To request a copy of this photo for your own personal use, please contact our state coordinator. If you are not a family member or the original photographer — please refrain from copying or distributing this photo to other websites.
Thank you for visiting the Arkansas Gravestone Photo Project. On this site you can upload gravestone photos, locate ancestors and perform genealogy research. If you have a relative buried in Arkansas, we encourage you to upload a digital image using our Submit a Photo page. Contributing to this genealogy archive helps family historians and genealogy researchers locate their relatives and complete their family tree.
Submitted: 6/3/08 • Approved: 11/29/08 • Last Updated: 7/31/12 • R26137-G0-S3
03 Jan 1886 - 10 May 1950
Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet and Essayist
John Gould Fletcher, Jr., a renown Imagist poet and essayist, was born in Little Rock to John Gould Fletcher and Adolphine Krause Fletcher. He was married twice, first to Florence Emily “Daisy” Arbuthnot, on July 5, 1916, whom he later divorced. Then, on January 18, 1936 he married children's author, Charlie May Simon. After spending one year at Phillips Andover Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, in 1903 he enrolled at Harvard University to study business and law at his father’s insistence. However, like his mother, his interests leaned more to artistic accomplishment than to success in the business world. Settlement of his father’s estate provided John an endowment sufficient to support himself for the remainder of his life. He left Harvard without a degree and sailed first to Italy in 1908. He lived in England for a large portion of his life, returning to America to live in about 1927. While in Europe he associated himself with other Imagist poets like Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell. During the late 1920’s and the 1930’s John was associated with a group of 11 other southern writers and poets known as the Southern Agrarians. He was commissioned by John Netherland Heiskell of the Arkansas Gazette to write an epic poem, The Story of Arkansas, to commemorate the Arkansas centennial in 1936. In 1939 he received a Pulitzer Prize for his "Selected Poems" published in 1938. Sadly, John committed suicide by drowning in the pond near his home, Johnswood, in Little Rock. In 1974 the John Gould Fletcher Library, a branch of the Central Arkansas Library System, was named in his honor.
The following is a selection of his most notable works.
Irradiations: Sand and Spray (1915)
Some Imagist Poets (1915).
Irradiations and Goblins and Pagodas (1916)
Branches of Adam (1926
The Black Rock (1928),
I'll Take My Stand (1930)
South Star (1941)
Life is My Song (1941) (his memoir)
Arkansas (1947)
References Consulted:
Ref:http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net/
Ref:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gould_Fletcher
Photo courtesy of Pattie Hays
Contributed on 6/3/08 by t720
Email This Contributor
Suggest a Correction
Record #: 26137