February 12, 1922 [Boston, Massachusetts] – July 30, 1967 [Sonoma, California]
Foster was born in Newton (a suburb of Boston), Massachusetts. After a career in advertising, he started a new life in 1957 in Venice, California becoming part of the Venice Beats led by Stuart Perkoff. An alcoholic, he died of cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 45. Robert Mezey, the formalist poet, eulogized him with these words: “He saw deep into the machinery of the Social Lie, he saw our world betrayed into the hands of the moneymen, the time-servers and connivers, the ‘hi-armed fuzz”’who kill Christ over and over, and he was outraged. During his lifetime, he published in the Evergreen Review and other underground journals; his collections of poetry, including Victoria Mundi: Selected Poems (1973) were published posthumously.
