Crane, Joan.

Guy Davenport: A Descriptive Bibliography 1947-1995. [Signed by Davenport]

Haverford, Green Shade, 1996. 8°. XX, 247 pages. Original Hardcover with original dustjacket in protective Mylar. Very good condition with only minor signs of external wear. Number 61 of only 100 signed copies (out of a total edition of 550).

Guy Mattison Davenport (November 23, 1927 – January 4, 2005) was an American writer, translator, illustrator, painter, intellectual, and teacher.

Guy Davenport was born in Anderson, South Carolina, in the foothills of Appalachia on November 23, 1927. His father was an agent for the Railway Express Agency. Davenport said that he became a reader only at 10, with a neighbor’s gift of one of the Tarzan series. At age eleven, he began a neighborhood newspaper, drawing all the illustrations and writing all the stories. At 13, he “broke [his] right leg (skating) and was laid up for a wearisome while”; it was then that he began “reading with real interest”, beginning with a biography of Leonardo. He left high school early and enrolled at Duke University a few weeks after his seventeenth birthday. At Duke, he studied art (with Clare Leighton), graduating with a BA summa cum laude in classics and English literature. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa his junior year.

Davenport was a Rhodes Scholar at Merton College, Oxford, from 1948 to 1950.[6] He studied Old English under J. R. R. Tolkien and graduated with a B.Litt., with a thesis on James Joyce. In 1950, upon his return to the United States, Davenport was drafted into the US Army for two years, spending them at Fort Bragg in the 756th Field Artillery, then in the XVIII Airborne Corps. After the army, he taught at Washington University in St. Louis until 1955, when he began earning a PhD at Harvard, studying under Harry Levin and Archibald MacLeish.

Davenport befriended Ezra Pound during the poet’s incarceration in St. Elizabeths Hospital, visiting him annually from 1952 until Pound’s release, in 1958, and later at Pound’s home in Rapallo, Italy. Davenport described one such visit, in 1963, in the story “Ithaka”. Davenport wrote his dissertation on Pound’s poetry, published as Cities on Hills in 1983. This interest led him to Hugh Kenner, who became one of his most important literary friends. They carried on a voluminous correspondence from 1958 till 2002, as recorded in the book Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner.

After completing his PhD, he taught at Haverford College from 1961 to 1963 but soon took a position at the University of Kentucky, “the remotest offer with the most pay,” as he wrote to Jonathan Williams. Davenport taught at Kentucky until he received a MacArthur Fellowship, which prompted his retirement, at the end of 1990.

Davenport was married briefly in the early 1960s. He dedicated Eclogues, 1981, to “Bonnie Jean” (Cox), his companion from 1965 to his death. Other Davenport volumes dedicated to Cox include Objects on a Table (1998) and The Death of Picasso (2004). Cox became Trustee for the Guy Davenport Estate. In one of his essays, Davenport claimed to “live almost exclusively off fried baloney, Campbell’s soup, and Snickers bars.” He died of lung cancer on January 4, 2005, in Lexington, Kentucky. (Wikipedia)

• Language: English
• ISBN: 0962223611
• Inventory Number: 42626AB

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