Early life Edward Charles O'Gorman was born on September 26, 1929, in
New York City. His father was Samuel Franklin Engs O'Gorman and his mother, Annette de Bouthillier-Chavigny, a French aristocrat. He spent most of his early life in
Southport, Connecticut, and
Bradford, Vermont. In 1950, he graduated from St. Michael's College in Vermont and later received an M.A. from
Columbia University, where he studied with poet and scholar
Mark Van Doren. While at
Princeton University in 1957, he rented a room in the house of novelist
Caroline Gordon Tate, former (and future) wife of poet
Allen Tate. O'Gorman would later research (but never complete) a biography of Allen Tate. His sister Pat O'Gorman Schonfeld was married to
CNN executive
Reese Schonfeld.
Career His poetry earned him
Guggenheim Fellowships in 1956 and 1962. He won the
Lamont Poetry Prize in 1958 for his first collection of poems,
The Night of the Hammer. From 1957 to 1960 O'Gorman taught at
Iona College in
New Rochelle, New York. He taught at
Tougaloo College in
Mississippi in 1965 and 1966. He later taught at
Brooklyn College,
The New School, and
Manhattan College. He was the literary editor of the Catholic magazine
Jubilee from 1962 to 1965. He was appointed by the
U.S. State Department to be the American studies specialist in
Chile,
Argentina and
Brazil in 1965. In 1968, he signed the "
Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the
Vietnam War. In connection with the peace movement, O'Gorman organized a poetry reading, called "Poets for Peace," at the Town Hall in New York City on November 12, 1967, for the Compassionate Arts of the Fellowship of Reconciliation. In July 1966, he arrived in
Harlem and worked that summer as a volunteer teacher in a
Head Start program. The children's library he started two months later, named after
Addie Mae Collins, one of the four children killed in the 1963 bombing of a
Birmingham church, gradually became a tuition-free school known as
The Children's Storefront, welcoming all children living in the area. Today, the school thrives with an annual budget of $2.5 million and a waiting list of eight hundred children. After losing a dispute over succession at the Storefront, O'Gorman founded the Ricardo O'Gorman Garden and Center for Resources in the Humanities which opened in 1998 with the collaboration of two teachers from the original school. The center, which O'Gorman continued to direct, is located on West 129th Street in New York City. The tuition-free school ran an annual budget of $300,000 and for many years benefitted from O'Gorman's fund-raising efforts. O'Gorman wrote six books of poetry, five books of prose, and numerous articles and poetry published in various magazines. His many correspondents included some of the most renowned cultural figures of the mid twentieth century:
Peter Levi,
Henry Miller,
Huston Smith,
Susan Sontag,
Mark Van Doren,
Daniel Berrigan,
Louise Bogan,
Gwendolyn Brooks,
Richard Eberhart,
Paul Goodman,
Suzanne Hiltermann,
Galway Kinnell,
Denise Levertov,
Archibald MacLeish,
Marianne Moore,
Anaïs Nin,
Richard Wilbur,
Robert Bly,
Rafael Squirru,
Bink Noll,
Laura Riding Jackson,
Lincoln Kirstein,
Kathleen Raine,
Robert Penn Warren,
Dorothy Day, and
Thomas Merton.
Death He died of pancreatic cancer at his Manhattan home on March 7, 2014, at the age of eighty-four. ==Bibliography==