"Everything I have written has had an excellent critical reception, but not a wide audience. I thought I was relegated to write books that were liked, but not read," Martin Bosse told Robert Dahlin in a Publishers Weekly interview. Bosse's love for writing emerged in adolescence, in spite of a "nonliterary" family background, and he published his first poetry at age fifteen. He received the Yale University Masefield Award for poetry and fiction in 1949; he won the Jule and Avery Hopwood Awards for fiction and poetry in 1956 while in graduate school at the University of Michigan.

Bosse described his family to Dahlin in the Publishers Weekly interview: "My father was a stockbroker, and my mother was a housewife. They wanted me to become a doctor, but in a rebellious frame of mind, I dropped premed and went into American studies--sociology, economics, history." Bosse went on to develop his...