Paul Scott Mowrer (1887-1971) won the Pulitzer Prize for foreign correspondence in 1928, the first Pulitzer awarded in that category. He wrote six plays, many books, and spent 24 years in Europe covering wars and directing news abroad for the Chicago Daily News, later returning to Chicago in 1934, to become chief editorial writer for the paper, then editor from 1935 to 1944.
At heart he was a poet. Retiring to New Hampshire in 1949, he was the state's first Poet Laureate, holding that office from 1968 until his death. His poetry, one might say was "traditionalist." Of the "modernist" poets popular today, he writes, they "are willfully obscure." Their dominance has "led most literate people to conclude that 'poetry' is something they cannot understand, and would not like if they could...an art that has failed to strike roots into some sort of popular favor is an art self doomed." Amen to that. - Quotations from a profile by Robert Kinerk, NH Union Leader, July 14, 1987.
