Leonard Wallace Robinson (1912-1999).
Leonard grew up in Malden, MA and as soon as he reasonably could, made his way to Manhattan to become a young man of letters. In the 1930s he attended the New School for Social Research and Columbia University, where he was editor of The Columbia Review. He was hired as a staff writer at The New Yorker Magazine and went on to become the managing editor in charge of fiction at Esquire Magazine, fiction editor at Collier's Magazine and executive editor at Holt, Rinehart publishing company. While working as an editor, he continued to write short stories. His fiction appeared in The New Yorker and Harper's magazines, among others. "The Ruin of Soul" appeared in the 1950 edition of the O. Henry Prize Stories, and "The Practice of an Art" was selected for The Best American Short Stories of 1965.
Leonard was deeply curious about the human relation to mystery, guilt, transport, and sorrow. In the early '50s, he took a leave from the publishing world to apprentice himself to a prominent psychiatrist as a lay practitioner. He also maintained a lifelong relationship with the Roman Catholic religion. "Double Thought," one of the haikus he liked to write in recent years, was his crisp theological treatise: "Just because man needs\ God is no reason to believe\ He doesn't exist."
In 1968 at MacDowell, Leonard met a poet named Patricia Goedicke who exhibited, among other charms, an intriguingly lethal style of playing ping-pong (one of MacDowell Fellows' favorite nighttime activities). Within a couple of days, the two were embarked together for life.
During most of the 1960s, Leonard taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, where he founded and taught the magazine article workshop.
Leonard was a listener, a muser, a laugher, a guide. He served as a generous and insightful mentor to many writers of fiction and nonfiction. He lunched often with people he liked; told ribald stories; walked the conversation into deeper waters: love, literature, what it feels like to know you are old when you don't feel that way.
In 1984, the year Leonard turned 72, Barnwood Press published a collection of his poems, titled In The Whale. Many of his readers considered the collection his finest literary work. Dedicated to Patricia, "my beloved," the poems celebrate, among many wonders, the crystal light of Mexico (where he and Patricia lived for many years), a washerwoman's beautiful mouth, a guano-stained blue fedora, odd dreams of Greece, a young runner on a wooden track in upper Maine.
