lit a candle 2d agoMy father had his WWII poems on a shelf next to his Auden collection. Said Field was the real thing, someone who saw what happened and told the truth about it. Grateful for that witness.
Their story
Edward Field was born on June 7, 1924, in Brooklyn to Ashkenazi immigrant parents Louis and Hilda Field (the family name had been Feldman; Louis changed it to work as a commercial artist). He grew up in Lynbrook, Long Island, one of six children in a secular Jewish household that…
Edward Field was born on June 7, 1924, in Brooklyn to Ashkenazi immigrant parents Louis and Hilda Field (the family name had been Feldman; Louis changed it to work as a commercial artist). He grew up in Lynbrook, Long Island, one of six children in a secular Jewish household that prized classical music and learning while facing open antisemitism in a Nassau County landscape that included German-American Bund activity. He played cello in the Field Family Trio on radio station WGBB in Freeport. After a brief turn at New York University's School of Commerce, he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Forces. A Red Cross care package with a Louis Untermeyer poetry anthology, handed to him after basic training in March 1943, decided his vocation: he knew at once he would be a poet.
As a navigator with the Eighth Air Force he flew bombing missions over Germany from England (about twenty-five in standard accounts). On a Berlin-related mission his B-17 was crippled by flak and ditched in the North Sea. All ten crew reached the rafts; only seven survived until a British air-sea rescue hours later. He later turned that night into the long poem World War II, collected in Variety Photoplays (1967) and in the Library of America anthology Poets of World War II (2003). After the European war he tasted gay Paris and London, returned to NYU cafeteria literary circles (where he met Alfred Chester), then lived as a young poet in Paris and Greece, absorbing Cavafy and learning craft from the American poet Robert Friend.
Back in 1950s New York he worked warehouses, typing pools, and brief stage roles while studying Method acting with Vera Soloviova. In 1959, in an advertising-agency typing pool, he met California temp Neil Derrick (1931-2018). Their partnership, with a short separation around 1970-1971, lasted nearly six decades. Grove Press published his debut Stand Up, Friend, With Me in 1963 after the manuscript won the 1962 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; William Carlos Williams praised its clean, straight writing. A Guggenheim Fellowship followed (1963-1964). Field wrote the narration for Francis Thompson and Alexander Hammid's multi-screen World's Fair documentary To Be Alive! (1964), which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. He supported himself for years by college readings, becoming a father figure to the conversational Stand Up Poetry associated with Long Beach, and taught workshops at the Poetry Center of the YMHA, Sarah Lawrence, and Hofstra.
From 1972 he lived at Westbeth Artists Community in the West Village. After Derrick lost most of his sight following brain-tumor surgery, Field became caregiver and collaborator. Together they published comic and historical fiction as Bruce Elliot(t), including the bestselling Greenwich Village epic Village (Avon, 1982; later The Villagers). Field edited A Geography of Poets (1979) and co-edited A New Geography of Poets (1992), won a Lambda Literary Award for Counting Myself Lucky (1992), received the Shelley Memorial Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Prix de Rome (1981), the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement (Publishing Triangle, 2005), and the W. H. Auden Award (Sheep Meadow Foundation, 2005). His 2005/2006 memoir The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag mapped the bohemian literary world around Chester, Sontag, and their circle; Publishers Weekly later called Field irreplaceable in the history of gay American writing. He turned 100 on June 7, 2024, was named Lynbrook's first poet laureate in 2025, and was celebrated at Westbeth on June 11, 2026. He died on September 6, 2026, at age 102. The New York Times published Edward Field, Bohemian New York Poet, Dies at 102, as cited on Wikipedia's Deaths in 2026 list. Cause of death and exact place of death were not made public in the open sources used for this profile.
Biography adapted from EN Wikipedia Edward Field (poet); Wikipedia Deaths in 2026 (NYT cite); OutHistory Autobiographical Reflections; Academy of American Poets; Poetry Foundation; Westbeth Profiles in Art (Terry Stoller, 2.
In their own words
“I was working in the typing pool of an advertising agency, and the supervisor assigned the typewriter next to me to a new temp, a terrific-looking young man from California named Neil Derrick. It was a case of immediate attraction between WASP and Jew.”
Meeting Neil Derrick, 1959 (via Lambda Literary / Wikipedia)
“Someone who has published a book called Stand Up, Friend, With Me had better not go around slumping.”
Quoted in Village View centenary profile
“May death take me only as I put down the last word.”
Closing of Living Will, A Frieze for a Temple of Love (1998); Village View 2024
“Nature needs both to do its work and humankind, confusing two separate orders of love makes rules allowing only one kind and defies the universe.”
From The Two Orders of Love (Gay Influence quoting Field)
“I still believe it's a kind of magic.”
Closing of OutHistory autobiographical reflections on poetry
“Poetry that spills the beans: saying what is usually unsaid (anxieties, private life, hidden truths).”
Westbeth interview paraphrase of Field on craft
This. The caregiving part matters as much as the poems.