Author Biography
Mary Jane Oliver was born in Maple Heights,
Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, on September 10,
- Her father was Edward William Oliver, and
her mother was Helen M. Vlasak Oliver. Raised
in Ohio, Oliver spent considerable time as a young
woman at the home of the recently deceased poet
Edna St. Vincent Millay, working as a personal
assistant to Millay’s sister. She first met the
woman who would become her life partner and
literary agent, the artist Molly Malone Cook, at
the Millay home. Oliver attended Ohio State Uni-
versity for one year and later transferred to Vassar
College, where she spent the 1956–1957 academic
year.
Oliver’s first book of poetry,No Voyage, and
Other Poems, was published in 1963. Jeannette E.
Riley, in an essay inTwentieth-Century American
Nature Poets, notes that many of the poems in this
volume ‘‘often rhyme and often are heavy-handed
in their messages.’’ Nonetheless, the collection
announces many of the themes that Oliver would
continue to address in the following decades,
including inner and outer landscapes, nature, and
mortality. In 1964, Oliver moved to Provincetown,
Massachusetts, with Cook, where she has main-
tained a home ever since.
Oliver’s second collection,The River Styx,
Ohio, and Other Poems, appeared in 1972. The
poems in this collection deal extensively with loss
and are often meditations brought on by her
travels through the ruined Ohio countryside.
The allusion to the mythological River Styx, the
boundary between the land of the living and the
land of the dead, signals the content of the book
effectively. In the same year, Oliver won a
National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to
pursue her craft.
In 1979, in addition to publishing a chap-
book of twelve poems, Oliver producedTwelve
Moons, which includes her poem ‘‘The Black
Snake.’’ It was with this collection that Oliver
found her authentic voice, according to Riley; in
these poems, she began a new chapter in her
writing about nature. She was awarded a Gug-
genheim Foundation Fellowship in 1980 and an
American Academy and Institute of Arts and
Letters Achievement Award in 1983. Also in
1983, Oliver publishedAmerican Primitive,for
which she won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize. This col-
lection, as well as the many honors bestowed
upon Oliver in the years since, established her
firmly as an important American poet. The fol-
lowing years saw her publish many significant
volumes, including Dream Work (1986) and
House of Light(1990). During the 1980s, Oliver
taught at Case Western Reserve University, in
Cleveland. In 1991, she was the Margaret Bannis-
ter Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College, in
Virginia.
By the 1990s, Oliver had achieved both crit-
ical and popular acclaim, and she was quickly
becoming one of the best known and loved
poets in the United States. Her 1992New and
Selected Poemswon the National Book Award
for that year. ‘‘The Black Snake’’ is included in
this volume. During the 1990s, Oliver published a
total of eight books of poetry and essays and held
the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distin-
guished Teaching at Bennington College, in Ver-
mont, a post she held until 2001. Throughout the
2000s, Oliver continued to publish regularly.
With Cook’s death in 2005, Oliver entered a
period of profound grief, as is evident in the
volumeThirst: Poems(2006). As a tribute, Oliver
published a collection of Cook’s photographsMary Oliver(AP Images)
The Black Snake