Born in Baltimore to Jewish parents, Karl Shapiro gained early fame during World War II, when his fiancée had the poems he mailed home published. (These won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1945). Later, as a professor at the University of Nebraska and editor of the influential literary journals Poetry and Prairie Schooner, he waged war against high Modernism, preferring poetry with a more direct, simple, and openly emotional treatment of subject matter.