Joseph Brodsky

A celebrated poet and essayist, Joseph Brodsky was considered the finest Russian poet of his era. Born Iosif Alexandrovich Brodsky, in Leningrad, he embraced the United States, and was embraced in turn by American poets and writers. The author of at least nine poetry collections, Brodsky reached the pinnacle of American letters, becoming U.S. poet laureate a few years after receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature. Brodsky’s writing—haunting, impassioned, opaque, melancholic—appeared in popular American magazines as well as highbrow literary journals.