Robert Polito

Robert Polito (born 1951) is an American academic, critic and poet.

Personal
Polito is from Boston, Massachusetts, and lives in New York City. He received a Ph.D. in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard University.

He is a contributing editor of BOMB and The Boston Review. He has taught at Harvard, Wellesley, and New York University, and has been Director of the Writing Program at The New School since 1992.

He has published in The New Yorker, The Yale Review, ArtForum, BOMB, Black Clock, Verse, Pequod, Open City, Ploughshares, New York Times Book Review, and VLS, among other magazines.

Polito is working on Detours: Seven Noir Lives, a nonfiction book. He is editing an anthology of Manny Farber’s film and art criticism.

Quotes

 * "Ed Hood knew everyone. Through him I encountered most of the Cambridge Warhol crowd that would [be] people [heard about in] Edie (Jean Stein and George Plimpton’s oral history of Edie Sedgwick) along with that crowd’s assorted New York visitors: Ed Hennessy, Chuck Wein, John Hallowell, Gerard Malanga, Lou Reed, René Ricard, Donald Lyons, Patrick Fleming, Dorothy Dean, Jonathan Richman, and Andy Paley."
 * Among my Boston College friends, Warhol radiated a sly, sinister hipness, a tangent to the dread, doom, and spectacle of our Catholic childhoods."
 * "Cain ultimately didn’t invent anything. He is often celebrated as the axial figure in the history of the crime novel...Yet the [shift from detective-focus to criminal-focus] was already implicit in the literary fiction of the 1920s and 1930s that cultivated violence and gangsters – F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), Ernest Hemingway’s "The Killers" (1927), and William Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931)."

Recognition
Polito won the National Book Critics Circle Award and an Edgar Award for Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson.

He has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation.

Publications
Doubles (a book of poems); A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover; and At Titan's Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron's Poetry. Editor of the Library of America volumes Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1930s and 40s and Crime Novels: American Noir of the 1950s. Essays and poems in Best American Poetry, Walk on the Wild Side: American Urban Poetry Since 1975, O.K. You Mugs, and Communion