Departures of note

Edward Field was an American poet, novelist, memoirist, and anthologist born in Brooklyn and raised in Lynbrook, New York. He served in World War II as a navigator with the Eighth Air Force, flying 25 bombing missions over Germany, and survived a crash-landing in the North Sea. His wartime experiences later shaped some of his most celebrated poetry, including the poem "World War II."

His 1963 debut collection, Stand Up, Friend, With Me, won the Lamont Poetry Prize and was praised by William Carlos Williams. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964 and wrote the narration for the Academy Award-winning short film To Be Alive! in 1966. Over a long career he published numerous poetry collections, novels written with his partner Neil Derrick under the pseudonym Bruce Elliot, and the memoir The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag.

Field was a pioneering voice in gay American writing, earning a Lambda Literary Award and the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. He edited influential anthologies including A Geography of Poets and A New Geography of Poets, and was a longtime resident of the Westbeth Artists Community in New York's West Village, where he was regarded as one of the building's icons.