Reeve was born in Philadelphia, the son of Anne Conrad D'Olier and Richard Henry Reeve. He was brought up outside
New York City. Reeve worked in the Dakota wheat fields for a while during college and, after graduation, was a Hudson River
longshoreman for a while. He graduated from
Princeton University (1950) and
Columbia University (1958), and in 1961 was one of the first exchanges between the
American Council of Learned Societies and the
USSR Academy of Sciences. In the late summer of 1962 he accompanied
Robert Frost to
Russia for his meeting with
Nikita Khrushchev, where Reeve served as Frost's translator. Reeve started his academic career teaching Russian language and literature at
Columbia University. After teaching at Columbia, Reeve moved to
Wesleyan University in 1962 as chairman of the Russian Department. In 1967, he joined Wesleyan's inter-disciplinary
College of Letters where he taught literature, humanities and creative writing until his retirement in 2002. During the course of his career he had visiting appointments at
Oxford University,
Yale, and Columbia. From 1994 on, he lived in
Wilmington, Vermont with his wife, novelist
Laura C. Stevenson. Reeve was an officer of the
Poetry Society of America, the founding editor of
Poetry Review, the secretary of
Poets House in its formative years, and was associated with the New England Poetry Club and the
New York Quarterly. He published over two dozen books of poetry, fiction, criticism, and translation. Reeve died on June 28, 2013, at
Dartmouth Hitchcock Hospital in
Lebanon, New Hampshire from complications from
diabetes. ==Awards==