{"product_id":"meaning-a-life-an-autobiography-9780811229470","title":"Meaning a Life: An Autobiography","description":"First published in 1978, Mary Oppen's seminal \u003cem\u003eMeaning a Life\u003c\/em\u003e has been largely unavailable for decades. Written in her sixties, her first and only prose book recounts, with honesty, depth, and conviction, her fiercely independent life--\"a twentieth-century American romance,\" as Yang describes it in the new introduction, \"of consciousness on the open road; a book of travel where the autobiographer is not the usual singular self at the center of the story but the union of two individuals.\"\u003cbr\u003e Oppen tells the story of growing up with three brothers in the frontier towns of Kalispell, Montana, and Grants Pass, Oregon, determined to escape the trap of \"a meaningless life with birth and death in a biological repetition.\" That escape happens in the fall of 1926, when she meets another student in her college poetry class, George Oppen. She is expelled for breaking curfew, and from then on the two face the world intertwined: living a life of conversation, hitchhiking across the US, sailing from the Great Lakes to New York City, meeting fellow poets and artists, starting a small press with Zukofsky and Pound, traveling by horse and cart through France, and fighting fascism through the Great Depression. Mary Oppen writes movingly of both her inner life and external events, of the inconsolable pain of suffering multiple stillbirths, of her husband fighting on the front lines during WWII while she struggled to care for their baby daughter, of fleeing to Mexico to avoid persecution for their political activities. This expanded edition includes a new section of prose and poetry that deepens Oppen's radiantly incisive memoir with further memories, travels, and reflections.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eOppen, Mary:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - \u003cstrong\u003eMary Oppen\u003c\/strong\u003e (1908-1990) was a writer, painter, activist, and the lifelong partner of the poet George Oppen. Besides her autobiography, she published two collections of poetry, \u003cem\u003ePoems \u0026amp; Transpositions\u003c\/em\u003e and the chapbook \u003cem\u003eMother and Daughter and the Sea\u003c\/em\u003e.\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eYang, Jeffrey:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - \u003cstrong\u003eJeffrey Yang\u003c\/strong\u003e is the author of the poetry books \u003cem\u003eVanishing-Line\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eAn Aquarium\u003c\/em\u003e. He is the translator of Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo's \u003cem\u003eJune Fourth Elegies\u003c\/em\u003e and Su Shi's \u003cem\u003eEast Slope\u003c\/em\u003e, and the editor of \u003cem\u003eBirds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems from New Directions\u003c\/em\u003e. He works as an editor at New Directions Publishing and New York Review Books.","brand":"New Directions Publishing Corporation","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50461265461522,"sku":"9780811229470","price":13.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_41eea295-22bf-4744-a07e-f4c954870458.jpg?v=1730061821","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/meaning-a-life-an-autobiography-9780811229470","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}