William Stanley Merwin was born in New York City and grew up in Union City, New Jersey, and in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In 1947 he received an A.B. in English from Princeton University. He worked as a tutor in France, Portugal, and Majorca from 1949 to 1951, teaching Robert Graves's son in Majorca for part of that time. In 1956 and 1957 he was playwright-in-residence for the Poets' Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in 1962 he served as poetry editor for the Nation. He was an associate at the Théâtre de la Cité in Lyons, France, for the term of 1964-1965.

For both his poetry and translations Merwin has received a number of awards, grants, and fellowships throughout his career, which include the following: publication of A Mask for Janus in the Yale Series of Younger Poets, 1952; a Kenyon Review fellowship, 1954; a National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, 1957; an...