Prolific poet, essayist, teacher, and poetry consultant to the Library of Congress, Reed Whittemore began his literary life in the late 1930s when he and Yale roommate James Angleton founded the poetry magazine "Furioso" - whose pages saw the publication of Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore, and E. E. Cummings, among others. This remarkable memoir chronicles the life and times of this self-considered "bourgeois anarchist," whose storied career included four wartime years in North Africa and Europe, as well as a second run of Furioso, which Victor Navasky called "the ne plus ultra of little mags."While teaching at Carleton College, Whittemore continued his pursuit of poetry, essays, reviews, and literary magazines, eventually becoming instrumental to the founding of the Coordinating Council of Literary Magazines. In the mid-1960s, Whittemore and his family moved to Washington, D.C., where he became active in Artists of Conscience against the Vietnam War.
He went on to serve as literary editor of the New Republic until leaving to write a biography of William Carlos Williams and teach at the University of Maryland, all the while publishing the poetry and essays that made his name - and even restarting Delos, a journal of world literature and translation. "Against the Grain" presents the memorable and brilliant life of this twentieth-century original.

Foreword by: Garrison Keillor