November 20, 1916 [Sheldon, North Dakota] – September 20, 1990 [Minneapolis, Minnesota]
McGrath grew up on a farm in Ransom County, North Dakota. He earned a B.A. from the University of North Dakota at Grand Forks. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, at Oxford and also pursued postgraduate studies at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge where he studied with Cleanth Brooks, Alan Tate and Robert Penn Warren. He served in World War II before starting his Rhodes Scholarship. He moved to Los Angeles around 1950 and taught at Los Angeles State College (where he mentored Henri Coulette and was faculty advisor of Statement magazine). He was dismissed in connection with his appearance, as an unfriendly witness, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1953. Pictures of a Gone World, a collection of shorter, satirical pieces, dedicated to his wife, Alice and to the memory of Edwin Rolfe, appeared in 1955. Sections of his best-known work, Letter to an Imaginary Friend, first appeared in the volume Poetry Los Angeles I (1959) which he co-edited with James Boyer May and Peter Yates (the entire poem was published in 1997 by Copper Canyon Press). Though only living in Los Angeles for a decade, McGrath was hugely influential, especially among the poets with left leanings and those associated with the journal California Quarterly and Coastlines. An exhibition, “Holy City Adrift: Thomas McGrath’s Los Angeles,” organized by Andrew Lyndon Knighton, was held at Cal State LA’s library in 2016.
