Howard Moss

Howard Moss, born on January 22, 1922, in New York City, was an American poet and editor. He attended the University of Michigan for two years, where he received the Hopwood Award for undergraduate poetry. He was enrolled at Harvard University during the summer of 1942, and finally received his BA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1943.

Moss is the author of twelve volumes of poetry, including Rules of Sleep (Antheum, 1984); Selected Poems (Antheum, 1972), which shared the 1972 National Book Award for Poetry with The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara; A Swimmer in the Air (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1957); and The Wound and the Weather (Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946), released during Moss’s brief time as an instructor at Vassar College. In addition to poetry, he also authored several volumes of criticism and a few plays. The Palace at 4 A.M. (1972) is his reimagining of the Oedipus myth.   

In 1948, Moss joined the staff of The New Yorker as a fiction editor. Two years later, he was promoted to poetry editor, a position he held until his death. Credited with discovering many major American poets, Moss is best known for his work as an editor and helped establish the careers of poets such as James Dickey, Anne Sexton, Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, and Mark Strand.

In addition to the National Book Award, Moss was the recipient of a Brandeis University Creative Arts Award in Poetry; MacDowell fellowships in the years 1953, 1965, and 1972; and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his New Selected Poems (Antheum, 1985). In 1987, he served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Of Moss, Galway Kinnell said, “He was a tremendous force for poetry in this country. He was often accused of publishing ‘The New Yorker poem,’ but as a matter of fact the variety and quality of poems he published was astonishing. I don’t know any pure literary magazine that has had as consistent a quality of poetry as The New Yorker under Howard Moss.”

Moss died on September 16, 1987, in Manhattan, New York.