John Berryman was born John Allyn Smith Jr., on October 25, 1914, in Macalester, Oklahoma. His parents, John Allyn Smith, a banker, and Martha Shaver Little Smith, a schoolteacher, traveled frequently, and John’s childhood was marked by a series of displacements. Following a number of failed business venture, in 1926, John Allyn Smith committed suicide outside of the family’s apartment, an event that marked his son for the rest of his life. Ten weeks later, Martha married the owner of their apartment, John Angus Berryman, in New York and changed her name to Jill Angel and her son’s name to John Allyn McAlpin Berryman.

Berryman himself made his first suicide attempt in 1931 by throwing himself on the train tracks. He entered Columbia University in 1932 and studied under Mark Van Doren, who would become a friend and mentor. He published his first poems in Columbia Review and The Nation, and graduated in 1936. A scholarship allowed him to study at Cambridge for two years.  It was in Cambridge that he met W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Dylan Thomas.

The year 1939 found Berryman back in the U.S., teaching at Wayne University in Detroit. In 1940, while teaching at Harvard, Berryman published his first collection of poetry in the volume Five Young American Poets. In 1942, he married Eileen Mulligan, and the next year he published Poems.  He said of himself, “I masquerade as a writer. Actually, I am a scholar.”  He taught throughout his life, not creative writing, but literature and history of civilization classes, and his poetry is characterized by a mixture of bookishness and wildness.

In 1953, he published Homage to Mistress Bradstreet in the Parisian Review, a long poem of fifty-seven stanzas in which Berryman addresses the Puritan poet of the 18th century. Critics and poets hailed the poem as a masterpiece and Berryman was recognized as one of the most prominent literary figures of his generation. In 1955, separated from Eileen and facing serious problems with alcoholism, he moved to Minneapolis in order to teach at the University of Minnesota, where he lived for the rest of his life. Around that time he began working on the composition of his Dream Songs.

Berryman married Ann Levine in 1956, three years later they divorced, and in 1961 he married Kate Donahue. He had a son with Ann and two daughters with Kate. During that period of his life he gave lectures at several universities, received many awards and was hospitalized repeatedly for alcoholism and nerves.

The Dream Songs was Berryman’s most significant achievement. Initially published in 1964, as 77 Dream Songs, the work appeared in its complete form in 1969. It consisted of 385 songs, sonnet-like poems, each composed in a three-stanza structure of eighteen lines with rhyme. The protagonist, a white middle-aged American called Henry, greedy and lusty, is a personification of Freud’s Id. Mr. Bones, a white American in blackface speaking in Negro dialect, represents conscience, the super ego, and the dialogue between the two characters resembles psychoanalytic sessions at the therapist’s office. Because of the personal tone and the strong autobiographical character of the Dream Songs, critics considered Berryman’s poetry part of the Confessional movement, that flourished during that period in America, with poets such as Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. Berryman though, rejected the categorization with scorn.

Berryman won the Pulitzer Prize for The Dream Songs in 1964 and the National Book Award in 1969. The work was completed with a Guggenheim Fellowship he was awarded in 1967. He spent some time in Ireland, but returned to the U.S. in order to check into a Minneapolis hospital for alcohol treatment. The following years Berryman was struggling against his addiction to alcohol.

Towards the end of his life, he came to distrust his poetry as a form of exhibitionism and searched for some new and humbling style (as evident in the volume Delusions, Etc.).

On the morning of January 7, 1972, John Berryman threw himself off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis and killed himself.