August 22, 2009

Richard Poirier '49, founder of Library of America

A Washington Post obituary remembers Richard Poirier, a professor of English and founder of the Library of America, who passed away in New York on August 15. After graduating from Amherst, he received degrees from Yale and Harvard, and taught at Williams, Harvard, and Rutgers, where he taught for 40 years.

In “Learning From the Beatles,” an essay originally published in Partisan Review in 1967, Dr. Poirier was one of the first commentators to argue that the album “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” represented an intermingling of pop and “serious” cultures that deserved close critical attention.

He also wrote about the impact of Vietnam on the culture and the significance of the 1960s revolution, and he once compared Bette Midler’s command of parody to that of the writers Mailer, Ralph Ginzburg and Thomas Pynchon.

Brian Meacham '97 | August 22, 2009 12:44 PM | Alumni

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