About Paul Southworth Bliss

Paul Southworth Bliss was born into the late nineteenth century and came of age on the wide plains of North Dakota. His early years were marked by a restless curiosity — a hunger for language, for story, for the world beyond the horizon.

When the First World War called, Bliss answered. He served with distinction, carrying his pen alongside his rifle, filing dispatches from the front that combined the precision of a journalist with the sensibility of a poet. His letters home remain among the most vivid firsthand accounts of the Western Front produced by any North Dakotan.

After the Armistice, he returned to Bismarck and built a literary life of remarkable breadth — editing newspapers, writing verse, championing the arts, and lending his voice to the civic life of a state still finding its identity. He was a man who believed, above all, that words had the power to dignify ordinary life and illuminate the human condition.

This volume by Lillian Crook and Jim Fuglie is the first full biography of Bliss — a long-overdue reckoning with a writer whose influence on North Dakota's cultural fabric has never been properly measured.

In the years between 1929 and 1939, most of which were spent on the prairies of North Dakota, Bliss published eight volumes of poetry. Here are the titles. Many of them are still available today, from used booksellers.

• —“After Supper Poems”1929
• —“How Pan Shaped The Leaves And Other Poems”1931
• —“The Arch Of Spring”1932
• —“Spin Dance And Spring Comes To Shaw’s Garden”1934
• —“Cirrus From The West”1935
• —“The Rye Is The Sea”1936
• —“Poems Of Places”1937
• —“The Lord Made Kansas For Wheat”1939