Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland on May 16, 1929. She was born into an upper middle class family- her father was a pathologist and her mother was a concert pianist and composer. Her Father was Jewish and like her mother, she and her sister were raised Christians.
She discovered her love of reading and poetry in her father’s personal library. Rich was home schooled until she was in the 4th grade. Rich’s father was very pushy when it came to his eldest daughter’s education and he was quoted saying he “planned to create a prodigy” and she described herself as a people pleaser at an early age. She was dedicated to her studies and expected to excel later in life. Rich received her college diploma in 1951 from Radcliffe College where she concentrated on poetry and perfecting her craft. She received two awards in her senior year of college- one was the Guggenheim Fellowship which gave Rich the ability to study for a year in Oxford.
Soon after graduation Rich married her husband, Alfred Haskell Conrad, an Econ professor at Harvard and with Conrad she gave birth to three sons.
So here is where one would start scratching their heads- Adrienne Rich is nationally known for bringing the oppression of women-especially lesbians to now mainstream literature. She is a woman who had two different lives- after her husband died in 1970 she started a relationship with her life partner Michelle Cliff a Jamaican novelist.
Rich was known to be a feminist and a civil rights activist before she became an openly gay woman, writer, and activist. The “first half’ of Rich’s life she wrote about the female identity basing her perceptions from her life as a wife and mother, and a daughter-in-law. The “second half” of her life she discusses her newly embraced homosexuality along with embracing a political stance for all women- gay or straight. Adrienne Rich’s life was filled with acknowledgements and she received 22 prestigious awards throughout her lifetime.
Rich died in March of 2012, she was 82 years old after long term struggles with rheumatoid arthritis.