Discipline: Literature

Howard Moss

Discipline: Literature
MacDowell Fellowships: 1953, 1965, 1972
Howard Moss (1922-1987) was an American poet, dramatist, and critic. He was poetry editor of The New Yorker magazine from 1948 until his death and he won the National Book Award in 1972 for Selected Poems. Moss was born in New York City. He attended the University of Michigan, where he won a Hopwood Award. He is credited with discovering a number of major American poets, including Anne Sexton and Amy Clampitt. According to Edmund White, Moss was a closeted homosexual, a notion exploited in White's thinly disguised roman à clef, The Farewell Symphony, in which the character "Tom" is a prominent New York poetry editor; the "closet" characterization is at odds with the memory of literary friends who remember Moss as openly gay. Moss died of a heart attack related to AIDS. W. H. Auden and Chester Kallman co-wrote a famously concise clerihew in his honor. TO THE POETRY EDITOR OF THE NEW YORKER Is Robert Lowell Better than Noel Coward, Howard?

Studios

New Jersey

Howard Moss worked in the New Jersey studio.

The yellow clapboard New Jersey Studio, located on a grassy, sloping site, was funded by the New Jersey Federation of Women’s Clubs and built as an exact replica of Monday Music Studio (1913). The studio’s porch rests on fieldstone piers that increase in height as the ground slopes to the west. Like Monday Music Studio, New Jersey…

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