Edward Merton Dorn is generally regarded as one of twentieth century America’s most brilliant satiric poets; he wrote more than twenty books. He was born in 1929 into a poor Illinois farm family. He never knew his father, who left the family during the Depression. His mother was of French ancestry, and his grandfather was a railroad man. Dorn attended a one-room school and, after graduating from high school, spent two years at the University of Illinois. He finally ended up at the renowned Black Mountain College in North Carolina in 1951, where he studied with the poet Charles Olson; Olson strongly influenced his work both spiritually and intellectually.

Because of his association with Black Mountain College, Dorn is usually grouped with other well-known poets and artists such as Joel Oppenheimer, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Jonathan Williams, John Wieners, and prose writer Fielding Dawson. Other members of the student body and faculty included dancer Merce Cunningham, composers Lou Harrison and John Cage, and painters Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Robert Rauschenberg. All these diverse aesthetic and cultural influences contributed to the development of Dorn’s unique poetic vision, one that responded with particular vehemence to social and political injustice. He was especially concerned with the plight of American Indians and addressed their degrading treatment by European colonists in several of his finest works, such as The Shoshoneans and Recollections of Gran Apachería.

After a few years at Black Mountain College, Dorn decided to leave school and go exploring. He wandered around Kansas, Wyoming, and Washington State, where he worked and met his first wife, Helene. He returned to Black Mountain to finish his degree in 1955 and then returned to Washington State to work in the Skagit Valley in 1957. Dorn recorded those experiences in a novel, the highly regarded By the Sound. His reading of cultural geographer Carl Sauer’s “Morphology of Landscape” crucially influenced his poetic stance and caused him to regard humankind’s interaction with the natural environment as his primary subject matter for the rest of his writing career.

Dorn moved from Washington to work in various jobs in New Mexico and Idaho, where he accepted a teaching position at Idaho State University and continued to publish poems that drew serious critical attention, collected in such volumes as The Newly Fallen, Hands Up!, and Geography, as well as short stories. Dorn moved to England in 1965 to teach at the University of Essex at the invitation of English poet and critic Donald Davie. An important poem that came from his English experience is the now-famous The North Atlantic Turbine, which documents the negative effects of American capitalism on England and Western Europe and explores the devastating effects of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

While teaching at such American institutions as Kent State, the University of California at San Diego, the University of Kansas, and North Eastern Illinois State, Dorn was composing what was to become his masterpiece, the infamous long poem Gunslinger. He published parts of it in the years between 1968 and 1972. The complete poem, known as Slinger , was published in 1975. It is a highly diverse set of satiric observations and meditations on the heart of the American Dream-become-nightmare, and it is one of the truly original mock epics in American poetic history. Dorn’s attack on American values is at times savage in its Swiftean parody of traditional American character types from literature and popular culture. The Gunslinger becomes the prototypical mythic quester who is searching for the authentic American hero Howard Hughes (whose projects in...