Louis Daniel Brodsky

Louis Daniel Brodsky (Louis Brodsky, L. D. Brodsky) (April 17, 1941 – June 16, 2014) was an American poet, short story writer, and Faulkner scholar.

Life Louis Daniel Brodsky was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1941. He attended St. Louis Country Day School. After earning a B.A., magna cum laude, at Yale University in 1963, he received an M.A. in English from Washington University in St. Louis in 1967 and an M.A. in creative writing from San Francisco State University the following year. He married Jan Hofmann on July 8, 1970, and had two children.

From 1968 to 1987, while continuing to write poetry, he assisted in managing a 350-person men's clothing factory in Farmington, Missouri, and started one of the Midwest's first factory-outlet apparel chains. From 1980 to 1991, he taught English and creative writing, part-time, at Mineral Area College, in nearby Flat River. From 1987 onward, he lived in St. Louis with his wife, his daughter and son, and devoted himself to composing poems and short fictions.

Brodsky authored eighty-four volumes of poetry (five of which have been published in French by Éditions Gallimard) and twenty-five volumes of prose, including nine books of scholarship on William Faulkner and nine books of short fiction. His poems and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Faulkner Journal, Southern Review, Texas Quarterly, National Forum, American Scholar, Studies in Bibliography, Kansas Quarterly, Forum, Cimarron Review, and Literary Review, as well as in Ariel, Acumen, Orbis, New Welsh Review, Dalhousie Review, and other journals. His work has also been printed in five editions of the Anthology of Magazine Verse and Yearbook of American Poetry.

Brodsky's You Can’t Go Back, Exactly won the Center for Great Lakes Culture's Michigan State University 2004 best book of poetry award.

His most recent books of poetry include A Mississippi Trilogy and The Words of My Mouth and The Meditations of My Heart, which he wrote during his year-plus-long journey living with brain cancer. He died of cancer in June 2014.