Charles Olson was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, on December 27, 1910. He thrived as a student at Classical High School and attended Wesleyan University from 1928 to 1932. Olson graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English and one year later earned a master’s in the same subject from Wesleyan. Before receiving his doctorate in American civilization from Harvard University in 1936, he taught English at Clark University. In 1940, Olson was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a book about Herman Melville.

The next year, he entered into a common-law marriage with Constance Wilcock and took a job with the Office of War Information, a position that sparked his involvement with the liberal politics of the Franklin Roosevelt era. However, after only three years within the organization, Olson left the OWI because of a dispute over the censorship of some of his work. He and Wilcock, with their child, moved to Key West, Florida, in 1945. There he devoted himself to writing, particularly the … [Olson began teaching at the experimental school Black Mountain College in North Carolina] …beginnings of a poetic project that continued for the rest of his life. He started composing pieces to be included in The Maximus Poems, an exploratory epic poem on the origins of America set in Massachusetts in the mid-1940s. In 1947, he published Call Me Ishmael, a study of modern American culture, based on the research in his thesis on Melville. Three years later, Olson published Projective Verse, an essay introducing the style in which he composed his poetry, specifically “The Kingfishers,” a long poem published in 1949. Basically, Olson’s projective poetry was based on the poet’s natural breathing patterns and thought processes, as well as his belief in “objectism,” or a identity of the poet as simply an object among other objects in the natural world.

In 1951, Olson began teaching at the experimental school Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Eventually he became the rector and served until 1956, when the school closed. As a member of the faculty and a revisionist savant of poetry, he inspired a whole generation of writers and thinkers studying at the progressive institution. He also published a poetry collection, In Cold Hell, in Thicket (1953), while teaching. When the school shut down, Olson moved to Gloucester, Massachusetts, separated from Wilcock, and published another volume, The Distances (1960). He taught modern literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo from 1963 to 1965, but was so shaken by his second wife’s sudden death in a car accident in 1964 that he resigned. He also taught at the University of Connecticut, but was forced to resign just a few months after starting in 1969 because of his failing health. He died on January 10, 1970, of liver cancer. Archaeologist of Morning (1970) and the final volumes of The Maximus Poems (1975) were published posthumously.