MacLeish died in 1982, a few days before his ninetieth birthday, laden with honors. His Collected Poems (1952) had won the Bollingen Prize, the National Book Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and his second Pulitzer Prize. He went on to win a third Pulitzer, to become secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, to accumulate dozens of medallions and decorations (both domestic and foreign), and to harvest enough honorary degrees, with academic hoods, to supply a whole Benedictine monastery. If Anne Sexton was the Judy Garland of American poetry—volatile, tasteless, self-destructive—MacLeish was its Eleanor Roosevelt, famous, as he self-reflectively said of his friend Mark Van Doren, for his goodness, his decency, and his rectitude.

Between 1978 and 1983 R. H. Winnick, the editor of MacLeish’s Letters(1983), collected printed material, tape-recorded numerous interviews, and turned out a draft of six early chapters of this life. Then, for unspecified reasons, Winnick, having completed Lawrance Thompson’s life of Frost, had his own biography of MacLeish completed by Scott Donaldson. This relay-writer has organized a massive amount of material into a thorough, accurate, and coherent narrative. Like his subject, it is competent, workmanlike—and dull. After a disastrous attempt at fine writing in the opening paragraph, the book moves along in clear but sometimes cliché-ridden prose. In three lines on MacLeish’s prep school, for example, Donaldson writes that his third year was so “replete with accomplishments” that his final year “pale[d] in comparison,” though his “own cup was about to