This engaging study provides new perspectives on the lives and work of two major figures in American poetry and publishing in the second half of the twentieth century: Robert Giroux (1914–2008), editor-in-chief of Harcourt, Brace and Company and later of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and John Berryman (1914–1972), Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and Shakespearean scholar who also received a National Book Award and a Bollingen Prize for Poetry.