Richard Eberhart was born in Austin, Minnesota, on April 5, 1904. His father
was a well-off businessman, and he grew up contentedly on the family's
forty-acre estate, Burr Oaks. Eberhart was graduated from high school in 1921
and duly entered the University of Minnesota. But the following year marked an
abrupt change. His mother died of cancer, and he said afterwards that her
death made him into a poet. Soon after, and with even greater suddenness, his
father's fortune was largely wiped out; an employee had embezzled over a
million dollars. Perhaps in refuge from this turmoil, Eberhart left the
University of Minnesota and enrolled at Dartmouth. He received his B.A. degree
there in 1926. Then, not sure what to do next besides write verse, he worked
in Chicago as a floorwalker in a department store, as an advertising
copywriter, then shipped out as a deck hand on a tramp steamer going around
the world. At Port Said, to escape a tyrannical captain, he jumped ship and
made way to England. In 1927 he went up to St. John's College, Cambridge, and
took a second B.A. there in 1929.
The following year (1930-31),
he returned to the United States and served as tutor to the son of King
Prajadhipok of Siam, the king then in New York for a cataract operation.
Eberhart spent 1932-33 as a graduate student at Harvard, and in 1933 received
an M.A. from Cambridge University. Then he decided not to become a university
teacher, and instead taught English at St. Mark's School in Southboro from
1933 to 1941. During the Second World War he was an aerial gunnery officer in
the Navy.
Eberhart's wife's family controlled the Butcher
Polish Company. On leaving the Navy, Eberhart became assistant manager. He
worked actively for the company for six years, and remained on its board of
directors. But the academic life, of which he had so long disapproved, had
become a more favorable environment for poets, and he was invited back into
it. After various university posts he accepted the position of professor of
English and poet-in-residence at Dartmouth, where he has been since 1956.
__________
Ellmann, Richard and Robert O'Clair. Modern Poems: An
Introduction to Poetry.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973, p. 259.
