How to Get Out of Your Own Way: John Berryman on Defeating the Three Demons of Creative Work

John Allyn Smith, Jr. was eleven when, early one morning in the interlude between two world wars, not long after his parents had filed for divorce, he was awakened by a loud bang beneath his bedroom window. He looked to see his father dead by his own gun. Within months, his mother had remarried, changing her last name and that of her son, who became John Berryman (October 25, 1914–January 7, 1972). He would spend the rest of his life trying to comprehend the incomprehensible. Art being the best ...