The collection consists primarily of material related to the work of American poet, professor and editor Clinton F. Larson.

Clinton Foster Larson (1919-1994) was born on September 22, 1919 and grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah. In 1942 he married Naomi Barlow in the Salt Lake Temple and served in the Army Air Corps during the Second World War. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Utah (1948) and a doctorate in English from the University of Denver. In 1947, Dr. Larson joined the faculty at Brigham Young University where he served as a professor of creative writing for the English department. After teaching for 27 years, he was appointed BYU's first poet in residence; Larson retired in 1985. He was a prolific poet and playwright who wrote hundreds of poems throughout his career. He was well known for his work in producing a multi-volume illustrated children's version of the Book of Mormon and for his devotion to portraying the Mormon theme and bringing gospel principles to light through his writings.William Edgar Stafford (1914-1993) was born in Hutchinson, Kansas in 1914. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Kansas and a doctorate in English from the University of Iowa. He was a professor of English at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, was Poet Laureate for the state of Oregon from 1975 to 1993, and served as a poet in residence of the Library of Congress in 1970. In 1963, Stafford received the National Book Award for Poetry for his first collection of poems, "Traveling Through the Dark." He died in Lake Oswego, Oregon, on August 28, 1993.

1.7 Linear Feet (4 boxes)

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