Kenneth Rexroth — the poet

1905 – 1982 · born in South Bend, 1905

The fame: Kenneth Rexroth is one of the central American poets of the twentieth century: the presiding figure of the San Francisco Renaissance, the man who launched the careers of the Beat generation's elders and then kept a critical distance from the Beats themselves, and the translator whose One Hundred Poems from the Japanese and One Hundred Poems from the Chinese carried classical Asian poetry into American English. He was largely self-educated, worked at a wide range of jobs, campaigned with the Wobblies, and wrote essays, criticism, and an autobiographical novel alongside the poems. The honors of record include the Shelley Memorial Award, an Amy Lowell Travelling Fellowship, election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the Copernicus Award of the Academy of American Poets (1975) for a lifetime's work.

The tie, exactly: Rexroth was born in South Bend on December 22, 1905 — and that, with an early childhood, is the whole of it. The family moved to Chicago while he was a small child; his formation was Chicago's, and his fame is San Francisco's. He is printed here because the birth is the city's and the record is honest about how much weight a birth alone carries: South Bend is where Kenneth Rexroth started, not where he was made.

The end: He died on June 6, 1982, at Montecito, California.

Sources:

1. Social Networks and Archival Context (SNAC), Rexroth authority record — born December 22, 1905, in South Bend; died June 6, 1982, at Montecito; the San Francisco Poetry Center, the radio years, the awards.
2. LibraryThing author record (Bowker biography) — born in South Bend, Indiana; the translations, the essays, the Shelley and Amy Lowell honors.