Lesemann, Maurice, 1899-

American poet and friend of Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Glenway Wescott, Pearl Andelson Sherry, Kathleen Foster Campbell, and Monroe Wheeler.

From the description of Maurice Lesemann papers, 1918-1986. (Unknown). WorldCat record id: 122500156

Biographical Note : Maurice Lesemann

Maurice Lesemann was born on November 28, 1899, in Chicago, Illinois, the son of Dr. Louis F. W. Lesemann, a Methodist clergyman and educator with the position of Dean at the Garrett Biblical Institute of Northwestern University.

Educated in the public schools of Chicago and Evanston, Lesemann subsequently attended the University of Chicago, earning his B.A. in 1923. At the University he was active in and served as president of the University of Chicago Poetry Club. The group affiliated with the Club, mostly students, included Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, novelist and poet Glenway Wescott, poet Pearl Andelson Sherry, poet Kathleen Foster Campbell, Curator of the Museum of Modern Art Monroe Wheeler. Several of the Poetry Club members were contributors to Poetry Magazine, published and edited by Harriet Monroe with the help of her assistant Alice Corbin Henderson, who later became a central figure in the literary life of Taos and Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Lesemann was in New Mexico from 1920-1922, taking two years away from college in order to visit Winters and Glenway Wescott, who had gone to New Mexico in response to Winters' enthusiastic description of the mountains and desert. After his arrival, Lesemann taught school at Cerrillos, at that time a small, mostly Hispanic, coal camp near Santa Fe. In 1922, Winters was teaching high school at Madrid, another coal camp not far away.

A promising member of the Chicago Poetry Club, Lesemann was a perfectionist whose finished work, in his eyes, was never worthy of publication. He did contribute a number of poems to Poetry Magazine, winning that magazine's Young Poet's Prize in 1920 and later the Witter Bynner Prize and the Levinson Prize in 1927. Although never collected together in one book, Lesemann's verse has appeared in various magazines and anthologies over the years.

After graduation, Lesemann entered the advertising profession and was associated with it until his retirement in 1959.

He was married in 1926 and shortly thereafter moved to Southern California where he lived for the rest of his life. His widow, Marjorie, resides in La Crescenta. One son, Dr. Frederick Lesemann, is a composer and professor in the School of Music at the University of Southern California.

In addition to a considerable collection of verse, he left behind a large work, a poem, which he called The Odd Planet. The last years of his life were devoted to writing a novel, Stranger at Saddlerock, as yet unpublished, about life in Northern New Mexico, that area which has had such an enormous influence on the lives of many writers, a number of them Lesemann's friends -- Witter Bynner, Alice Corbin Henderson, Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis, and Lynn Riggs, among others.

After several years of frail health, he died on October 2, 1981, from heart failure, at La Crescenta, California.

May 1984

BiographicalL Note: Elizabeth Madox Roberts

Elizabeth Madox Roberts was born on October 30, 1881, in Perryville, Kentucky, to Simpson and Mary Brent Roberts, descendants of Kentucky pioneers who had trekked into Kentucky through Boone's Trace in the 18th century. Her father was a combination of scholar, schoolteacher, farmer, and surveyor whose enthusiasm for classical culture and the philosophical idealism of Berkeley, along with his awareness of the family's involvement in Kentucky and American history, strongly affected the intellectual framework of his daughter in her formative years.

She spent her high school years in Covington, Kentucky, living at her grandmother Brent's between 1896-1900, then six more years in Colorado for her health, before entering the University of Chicago in 1917. While at Chicago she bacame attached to a group of writers in the Poetry club, among them Yvor Winters, Janet Lewis, Maurice Lesemann, Glenway Wescott, and Monroe Wheeler, and was accepted as a contribuing poet in Harriet Monroe's magazine, Poetry. A member of Phi Beta Kappa, she was awarded the Fiske Prize of the University of Chicago in 1921, graduating from the University that same year. The Fiske Prize poems were later gathered into one of her first volumes of poetry. She won the John Reed Memorial Prize of Poetry in 1928 and the Poetry Society of South Carolina Prize in 1931. In addition to her gifts in poetry, she had exceptional talent in the shorter forms of fiction and, in 1930, won the O. Henry Memorial Volume short-short story prize.

Occasionally criticized as mystical and obscure, she maintained, nevertheless, the integrity of a subtle and rhythmic style, feminine and lyrical, rich in the power of suggestion. A poet in her early years, Roberts later developed into a mature and effective prose writer. The Time of Man, her first novel (1926), is a story of poor whites in Kentucky possessed by the pioneer urge and is considered by many critics to be her finest novel. The second novel, My Heart and My Flesh (1927), set against a pastoral background, is a tragic story of a woman driven to the verge of madness. The Great Meadow (1930), a historical novel, depicts the terror and beauty of pioneer life in Kentucky.

Elizabeth Madox Roberts was essentially a Kentuckian, although she lived for long periods in New York and California. She never married. Her instinct for the folk speech of her native state and her talent for the precise and effective description of Kentucky's folk customs have made her a writer of authentic regional power with an international repuation.

Troubled in her last years by chronic anemia and Hodgkin's disease, Roberts was denied both critical and commercial success. She died in Orlando, Florida, on March 13, 1941, and was buried in Springfield, Kentucky.

Her books include: In the Great Steep's Garden, 1915 (poetry); Under the Tree 1922 (poetry); The Time of Man 1926; My Heart and My Flesh, 1927; Jingling in the Wind, 1928; The Great Meadow, 1930; A Buried Treasure, 1931; The Haunted Mirror, 1931 (short stories); He Sent Forth a Raven 1935; Black is My True Love's Hair, 1938; Song in the Meadow, 1940 (poetry); Not by Strange Gods, 1941.

From the guide to the Maurice Lesemann Papers, 1918-1986, (Stanford University. Libraries. Dept. of Special Collections and University Archives.)