D. degree from New York University in 1952.

One of the foremost literary figures among Dartmouth alumni, Flaccus early displayed his poetic gift by winning the Glascock Intercollegiate Poetry Prize as a sophomore and having his undergraduate poems printed in various magazines beyond the campus. He was a Senior Fellow, president of The Arts, and editor of The Five Arts and The Arts Chapbooks. He also was a letterman in soccer and a member of Green Key. In 1934-35, following his year at Columbia, he studied in Ireland as the holder of Dartmouth's Richard Crawford Campbell Jr. Fellowship.

In 1934 his first volume of poetry, Avalanche of April, was published by Scribner's. This attracted wide notice and as recently as last winter was praised by John Cowper Powys as the work of "a true and original poet." A second volume of verse' appeared in 1940 and took its title, The WhiteStranger, from a poetic drama about Quetzalcoatl. A verse play, The Musicof the Mountains, was a radio presentation in 1942 by the Columbia Workshop, which had earlier given his play, Fulton Fish Market.

Since 1940, much of the time not given over to Navy service, teaching and graduate work has been devoted by Flaccus to the writing of a critical biography of the American poet, Edgar Lee Masters, whom he knew quite intimately. Masters gave Flaccus access to some of his private papers and much first-hand information for the book. After the poet's death, permission to continue work on the biography was obtained from Mrs. Ellen Coyne Masters, literary executor of the estate. To assist him in the writing of this biography, tentatively scheduled to appear next year, Flaccus has received the Newberry Library Fellowship in MidWestern Studies; a Saxton Memorial Trust Fellowship from Harper & Brothers; and a research grant from the American Philosophical Society.

Interest in Thomas Wolfe has. not diminished with this work on Masters, and since going to Greensboro College this fall Flaccus has been instrumental in the establishment by Charles Scribner's Sons and Harper & Brothers of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial Prize in Imaginative Prose Writing, to encourage students in the new Writing Workshop.

Kimball Flaccus '33