Robert Wallace Biography

Robert Wallace was born in 1932 in Springfield, Missouri, the son of a furniture maker. By the age of ten, he was crafting poems influenced by the witty verse of Ogden Nash and Richard Armour. At 16, one of his poems was published in The Rotarian magazine. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1953, where he had formed a life-long friendship with fellow student John Updike. His own poems were then appearing in Christian Science Monitor and The Lyric. He traveled to England as a Fulbright scholar and Woodrow Wilson fellow, enrolling in St. Catharine’s College, Cambridge, where he earned a second Bachelor of Arts degree in English, with honors. After a two year stint in the army, his first book appeared, This Various World and Other Poems (Scribner’s 1957).

Wallace’s teaching career began at Bryn Mawr College in 1957, and continued at Sweet Briar and Vassar Colleges before he joined the faculty of CWRU in 1965. His second book, Views from a Ferris Wheel (E.P. Dutton), appeared that same year, followed by Ungainly Thing (1968) for which he received the Cleveland Arts Prize. Swimmer in the Rain (Carnegie Mellon Univ. Press 1979) was followed by Girlfriends and Wives (Carnegie Mellon 1984), and The Common Summer: New and Selected Poems (1989).

While teaching and writing, he launched Bits Press in 1974. Devoted to the short poem, Bits began by publishing a magazine, Bits, from 1975 to 1980, but quickly branched out to publish chapbooks by single authors as various as Updike, Mary Oliver, and X.J. Kennedy. Frequently assisted by students, Wallace hand-set and printed both Bits and the chapbooks on a Chandler & Price printing press at his Cleveland Heights home. In 1985, Bits Press debuted a series of hard-bound collections of new light verse and funny poems by both famous and unknown authors called Light Year, which was published, first annually, then biennially, until 1989.

Robert Wallace died in April 1999 at the age of 67, while working on his much used text, Writing Poems (HarperCollins).