Archibald MacLeish: An American Life

Born on May 7, 1892, in Glencoe, Illinois, to the craggy but prosperous president of Carson Pirie Scott and an idealistic mother who had been a college president, Archibald MacLeish grew up to become not only a highly regarded poet, even eventually the unofficial poet laureate of his time, but one of our most dedicated and effective public servants. Educated at Hotchkiss (which he hated), Yale (football, Skull and Bones), and Harvard Law School, he abandoned a promising law practice in Boston on the very day he was to be offered a partnership, to take his wife, a gifted singer, and their young children to Paris and write poetry full-time.