One of the best-known and most prolific writers of light verse in twentieth-century America, Phyllis McGinley enjoyed a long career which was highlighted in 1961 by her receiving the Pulitzer Prize for Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades, with Seventy New Poems, the first time that award had been given for a volume of light verse. Her verse has been widely praised for its technical virtuosity. W. H. Auden, in the foreword to Times Three, places her in the tradition of Hood, Belloc, and Chesterton, and she is often compared to Dorothy Parker, though more on the basis of her sex and her long association with the New Yorker than for similarities of style and subject matter. A consistently staunch defender of woman's role as homemaker and mother, McGinley celebrated that role in her poetry and in humorous essays published in a wide variety of magazines, and in...