Robert Creeley focuses on the first forty years of the poet's life B years of rebellion, restless travel, tumultuous liaisons, and anger and violence that gave his writing an idiosyncratic new voice of razor-sharp precision and vehemence. With his unfailing flair for recognizing talent, as a small press publisher and editor he promoted the likes of Layton, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Olson, and Burroughs. Their stars rose while he scraped by, until his poetry collection For Love and a novel, The Island, earned him fame and a critical acclaim largely denied the Beats. Since then his poetry has become increasingly autobiographical and nostalgic, dwelling on the deliberately commonplace, on decrepitude, and finally on death.

In this biography Ekbert Faas pioneers a new kind of "life-writing." It tells its stories through the emotions, thoughts, and, above all, language of the dramatis personae, exchanging the authorial omniscience of traditional biography for an utter fidelity to sources. Allowing for contradictory viewpoints, anecdotes are told and re-told, letting Creeley reveal himself beneath the myths created by self-invention, wishful thinking, and, sometimes, distortion. Excerpts from autobiographical writings by the poet's first wife, Ann McKinnon, complete this intriguingly colourful and complex picture.