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American poet WD Snodgrass won several awards including the Pulitzer Prize for his first collection of poetry, "Hearts Needle". His controversial fifth anthology "The Führer Bunker" received heavy criticism but in recent years their importance has been recognised. [Listener: William B. Patrick]

TRANSCRIPT: My father was an accountant. I... I was actually born in Beaver Falls, which is about 40 miles north of Pittsburgh, is a small industrial city, you know, up... up one of the rivers that flow down to... into the Ohio and... I was born there because his father was a... was a physician in the... in the hospital but then we moved for two years to live in a... a very slummy area of Pittsburgh called Wilkinsburg and, you know, he was... he was rather hard up. He put himself through college shooting pool and... he was pretty tough and a macho kind of guy. He was also very tall and handsome… slender … and as he grows up in the world he became an accountant and then when he could he moved back to Beaver Falls, and he lived there and he would... catch a train every morning to go to Pittsburgh — to his office — and then later he had his own office there and... and came to be doing quite well. As a matter of fact, to my utter astonishment, I was later told my... by my brother that at one time he became a millionaire, and that was at a time when a millionaire was a millionaire, you know. He... he..., as I think I may have told you at some time, he had been an ice man; you know, they carry these great blocks of ice on... on their back and deliver them to people's houses and a number of times the tongs had slipped off the ice thing and caught him in the face, so he’d had... he’d had badly broken cartilage inside his nose and stuff like that, that later gave him a lot of pain.

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