Archie Randolph Ammons was born on February 18, 1926, in Whiteville, North Carolina, the youngest of his parents' three surviving children. 
His father worked as a tobacco farmer. After graduating high school Ammons worked at the naval shipyard in Wilmington, North Carolina; as a member of the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War II, he served on board a destroyer escort in the South Pacific. After the war he studied biology at Wake Forest College, receiving his degree in 1949; in the 1950s, he took graduate courses in English at the University of California at Berkeley. He married Phyllis Plumbo in 1949. Ammons spent a year as the principal of an elementary school on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, and later worked for several years as a sales executive for a glass company in southern New Jersey. Ommateum, his first collection of poetry, was published at his own expense in 1955. In 1964 he joined the faculty of the English Department at Cornell University, where he would teach for more than three decades. A popular teacher and prolific poet, Ammons published more than 20 volumes of poetry, as well as the prose collection Set in Motion (1996). He received numerous awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Lannan Poetry Prize, a Fellowship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, a Bollingen Prize (1975) for Sphere: The Form of a Motion, and National Book Awards for Collected Poems 1951-1971 in 1973, and for Garbage in 1993. He died of cancer on February 25, 2001.
(Back to Introduction to A. R. Ammons: Selected Poems)
