| William Stafford |
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LIFE Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas , the oldest of three children in a highly literate family. During the Depression , his family moved from town to town in any effort to find work for his father. Stafford helped contribute to family income by delivering newspapers, working in the sugar beet fields, raising vegetables, and working as an electrician's mate. He graduated from high school in the town of Liberal in 1933. After attending junior college, he received a B.A. from the University Of Kansas in 1937. He was drafted into the United States armed forces in 1941, while pursuing his master's degree at the University of Kansas, when he became a Conscientious Objector . As a registered pacifist, he performed alternative service from 1942 to 1946 in the Civilian Public Service camps, which consisted of Forestry and soil conservation work in Arkansas, California, and Illinois for $2.50 per month. While working in California in 1944, he met and he married Dororthy Hope Frantz with whom he later had four children. He received his M.A. from the University of Kansas in 1947. His master's thesis, the prose memoir ''Down In My Heart'', was published in 1948 and described his experience in the forest service camps. That same year he moved to Oregon to teach at Lewis & Clark College . In 1954, he received a Ph.D. from the University Of Iowa . CAREER One of the most striking features of his career is that he began publishing his poetry only later in life. He was also a close friend and colloborator with the poet Robert Bly . Despite his late start, he was a frequent contributor to magazines and anthologies and eventually published fifty-seven volumes of poetry. James Dickey called Stafford one of those poets "who pour out rivers of ink, all on good poems." {Link without Title} In at Lewis and Clark College. BIBLIOGRAPHY ;Poetry
;Prose
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