The Key to Everything

May Swenson, A Writer's Life

Margaret A. Brucia

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2025
• Print ISBN:
  9780691247212
  9780691247236
• eBook ISBN:
  9780691247229
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

An intimate portrait of the twentieth-century American poet

May Swenson (1913–1989) was one of the most important and original poets of the twentieth century. The Key to Everything is a biography of this experimental American modernist that draws directly from her unpublished diaries and her letters to friends, family, and colleagues, most notably Elizabeth Bishop. In 1952, Swenson wrote in her diary, “I want to confirm my life in a narrative—my Lesbianism, the hereditary background of my parents, grandparents, origins in the ‘old country.’” Taking up Swenson’s uncompleted autobiographical plan, Margaret Brucia tells Swenson’s story as much as possible through her own words.

While chronicling the whole of Swenson’s life, this book focuses on the period from 1936 to 1959, when she came of age artistically and personally in New York City. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the Federal Writers’ Project, Greenwich Village, and the emergence of gay culture, Swenson’s diaries lay bare her aspirations, fears, joys, and disappointments. Readers see the poet and person emerge, inextricably entwined, as Swenson describes her struggles with poverty, anonymity, and predatory men; her romantic relationships; and the people she met, the books she read, and the work she produced.

The most detailed and intimate biography of Swenson to date, The Key to Everything is a unique portrait of a poet who resisted labels throughout her life.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Paul Crumbley and David Hoak
• Preface
• Chapter 1. My Life in a Narrative
• Chapter 2. An Innocent Era
• Chapter 3. Creature Both Male and Female
• Chapter 4. The Taste of Love
• Chapter 5. I Have Yet to Find My Love
• Chapter 6. Dreams and Ashes
• Chapter 7. I Can Live Free Inside
• Chapter 8. I Am One of Those to Whom Miracles Happen
• Chapter 9. It Is Squaresville Here
• Chapter 10. If Distinction Comes, Can Extinction Be Far Behind?
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index