The New York Times Reviews Hilary Holladay's Adrienne Rich Biography

At the New York Times, Dwight Garner reviews Hilary Holladay's forthcoming [Next week!] biography of Adrienne Rich, The Power of Adrienne Rich (Nan A. Talese). "It’s the first proper biography of her, and there’s a lot to unpack," Garner observes. "This is a good story well-told." Reading on from there: 

Rich was a child prodigy. She played Mozart on the piano and dictated stories by the age of 4. Her father, a pathologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, sensed his daughter’s genius. He tightly controlled her education and ruthlessly urged her to work harder and better. Mostly she enjoyed this urging; she was an apt pupil. By the time Rich was in high school, others saw her intelligence and high seriousness and were a bit terrified of her.

While she was still at Radcliffe College — she was, with Ursula K. Le Guin and Rona Jaffe, in the class of 1951 — Rich’s first collection of poems, “A Change of World,” was selected by W. H. Auden and published in the Yale Younger Poets series. Rich would become known for the intensity of her public readings, and already she drew crowds.

Learn more at the New York Times.