John Brooks Wheelwright (sometimes Wheelright) (9 September 1897 – 13 September 1940) was an American poet from a

Boston Brahmin The Boston Brahmins or Boston elite are members of Boston's traditional upper class. They are often associated with Harvard University; Anglicanism; and traditional Anglo-American customs and clothing. Descendants of the earliest English colonis ...

background. He belonged to the poetic ''avant garde'' of the 1930s and was a

Marxist Marxism is a Left-wing politics, left-wing to Far-left politics, far-left method of socioeconomic analysis that uses a Materialism, materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to understand S ...

, a founder-member of the

Trotskyist Trotskyism is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Ukrainian-Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and some other members of the Left Opposition and Fourth International. Trotsky self-identified as an orthodox Marxist, a rev ...

Socialist Workers Party in the United States. He was

bisexual Bisexuality is a romantic or sexual attraction or behavior toward both males and females, or to more than one gender. It may also be defined to include romantic or sexual attraction to people regardless of their sex or gender identity, whi ...

. He died after being struck by an automobile at the intersection of Beacon St. and Massachusetts Avenue in the early morning hours of September 13, 1940. Wheelwright was descended from the 17th-century clergyman

John Wheelwright John Wheelwright (c. 1592–1679) was a Puritan clergyman in England and America, noted for being banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony during the Antinomian Controversy, and for subsequently establishing the town of Exeter, New Hamps ...

on his father's side and the 18th-century Massachusetts governor John Brooks on his mother's side. He studied at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

and at

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the ...

before practising as an

architect An architect is a person who plans, designs and oversees the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to provide services in connection with the design of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the buildings that h ...

Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...

. He was editor of the magazine ''Poetry for a Dime''.Paul Christensen, 'Wheelwright, John (Brooks)', ''20th Century American Literature'', Macmillan, 1980, pp.619-620

Works

* (ed.) ''A History of the New England Poetry Club'', 1932. * ''Rock and Shell: Poems 1923-1933'', 1933. * ''Mirrors of Venus: A Novel in Sonnets, 1914-1938'', 1938. * ''Political Self-Portrait'', 1940 * ''Selected Poems'', 1941. * ''Collected Poems'', ed. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, 1972.

References

External links

Biography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Wheelwright, John Brooks 1897 births 1940 deaths 20th-century American poets Bisexual men Bisexual writers American LGBT poets The Harvard Lampoon alumni Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni American architects 20th-century LGBT people