Troy, William, 1903-1961

Léonie Adams was born Léonie Fuller in Brooklyn, New York, on December 9, 1899. She grew up with five siblings in a strict household until she left to attend Barnard College, from which she graduated in 1922. During her studies Adams began to write poetry and became the editor of The Measure . In 1925, she published her first collection of poetry, Those Not Elect . The book received great praise and Adams continued to write poetry while working as an editor for Wilson Publishing and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She moved to Paris for one year in 1929 on a Guggenheim Fellowship, where she befriended H.D., regularly visited with Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein, and lived with Allen Tate and his family. Her next two collections, High Falcon and Other Poems and Midsummer, were published in the same year. In 1930, she returned to New York and taught at New York University, where she met writer and teacher William Troy. The two married in 1933 and Adams published her collection of poetry, This Measure . She published no poetry for the next twenty-five years yet continued to teach poetry and was elected Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (now known as the U.S. Poet Laureateship) in 1948.

Adams spent the rest of her career editing and teaching poetry for various institutions, including Columbia University; New York University; New Jersey College for Women (known then as Douglass College), from which she received an honorary doctoral degree in 1950; the University of Washington; the Breadloaf Writers Conference; and Sarah Lawrence College. In 1954, she won the Harriet Monroe Award from Poetry and in 1955 she won the Shelley Memorial Prize and shared the Bollingen Prize for Poems: A Selection with her friend and fellow poet, Louise Bogan. She received an Academy Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets in 1974. She died on June 27, 1988 in New Milford, Connecticut.

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