David McCord

David Thompson Watson McCord (December 15, 1897 New York City – April 13, 1997) was an American poet and college fundraiser.

Life

He grew up in Portland, Oregon. He graduated from Harvard University. His work appeared in Harper's.^[1]

He was executive director of the Harvard College Fund, raising millions of dollars.^[2]

Awards

• Golden Rose Award
• 1954 Guggenheim Fellow^[3]
• 1961 National Institute of Arts and Letters grant
• 1977, the first national award for Excellence in Poetry for Children from the National Council of Teachers of English
• Rudyard Kipling Fellow at Marlboro College in Vermont
• Benjamin Franklin Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts in London

Two collections of poems, The Star in the Pail and One at a Time were 1976 and 1978 finalists for the National Book Award, Children's Literature.^[4]

Poems

On Halloween, what bothers some
About these witches, is how come
In sailing, through the air, like bats
They never seem, to lose their hats?^[5]

A review of Cram & Ferguson's design for the New England Mutual Life Insurance Company building in Boston's Back Bay upon its dedication in 1939:

Ralph Adams Cram
One morning said damn
And designed the Urn Burial
For a concern actuarial.^[6]

Works

Poetry

• Oddly Enough. Washburn & Thomas. 1926.
• Far and few: rhymes of the never was and always is. Illustrator Henry B Kane. Little, Brown. 1952. ISBN 978-0-316-55502-9.
• An Acre for Education. Crimson Printing Co. 1954.
• Take Sky. Little Brown & Company. 1962. ISBN 978-0-316-55509-8.
• About Boston: sight, sound, flavor & inflection, Doubleday, 1948
• All Day Long. Bantam Books. 1971. ISBN 978-0-440-40376-0.
• The Star in the Pail. Little, Brown and Company. 1975. ISBN 0-316-55515-0.^[4]
• One At A Time. Little, Brown and Company. 1977.^[4]
• Dinosaurs. Educational Development Corporation. 1977. ISBN 978-0-88110-119-5.

Essays

• In Sight of Sever: Essays from Harvard. Harvard University Press. 1963. ISBN 978-0-674-44701-1.

Editor

• David Thompson Watson McCord, ed. (1955). What cheer: an anthology of American and British humorous and witty verse, gathered, sifted, and salted, with an introduction. Modern Library.

Anthologies

• Louis Untermeyer, ed. (1936). Modern American poetry: a critical anthology. Harcourt, Brace and company.
• David Lehman, John Brehm, eds. (2006). The Oxford book of American poetry. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-516251-6.

References

1. Hartman, Lee Foster; Allen, Frederick Lewis (1953-01-01). Harper's Magazine. Harper & Brothers.
2. Affairs, Harvard Office of News and Public. "David McCord, Fundraiser, Poet, Dies at 99". www.news.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2016-04-13.
3. http://www.gf.org/fellows/all?index=m&page=11
4. "National Book Awards – 1970". NBF. Retrieved 2012-02-08. (Select 1976 and 1978 from the top left menu.)
5. "David McCord, poet". The Boston Globe. April 15, 1997.
6. Shand-Tucci, Douglass, Built in Boston: City and Suburb, 1880-2000, Revised and Expanded Edition (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), p. 183.

External links

• "PERSPECTIVES: David McCord", Boston, Massachusetts, David A. Dillon
• http://harvardmagazine.com/1997/07a/alumni.html
• http://harvardmagazine.com/1997/07/mccordiana