Randall Jarrell was born in 1914 in Nashville, Tennessee. He had a reputation for being an exacting literary critic and an intense lover of literature. He was also admired as a poet and won the National Book Award in 1961 for The Woman at the Washington Zoo, one of his six books of poetry. In addition to his poetry and criticism, Jarrell wrote a novel and children's books, edited anthologies, and translated a number of works, including stories by the Grimm brothers. He died in 1965.