George Butterick Papers

Born in Yonkers, N.Y., in 1942, George Butterick grew up in the Kingsbridge section of the Bronx where he attended St. John's and Manhattan Prep. He graduated from Manhattan College in 1964 and received a PhD. in English from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1970.

From 1972 until his death in 1988, Butterick was the curator of literary archives at the University of Connecticut, where he also taught. Butterick was a poet and scholar who did much to insure the acceptance of Charles Olson as a major figure in American poetry. In 1984, his edition of Charles Olson's The Maximus Poems received the Los Angeles Book Award, and in 1988 he was awarded the American Book Award by the Before Columbus Foundation for editing The Collected Poems of Charles Olson. In addition to editing Olson's work, Butterick published several books of his own poetry. His poems were collected in an edition published posthumously in 1988.