Brendan Galvin was born in Everett, Massachusetts, the son of James Russell Galvin, a letter carrier for the U.S. Post Office, and Rose McLaughlin Galvin. Both his parents are first-generation Irish-Americans. His marriage to Ellen Baer took place in 1968, and they have two children, Peter and Anne. He attended Malden Catholic High School, and graduated from Boston College in 1960 with a B.S. in Natural Sciences. From 1963 to 1965 Galvin was a teaching fellow and instructor of English at Northeastern University, where he received an M.A. in English in 1964, and from 1965 to 1968 he was a graduate fellow in English at the University of Massachusetts, receiving an M.F.A. in creative writing in 1967 and a Ph.D. in 1970. (Galvin wrote his dissertation on Kenneth Burke and Theodore Roethke.) He worked as an assistant professor at Slippery Rock State College in Pennsylvania in 1968-1969 and since then has...