Gould was secretive, reclusive, inconsistent, and private. The most readily available accounts of his life and work--included in Alfred Kreymborg's Our Singing Strength: An Outline of American Poetry (1620-1930) (1929) and William Carlos William's Autobiography (1951)--are entertaining and sympathetic, but they contain a number of inaccuracies, contradictions, distortions, exaggerations, and mistakes. The most reliable biographical document is Pollyanna Martin Foard's "Wallace Gould: A Critical Study," a ninety-two-page English honors research paper on file in the library of Longwood College in Farmville, Virginia.Ms. Foard's research has the virtue of firsthand experience in the place where Gould spent his last twenty years. Since Foard's able, thorough study in 1955, very little scholarly, critical, or biographical work on Gould has been written.
Born in Lewiston, Maine, Wallace Chester Gould was the child of a prostitute and one of her clients, a man who seems to have been the brother of Holman Day, at one time a well-known Maine writer. The illegitimate baby was taken in by a well-to-do childless couple in Lewiston, who gave him their family name. The boy, following a rather familiar pattern, was spoiled by his foster mother and scorned by his foster father. An obstreperous hellraiser, he was kicked out of Lewiston High School in his junior year for misconduct (smoking, drinking, and swearing).
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