Heart's Needle

William De Witt Snodgrass (1926-2009) was an American poet born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. He gained prominence with his debut collection Heart's Needle (1959), which won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and is noted for inaugurating confessional poetry through its intimate exploration of his divorce and loss of his daughter. Snodgrass taught at universities including Cornell, Wayne State, Syracuse, and Delaware for nearly 40 years before retiring in 1994, and later works included the ambitious Führer Bunker cycle and translations.