Oppen, George, 1908-1984

George Augustus Oppen Jr. was born on April 24, 1908, in New Rochelle, New York, the son of George August Oppenheimer, a diamond merchant who changed the family name to Oppen in 1927.

He was an American poet, a member of the Objectivist group of poets. He attended Oregon State University, where he met his future wife, Mary Colby (1908–1990). After staying out all night on their first date, she got expelled, and he suspended. They left Oregon, got married in 1928, and started hitch-hiking across the country, working at odd jobs along the way. Mary documented these events in her memoir, “Meaning A Life: An Autobiography” (1978). Oppen began writing poems and publishing them in local magazines. In 1929, he received a small inheritance that gave him relative financial independence. In 1930, George and Mary moved to California and then to France. In 1933, the Oppens returned to New York to set up the Objectivist Press with poets William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, and Charles Reznikoff. The press published Oppen's first book “Discrete Series” (1934). He abandoned poetry in the 1930s for political activism (he joined the Communist Party USA) and later moved to Mexico to avoid the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee. After a twenty-five-year period of silence, Oppen re-emerged in 1958, producing new work that took up a challenging stance toward the American scene of the time. He became an important influence on many younger American poets, including members of the Beat and Black Mountain schools. His book “Of Being Numerous” (1968) addressed the ongoing war in Vietnam and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1969. He also published several books of poems, e.g., “The Materials” (1962), “This in Which” (1965), “Of Being Numerous” (1968), “Alpine” (1969), “Seascape: Needle's Eye (1972)” and The Collected Poems (1975).

He died on July 7, 1984, in Sunnyvale, California.